ep 04: transcript
04. Talk To Your Loved Ones About Their Paperwork
Hi everyone. Thanks for tuning into the grief coach. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter @the_griefcoach or email us at hello@thegriefcoach.co. Today we’re going to talk about important paperwork and how to talk to your loved ones about where it is and what’s in it. We’re going to cover power of attorney, living wills, health care proxies and last will and testament. I’m going to tell you a little bit about my experience and some general definitions and advice. I will caveat several times that I have zero legal training and all advice is anecdotal.
First of all, I’m just going to say - I love paperwork. I know that’s weird and I know that you are silently judging me right now. A few years ago, I don’t know why but I had the idea that I needed to start talking to my parents about their wills, their health care proxies, and their power of attorneys. I think my dad might have fallen or something, but this was something I would hound him about every few months. We went to the doctor years before he got sick and he put me on the HIPPA paperwork so the doctors could talk to me. I counted it as a major win when we talked about it once in the hospital this past October and he gave me the phone numbers of his doctors and his attorney. For context - his tumor was growing so quickly that he got sepsis before starting chemo. He had delayed this chemo a few weeks so he could finish his European trip that was previously cut short by his diagnosis a month earlier. In the hospital he kept saying “I just thought I had a bad bed!” But he had sepsis and almost died. We talked briefly about health care proxy, power of attorney and living will. He decided that my sister and I would be co-everything. He felt it was really important to have representation from both sets of his kids. My dad has two children from his first marriage and two from his third. Anyway, as he got sicker and sicker and as I attended doctors appointments with him I knew what his end of life wishes were. But I had no idea where the paperwork was. On March 6th he told us he had three to six months. On March 22 we put him in hospice. I asked him over and over again where the paperwork was and he would kind of wave me off. If you’ve ever spent time with someone in hospice you know they are on a lot of pain killers. If you’ve ever spent time with someone on painkillers you know it can be difficult to have a conversation with them. My cousin looked for hours and hours in my dad’s office. To paint you a picture, my dad had stacks of paper everywhere, in those see through plastic folders. I think my cousin looked for six hours. Every time we asked my dad where the paperwork was he would just say it’s in my office. Finally, we wheeled him into his office on a wheelchair in a last ditch effort to find everything. And it sucked because you almost start talking to someone who is dying like they are a child, and my dad was this very proud, strong man. And so we wheel him over to a table with stacks of paper and he starts looking through it and I say dad I don’t think it’s here. He looks up at me confused and says why aren’t we getting rid of this stuff? Which by the way we did need to do, but that was not the task at hand. He points to a bag, and we say it’s not there, we looked there. He kept pointing so we opened it. And low and behold there it was! He turns to me and goes “Are you happy?” and I said yes and we wheeled him out. Now the work could be done. I tell this story as a way to illustrate the importance of having these conversations while someone is healthy. My dad’s death was not sudden and we had a short window to get his affairs in order, but if it was a sudden death I don’t know if we would have ever found the originals. I encourage you to have these conversations even though they’re hard. There is a huge misconception that the safest place for these documents is in a safety deposit box, but actually, unless you are also listed on the box, as soon as the box owner dies, the box gets locked. So either have them add you to the box, or keep them somewhere else. Perhaps you can keep these documents with an attorney and you should have the attorneys name and information so you know who to reach out to when you’re dealing with this stuff.
There are four major pieces of paperwork that I would suggest having a conversation with your people about: power of attorney, living will, healthcare proxy, and last will and testament. And then talk about where they are stored and be sure they are signed and dated! Again, what I am saying is anecdotal and I am not an attorney, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But I am telling you this in the hopes that it allows you to have a constructive conversation with your people.
Power of attorney. This is who you want to make your financial decisions - some people choose to draw this up when they are healthy and have a lawyer keep it on file in their office without filing it in court, some people file it in court right away. If the money in question is not in a trust or joint account, I would recommend looking at extended power of attorney which allows someone to write checks to themselves. The reason being that money in probate can take a really long time to get to! With extended power of attorney, you can write a check to yourself, or whoever, and then have an easier time managing estate expenses. Note if you do this it may be a good idea to track expenses in case any other heirs have questions. Additionally, you can provision power of attorney to be your health care proxy which is helpful. My dad had me as power of attorney with the health care proxy provision, and my sister as health care proxy with a power of attorney provision. This way he was covered regardless of who was there. What does a power of attorney actually do? In my case, it involved a lot of running around closing bank accounts. One of my dads last directives to me was to close the bank accounts. If you are unfamiliar with the world of estates and probate, it takes a long time to settle an estate. If money is tight, which let’s face it, it is for a lot of people, you may need instant access to the deceased’s money for funeral bills. I prepaid cremation, death certificates, an overnight nurse, and anything else that was possible for me to prepay. I then closed out all of his accounts so we would have access to his money to pay for his funeral. Just so you know, you need the original paperwork. I brought copies in the first time I went to the banks so then had to go back the next day.
A living will is really important. This is a document that outlines your medical wishes should you not be able to speak for yourself. I tried to make one before all of this (see I told you, I’m a freak who loves paperwork), and I couldn’t get through it. It covers things like do you want to be given a ventilator, a feeding tube, do you want this all to stay in effect if you are pregnant but there is no way for the baby to survive, etc. It’s intense to say the least. After seeing my dad go through what he did at the end, I was able to easily answer these questions when I revisited the exercise this past summer. No, no, no, I wanted to live as little as possible if I was incapacitated because to me that is not living. Successfully executing a living will for someone you love is one of the most painful things on earth. Towards the end, my dad was starting to get some sort of infection that was making him really jaundiced and one of the hospice nurses said we could put him on antibiotics and that would help. Which we did for a day. We then noticed that his living will said he didn’t want any antibiotics. So we stopped. And it sucked. A living will is a blessing because you are put in a very stressful situation that you’ve never been in before and it can guide what you should be doing, in this case the document guided us to ultimately not give him antibiotics which we knew would mean we would lose him sooner than if we gave him antibiotics. Coming to that realization was really hard. On one hand you don’t want the person you love to be in pain, but on the other hand, you know you are losing someone you love. And even though intellectually you don’t want them to suffer, losing them is terrible.
A Healthcare proxy is a person who you appoint to make your health care decisions in the event you aren’t able to. I would recommend getting specific if this person is allowed to defy what is written in your living will and go against your wishes. So in my earlier example with the option to put my dad on antibiotics, if he had a clause in there whether or not we could defy his wishes of no antibiotics and we could have put him on them which would have kept him alive longer.
A last will and testament is what everyone calls a will. Its a document that states who all your belongings go to after you die and it’s important that you are as clear as possible. My dad’s will stated that everything went to his children and there were still disagreements with other family members about who got what. Which is totally common and happens to a lot of families. My mom’s mom and I talk all the time, and she heard *a lot* about these disagreements and was inspired to make a list of everything of value in her home and have my cousins and I go through her home and tell her what we wanted so now it is all written out. I’m not saying it’s a comfortable conversation to have, you may feel selfish or weird or whatever going through someone’s home and pointing to things you love, but if there is something really valuable or meaningful, the beneficiary should be in writing so when everyone is upset and grieving, you’re not getting in fights with your family. A fun will fact I learned when we couldn’t find my dad’s will and thought we were going to have to have him resign it, it’s really easy to contest a will in court if it is signed a few days before someone dies. I’m not going to get into the financials in this episode but I am working to get an estate attorney on here to provide considerations on what people should be thinking about. I will quickly tell you that guidelines are different whether you are filing the estate as a solvent or insolvent estate and I hope to get into that on an episode soon. Also, for what it’s worth, you can’t inherit debt.
The moral of the story here is that paperwork is important! I tell my friends now that they need to have this conversation with their parents, spouses, siblings, whatever. I tell them they need to do this and to blame it on me. Literally when people asked me what they could do for me after my dad died I told friends to talk to their parents about their paperwork and end of life wishes. Say something along the lines of “My friend is going through this and it seems really terrible and she keeps talking about how stressful it was to not know where the paperwork was. Can you tell me where it is and can we talk about your end of life wishes?” I know this will be a painful and maybe awkward conversation, but it’s really painful to be searching for a will instead of spending time with someone you love who is dying. I would also suggest framing the discussion with your parents as having all of these documents makes it so much easier for the people they love that are left. When you are grieving a loss you want to make as few decisions as possible, so knowing your loved one’s wishes is extraordinarily helpful in reducing stress. It is also important to review these documents every 5-10 years.
I would also like to add that if you’re single, you should make sure that someone you trust has a copy of these documents and knows where the originals are. None of us want to face our own mortality but I really think that if you think about it in helping people who are left, it’s much easier.
A few more things that people don’t think about: loyalty program points and miles, passwords and funeral planning:
Ok for loyalty programs for hotel points, airline miles, and credit card points. If there is going to be an unpaid balance on the credit card due to an insolvent estate, you can’t get access to the points. Prior to death you can redeem points for gift cards. I called everywhere he had hotel and airline points, some were much easier to deal with than others. American airlines was a dream. Marriot was a delight. Jet blue and united were easy. Virgin doesn’t transfer miles. Delta will only transfer miles for free if you are the surviving spouse or if you are the only child -- because there were multiple heirs I was charged money to transfer the miles out of his account. Hotels.com gave me the runaround and were frankly a nightmare, I spoke to at least three different people only to be told at the end that I was unable to transfer the free nights. Don’t waste your time calling them.
For passwords, if you use a password manager, there may be an option where you can put who can access your passwords after you die. If this is not an option, I would write some passwords down and keep them with your will.
While you’re on these uncomfortable conversations, it would probably be useful to know if they have any wishes for their funeral. By the time we had this conversation with my dad he was already on pretty heavy pain meds. He told us he wanted all of us to speak if we wanted to, and that he didn’t want to make it a big thing. We ‘yessed’ him, because we knew that it would be a big thing. There are so many people who love him, and came in from all over the world to say goodbye to him in the last few weeks, that we knew it would be big. But it’s good to ask.
To recap - do your paperwork. I know these conversations are hard but it is so so so much easier to have them when you are not looking death in the face. Please do it for me. Find out where your parent or spouses paperwork is, and if they don’t have one for the love of god please work on that. Part of the reason that I decided to release this episode now is because a lot of listeners are going to be going home for the holidays. Use that time to do something productive and have these conversations while you are together, I know it’s not fun but it will save you a lot of headaches down the road. Good luck.
Thanks for listening. You can send any feedback, questions or episode ideas to hello@thegriefcoach.co and find us on instagram and twitter @the_griefcoach.Talk to you soon.