By Lynn Evansohn, L.C.S.W, The Counseling Center

Sept. 11, 2024: It can be very difficult for seniors to discuss with their adult children issues related to aging.  These can be sensitive, even painful conversations about seniors’ changing (often rapidly changing) health needs, questions to do with financing their care, where they will live, and their wishes for handling the end of life, including their funeral arrangements. 

What remains unsaid, for whatever reason, can lead to financial losses and emotional complications that could have been avoided.  Often, too, families want to build strong connections with each other but find that desire thwarted by their inability to venture into sensitive terrain.

Many seniors expect their children to carry out their end of life wishes, but they have never actually articulated what those wishes are.  And when essential documents don’t get written, or can’t be found, children can end up squabbling over their inheritance and estates can remain unsettled for years.

It's important for families to write things down—not just wills and living wills but also the parents’ medical history, medications with dosages, how care will be paid for (especially if the kids are expected to help out), and what kind of care is needed now.

Parents might need help keeping an eye on their alcohol consumption, since alcohol is less well tolerated as we age and can interact with many medications. 

Families should consider confronting “unfinished business” while there’s still time. The Five Wishes Living Will, readily available online, requires the answers to five questions related to your end-of-life arrangements.  Once completed, it’s considered a legally viable document. 

Listening to what aging parents need is an essential part of the conversation.  When a couple in their 80s, who could no longer adequately care for their large menagerie of cats and dogs, refused to give up their animals, it took deep listening to pick up on why—they’d been circus performers in their youth and animals were a cherished part of their life together.  Eventually it became clear that what the couple really needed was for animal care givers to come to the home. 

Sometimes a third party such as a pastor, friend, or professional therapist can facilitate a conversation that the parents and children are unable to have on their own.  A man acting as sole care giver for his ill wife, whom he loved dearly, failed to realize how his care for his wife was taking a serious toll on his own health, which greatly concerned his children. 

With the help of a therapist acting as a third, neutral party, the man was finally able to hear his children’s pleas that they loved him and didn’t want to lose him through worry and overwork, just when they were already losing their mother.

Sometimes we think we’ve had certain conversations with our family members, but we haven’t.  A woman, 96, suffered a life-threatening incident. She recovered, but in the midst of the crisis, her daughter contacted her brother, trying to prepare him for their mother’s possible death, and was shocked to hear him say, “I’m not ready.”

This, despite their many conversations about their mother’s situation over the years. Subsequent conversations revealed how much her brother, who lived several states away, missed his mother and regretted the infrequency of their visits. Six months later, the daughter’s family moved their mom to live near her brother. 

It’s important to acknowledge the tremendous grief associated with aging—over the loss of friends, loss of abilities.

When children refuse to have the conversation parents try to initiate, it can be helpful to ask if they might be ready to hear “one thing.”  That one thing is sometimes enough to open an on-going conversation that unfolds over time. People experience grief and loss very differently, and some people get stuck in their grief. In such cases, a professional can often help them get unstuck.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Note: This article is based on a presentation to Bronxville Seniors by Lynn Evansohn and Rev. Shannon White, on November 6, 2018, which was inspired Rev. White’s book The Invisible Conversations With Your Aging Parents (Total Publishing and Media, 2012).

The Counseling Center in Bronxville, a nonprofit organization, offers therapy for individuals, couples, and families, through video platforms, telephonically, and in person.  Please feel free to reach out if we can help, by calling Dr. Jennifer Klein, 914 793 3388. 

To keep abreast of ongoing information and activities at The Counseling Center, or to make a donation, please visit our website at https://counselingcenter.org/.