grieving, life skills, normalizing what should be normal

How to Prepare Now for the Next Crisis or Death (including yours)

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned since my husband’s stroke is that people want to help. Another lesson I’ve learned is that it’s hard to figure out what you need help with when you are in the middle of a crisis. When my husband had his stroke, I didn’t know what I needed until I sat down and talked it through with a couple other people. A year later when he died, I once again didn’t know what I needed until I talked it through with someone.

So, lesson #1 is that talking it through with someone else can help.

Other things I learned:

2. Figure out before the crisis what people can help with.

Ironically, the best time to figure out what you need help with might be before you need it, when life is calm and you don’t need help. Right now, for example, you could make a list of all the mundane things you’ve done recently that someone else could have done. For me, the list might include feeding and walking the dogs, weeding, buying groceries, cooking, and doing laundry.

There may be things that someone else could theoretically do but maybe you are persnickety about how it gets done. I’m picky about how my laundry gets done. My daughter’s generation doesn’t separate colors from whites—they just throw them all in the washer together. I want my colors and whites done separately and I want some items air-dried even though the tags say they can go in the dryer. Explaining this to someone while I’m experiencing a crisis would not go well. But today, when there is no crisis, I could take a few minutes and write out my quirky laundry habits so that when the next crisis hits, I can just share the document with someone who has offered to help.

3. Let people help rather than insisting you don’t need help.

You do need help and you can receive it gracefully or make it miserable for everyone—the choice is yours. Acknowledging that you need help isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s an opportunity to connect with others and allow them into your life.

4. Talk about death with the people who will be most impacted by yours (and vice versa).

I am incredibly grateful that my husband made his final wishes clear so that I could make the decision to remove him from life support with a clear conscience, knowing it was what he wanted. Even knowing I was following his wishes, the decision was heart wrenching. It would have been exponentially more difficult had I not known what he wanted.

After my husband died, I updated my will and talked through it with my daughter and stepson. I expressed my final wishes and showed them where they could find important documents when I die. Nobody liked that conversation, but when I die, one thing neither of them will have to stress out over is where to find my will. Because we’ve talked about my will, there’s no mystery about who gets what, and because we’ve talked about my final wishes, there’s no mystery about what I want.

I suggest preparing people for these conversations. You can say something like, “Hey, I know nobody wants to think about this, but I want you to know what my final wishes are just in case.”

I have not always prepared people. I’ve tried to slip it into dinner conversations, thinking that it would be too stressful for everyone to have “talk about Elizabeth’s death” on their calendar. I’d wait for a lull in the conversation and then say, “So, I won’t live forever and there are a few things you need to know.” I recommend against this strategy. It actually does go better if you schedule the discussion ahead of time as a stand alone conversation. That allows people to do whatever emotional preparation they need to do to be fully engaged in the discussion.

The Cake website has a great checklist for organizing and sharing your final wishes.

And please, if you have pets, make a plan for their care in the event of your death.

5. Do some Swedish death cleaning.

Swedish death cleaning may sound like a scary cult practice, but it’s simply getting rid of what you don’t need while you’re still alive so your loved ones don’t have to do it after you die. I feel relief to know my loved ones won’t have to go through a packed house of my things when I die, wondering what to do with them or how to get rid of them.

6. Label for others.

Even after Swedish death cleaning, I still have things that will need to be gone through when I die, and what seems self evidently important to me may appear to be a fabric scrap to you. This is why it can be helpful to label things for whoever may find them. For example, I have a drawer full of things that smell like my husband (well, the smell has faded, but to me, they will always smell like him). I put a piece of paper in the drawer that says “Things that Smell Like Tom” so that when I die, anyone opening the drawer will understand the significance of the items.

Anderson Cooper talks in his podcast about how meaningful it was to find items after his mother had died that were labeled with their significance. I like knowing I’m doing something that Gloria Vanderbilt did.