My wife and I kept having the same conversation, and not only with each other. Aging parents. What we would want. What we would refuse. How to avoid the ending none of us wants. It came up with one set of friends and then another, in pieces, usually late in an evening when there was no time left to do anything with it.
So we asked a few of them to sit down and do it properly.
Not therapy and not a class. Nobody has to decide anything, sign anything, or come around to a position. A small group of people who like each other, in a room, able to say the hard part out loud. What we wanted was for each of us to move our own thinking forward a little.
We set up an email group as well, to keep some momentum between meetings and pass along what we were finding.
Then my father-in-law died in June, and my father died three weeks later. That group is where we took it. Not the announcements, we made those elsewhere. The part underneath: here is what happened, here is what we would want for ourselves, here is what we would want to avoid. These were the people already inside the conversation. We did not have to explain anything first.
Two years ago in Colombia a group of us signed something we called the Pacto de los 80. Friends born in the sixties, in our sixties now, promising to live to around eighty as fully as we could manage, and then, when questions about quality of life get thorny, to help each other close the circle with respect and affection. There is an annual check-in. There is a clause letting anyone leave without explaining. It ends: firmamos con vino o café en la mano, una sonrisa, y el corazón claro. We sign with wine or coffee in hand, a smile, and a clear heart.
Two novels came out of that pact. Not one book in two languages. Two different books.
El Peso de Elegir is set in Bogotá, and those friends do what we did. They make a promise. They sign it on a farm above La Calera at sunset, oldest first, and the man who is eighty-six writes that it would have improved his life considerably if it had existed twenty years earlier. Somebody says out loud that this is not a legal document and not a resource center, just a pact between us.
The Weight of Choosing is set in San Diego, and there the same group turns into an organization. Funding, facilitator training, families writing in from Phoenix and Albuquerque.
I never decided which of those was right. I wrote both and let them argue.
What we are learning in the real group is smaller and more practical than either book.
We are learning how much it matters to write the advance directive, and to write it in plain language that a frightened person can follow at two in the morning.
And then the part I did not expect. Name your person. Say who decides for you when you cannot decide for yourself. If that is unclear, the rest of it does not hold. Wishes on paper with nobody authorized to act on them turn into a family arguing in a hallway about what you would have wanted, while you are in the room and cannot tell them.
My father had signed a directive. He signed it in Colombia. He died in Canada. The paper did not cross the border with him, and by the time it mattered he could no longer sign another.
None of us knows these things until we are standing in them, which is why we are bringing in somebody who does. A death doula will facilitate our next session. There is no agenda beyond carrying the conversation forward, wherever it needs to go, with someone from outside the group who has done this before and is not uneasy with the subject. Some of us find these conversations harder than others do. All of us think they are worth having.
Somebody floated an idea for later. A signing party. Everyone comes, a notary comes, and we sign our documents with our friends standing there as witnesses. I like it, and I notice that I wrote two novels with signing scenes in them and both times refused to make the signing legal. For now it stays an idea. Nobody in this group needs one more thing they are supposed to get done.
In the Spanish novel a dying man tells his son: nobody is ready. Being ready is not the point. Being prepared is.
If you and your friends keep having this conversation in fragments at the ends of evenings, you already have the group. What you have not done is invite them into something with enough shape to get somewhere. A set time. A small circle. No obligation to conclude anything. And permission to say the part you have been leaving out.
The Weight of Choosing · English → https://mybook.to/WeightOfChoosing El Peso de Elegir · Español → https://mybook.to/PesoDeElegir
The short video:
If your family has done this well, or badly, I would like to hear about it. Write back.
Ricardo, this is great. I’m glad to hear you followed through. What a wonderful, loving group effort.