At the park with my Mom
I had the conversation with my parent.
The emotion was at a peak when she said she wishes she had held her mother’s hand more when she was dying.
I sent my Mom the starter kit via email at the holidays and we had several aborted attempts to go through it in the past few months – largely due to not actually setting time aside on one of her visits as though that time would magically appear. Once we blocked the time and headed out the door we were fine. She had printed out the starter kit and read it through but not written a single thing on it. We got tea and went to a park and sat side by side on a bench while going through each question with me scribing the answers (I asked her to sign the front and back pages since it is all in my handwriting!) It took an hour and she cried the entire time. And. I. Mean. Entire. Time. There were no big surprises in her answers but I was somewhat surprised by the level of emotion. The emotion was at a peak when she said she wishes she had held her mother’s hand more when she was dying. I am an only child and she is single and it was clear she did not intend to have this conversation with anyone else though I asked if I could share it with my husband in case anything happens to me. I don’t know if others have had the experience of going through the kit in real time but that was the striking thing I wanted to share. She really didn’t want to work it all out and then bring it to me, she wanted to work it through in the moment. I also wanted to share that prior to her visit, she sent me an email that said that reading it through is making her think about how she wants her life to be in addition to how she wants her death to be and that is leading her to do some specific things (financially for example).