Author Margaret Atwood wryly wrote, “Parents ought not to die. It is so inconsiderate!” 

Two friends of mine are now figuring out how to deal with impending deaths of their sole living parents. It is an inconsolable fact – they will soon be “orphans,” and they will face the challenge of making decisions either they or their parents have put off making.

In one case, a friend will have to make the decisions alone. His father – a distanced figure with whom he has had little contact – is sheltered in an expensive care center, and my friend is the only sibling able to shoulder the $6,500 monthly cost.  In his mind, he has little choice; someone has to pay the bill, and that someone is him.

In another case, a friend has left the decisions to her brothers. For her, it’s a cultural thing. In her family, men make the final decisions, and there is dissension among her sisters and brothers as to her weak mother’s care.

The surrounding questions are not new.  Is the parent mentally able to decide whether or not to be moved from their home into a care center? If so, how will the cost be divided between the children? Upon death, how will the assets be shared? Should one of the children receive less of an inheritance since he or she was “bailed out” of a previous financial problem? 

The helpful parent will answer many of these questions through an estate plan/trust and a designated executor.  But a majority of parents die without a legal document, in many cases refusing to acknowledge a certain future, or as playwright Samuel Beckett mused, “Death must have taken me for someone else!”

Another friend was unprepared for her father’s death. “He was so healthy and I figured he would live forever,” she said.  Last month he died of COVID, and she has been a relative shut-in ever since.

“When will I ever stop grieving?” she asked me.

Hopefully, never, I told her.  But that can’t stop you from doing the final chores: Tossing aside the jigsaw puzzles with the missing pieces, questioning what to do with the well-worn Harry Belafonte and Kingston Trio record albums, cherishing the handwritten recipes from mother and grandmother…And what to do with the musty winter coats and the beat-up broken plastic Adirondack patio chairs?

A vital life, now 70% on hangers at Goodwill or Deseret Industries.

The aging process is not for sissies, but I hope my friends’ parents can weather it through patience and laughter. When my wife’s sister was in her final weeks of hospice from brain cancer, a doctor told her she should be careful of her sugar intake due to her diabetes.

Her answer: “Take me to the donut shop. A donut isn’t the thing that’s going to kill me.”

And she bought a half dozen!