In the last weeks of my father’s life, when I felt as though a rip current was sweeping me away from shore, phone calls with friends were a lifeline. One of those friends was Emily. My dad and her mom lived in neighboring cottages in the same retirement community in Ohio. Both were widowed years ago, so Emily and I shared the experience of becoming close to a parent aging solo. Her mother died in 2019 at age 88, my father in December 2023 at 99. After the deaths, we cleared out cottages with identical floor plans and held memorial services in the same auditorium.
We’ve had several chats, the last one over Zoom. It wasn’t a Zoom happy hour: we cried our way through much of it, but also laughed. We talked about loss and regret and about the stealth nature of grief. And we touched on the practical. What do we wish we’d known? What would we have done differently?
CATHY: We’re both lucky. Neither your mom nor my dad had a long decline. They lived independently almost to the end.
EMILY: For the most part, I'd say my mom died the way she wanted to. And I suspect your dad too.
CATHY: Our parents left roadmaps for us. Dad sent files called "Last Words" with instructions about his end of life, his finances, even his furniture. He started in 1999 after my mother died, and every few years he’d send a new iteration. Last Words. Final Words. Very Last Final Words. Each one would start out, "Well, I can't possibly last much longer." This went on for two decades. Our parents planned ahead and made their wishes clear. So why is this so hard?
EMILY: It’s very hard.
CATHY: I feel like I’ve lost my anchor.
EMILY: After my dad died in 2011, I was looking through photo albums. There was a picture of my dad taken the summer after his mother had been killed in a car accident. I looked at this picture and thought, I know exactly how you feel, because I’m there now. There was a connection with him, knowing what loss feels like.
CATHY: I feel I’ve lost not only my dad but also his home, which was a second home to me. And his garden. I went there to say goodbye because I know his spirit inhabits that garden. I stared at the chair beside his plot, conjuring him to appear.
Everyone has regrets
EMILY: When my dad died there was a certain relief, because he’d been sick a long time. But I also felt abandoned. I thought, how come nobody told me that the person you've loved from your first breath is going to someday die and leave you alone?
CATHY: I also worry that I abandoned Dad. At the hospital, he told us, “I want to die at home. I don't want to die in this hospital.” So we took him home. At least we got that right. He stayed a few weeks in the retirement community’s nursing care wing, but he wanted so much to go back to his cottage, turn back the clock and go on living just as he had been. We respected that wish, though in my heart I didn’t think he could. When he got back to his cottage, he sank into his favorite couch and heaved a sigh and said, “It's getting kind of heavy.” So I think he knew.
EMILY: He knew.
CATHY: We arranged for housekeeping and nurse visits, and after a few days I went home to DC. Forty-eight hours later he had a stroke. I flew back to Ohio that night, but by the time I got there he couldn’t speak. I wish I hadn’t gone back to DC. You want to do right by your parent at the end, but you can’t know what’s going to happen, not even one day to the next. No one gets everything right.
EMILY: It was what he wanted. He got to do it his way.
CATHY: Some tiny part of my lizard brain thinks he's coming back. Like it’s all a mistake. [We are crying.]
EMILY: After Mom died I had some of her furniture shipped to me. When it arrived, my first thought was oh my God, what if she wants it back? [We are laughing and crying.]
Tackle finances early
CATHY: If you could get a do-over, what would you do differently? What do you know now that you didn't know then?
EMILY: This is going to sound silly, but I learned that inherited IRAs automatically go to the person who's the beneficiary. As the executor, I thought I had to do everything.
CATHY: I learned that too. Dad thought he left his finances in perfect shape, but by age 99 he was slipping. I didn't want to meddle, but I wish I had. Once he went in the hospital, we found out he'd been paying his bills by writing checks and mailing them. If he couldn’t continue doing that, he was going to fall into arrears. When my brother and I tried to put bills on autopay, we found that Dad hadn't set up online access. Even though we held power of attorney for him, that didn’t give us access to his accounts. I spent hours on the phone with customer service agents, trying to straighten it all out. Believe me, you do not want to spend the last weeks of your parent's life fighting with customer service agents.
EMILY: My dad was hospitalized right after my parents moved to the retirement community, and my mom needed to get telephone service switched over to their new address. The telephone company said they couldn't do it for a week. My mom was so upset. So I called and pretended to be Mom. I said, “My husband is in the hospital. I have to be able to get phone calls from the hospital.” And then they did connect it.
CATHY: I piled his financial records all over the floor to sort through them. My brother and I thought we would have to manage Dad’s finances for some time, so we needed to get set up for that. If I'd known the end was so close, I would’ve said the hell with it, we'll figure it out later.
EMILY: You didn’t know how long it would be. What if you’d said let’s not worry about it, and then he lived for another six months?
CATHY: He wanted to do things the way he'd been doing them for 50 years. He didn't trust online banking. “Anybody could get the information. How do I know where it's going?” He considered mailing paper checks as more secure.
EMILY: I should have told him about the mortgage payment that I paid with a check in the mail. It came back to me the day after it was due, torn up in a little baggie, with a note from the US Postal Service saying, “Oh, we're sorry.”
CATHY: I should have taken steps earlier to set up online accounts that my brother and I could monitor, with our own phone numbers attached to them for verification. By waiting so long, I ended up consumed with those tasks in the final month, when Dad and I had so little time left together.
What’s important at the end
CATHY: I wish I'd spent more time in those last weeks talking with him about what he most wanted to remember and what he wanted me to know. Of course he had reminisced quite a bit over the years. I’m especially glad I did the World War II narratives with him last fall. His wartime memories hadn't always made sense to me, but once I tried to write it as a coherent narrative, I could see the whole story unfold. It’s a great story. I'm grateful we did that project while he still could.
EMILY: The dad of a friend of mine was in the Army in Europe and went into the concentration camps, but he couldn’t speak about it afterward. What a gift that Jim was able to share his wartime experiences with others.
CATHY: We did have some good moments in the days before the stroke. We got carryout on two nights, and Dad enjoyed lamb shish kabob and beef meatballs. This was little more than a week before he died. He once told me, “The appetite will be the last thing to go.”
Grief comes unexpectedly
CATHY: At a time when I’m missing Dad the person, instead I have Dad the multimedia project. Since he died, I’ve organized two memorial services, written two eulogies and four obituaries, created two slide shows in PowerPoint, and made two photo displays. I could have done much of this work ahead of time. I wish I had. If I could get a do-over, I’d write the obits in advance and start on the rest as well. It would have taken some of the pressure off to have these things ready to go.
EMILY: I remember thinking, as I was going through all the financial stuff after my mom died, I'm not feeling the grief.
CATHY: It gets suppressed.
EMILY: It comes later. All the things you couldn't think about before, when you were dealing with everything, you suddenly come up against.
CATHY: Grief comes in waves, triggered by odd things. You’d think that clearing Dad’s cottage and donating his clothes would trigger grief, but it didn’t. It became just another downsizing task. But yesterday, I had to call a financial company and got stuck on hold. The instant their hold music started, a jolt of sadness hit me. It took a minute to think why. When I was wrangling Dad’s finances before he died, I was on hold with this same company almost every day. They have weird, somber hold music, not the usual tinny tune. When I heard it again yesterday, it felt like the soundtrack to Dad’s last days.
We did do one thing right, or rather Dad did. He made his end-of-life wishes explicit, long in advance, orally and in writing. So when the time came, family was united in following his wishes. That gives me comfort even now.
Cathy, this is so moving. Thanks so much! I want to send it to our kids but I'm afraid they wouldn't take the time to read it as they are all very busy. OR they would want to get involved too early, hovering and over-reacting to any small illness! No way to get all of it right, ever. But you've given us a gift to share when the time is right.
There are no do overs. But I think you got SO many things right, and got to spend alot of time with your Dad. Such a blessing to have him lucid until the last. As someone that spent quite a bit of time with both parents that declined mentally before they died, one feels you lose them twice.