You Already Caught Death
There was a season of my childhood where death sat at our kitchen table like a regular guest. My parents didn't whisper about it. They didn't wait until someone got sick or until a milestone birthday made it feel urgent. They just talked about it, the way other families talk about vacation plans or Sunday dinner. Who has the documents, what the plan is if something happens, how my siblings and I need to stay connected to each other no matter what, because one day we would be the ones left standing in a room full of decisions.
I didn't know that was unusual. I thought everyone grew up this way. I thought every household had a version of the conversation where a parent looks their children in the eye and says, here is what you need to know, here is what you need to have ready, here is how we take care of each other when I'm no longer the one doing the taking care of. It wasn't until I got older, sat across from other families, clients, rooms full of grief, that I realized most people don't just avoid this conversation, they treat it like something they can catch if they say the wrong word out loud.
The crazy thing that I need for everyone to realize is that you caught the epidemic of “death,” the moment you were born! And yet I watch grown adults flinch at the word like it's a curse they might summon by naming it, as if silence is a form of protection.
As someone who has experienced the death of a child, random deaths from unsuspecting car accidents, a minor surgery becoming a fatal one, etc., I can reiterate with certainty the thing you have probably experienced as well, that it’s almost NEVER planned. You don't need to reach a certain age; you just need to have been born.
I know this may be unpleasant, the thought of not being here or the thought of your child mourning you, but you know what’s even more unpleasant than death, which is by the way inevitable…it’s death and you leaving your mourning child with both sadness and confusion because they don’t know what to do, where anything is, they have to pay people to find things out, and they have to put aside being sad just to deal with all of this in sheer frustration. Am I saying scare a ten-year-old with the same conversation Mufasa had with Simba in the Lion King, no.
There are also those of us who believe we are beyond reproach because we’ve done the bare minimum job of getting an insurance policy, as if a policy is a plan and a payout is the same thing as peace. If your response to the conversation of death is, “I’m okay because I have a policy,” it tells me that you are confusing having a financial cushion with having prepared your people.
However, what actually happens when you pass, more often than the insurance check, is chaos. Adult children who haven't spoken in years suddenly forced into a room together to make decisions none of them agree on. One minor child left behind, with a lump sum of money now sitting in the hands of whoever the court decides should manage it, sometimes someone the parent never would have chosen if they'd only written it down. How about when an eighteen-year-old ages out of guardianship on a technicality and inherits everything at once, with no one left to guide them on what to do with it, just a number in an account and a grief they haven't finished processing yet. Can we guess how that money will be spent and how quickly?
None of that is about death. That's about the living. That's what gets left behind for the people who have to keep breathing after you stop. And that's the part I don't think people fully understand when they avoid the conversation. Their silence isn't sparing anyone. It's just transferring the weight of the decision from them, who had the most information and the most love for the outcome, to whoever is left holding the pieces, who has the least of both.
By the time I was ten, maybe twelve, I had already sat with more loss than most people carry by forty. I watched what happens in the aftermath, the paperwork, the arguments, the families that either pulled together or came apart depending entirely on whether someone had done the work beforehand. It didn't make me morbid, it made me practical. Now, as a lawyer, I sit across from people navigating exactly what my family prepared me for, except most of them are doing it for the first time, in real time, while grieving. I can't tell you how many conversations start with someone saying I never thought we'd need this so soon, followed by the quiet admission that they always meant to get around to it.
The will, the guardianship documents, the beneficiary designations, those aren't cold tasks disconnected from love, they are one of the clearest expressions of it. Deciding who raises your children, how your money reaches the people you intended it for instead of the people a default legal process assigns it to, that is love with its sleeves rolled up. The emotional work of loving someone and the legal work of protecting them are not separate chapters, they're the same sentence.
Even if you have to do a little bit and cry, or do it while crying, that’s okay. What’s not okay is to not do it simply because it makes you feel sad, thereby transferring that problem on to the very people you love today.
I appreciate the way Dia de los Muertos holds death differently, as something to be welcomed back into the room for a visit, celebrated with color and food and stories instead of silence. I don't think preparing for death should look like preparing for a funeral in the way we've been taught to picture funerals, dim rooms and hushed voices.
I think the goal isn't celebrating death itself. It's refusing to let death cancel out the celebration of the life that came before it. Cry if you need to, cry hard, let it come in waves if that's what your body needs. But somewhere in that same room, someone should be telling the story about the time they embarrassed themselves at a family reunion, or the way they laughed, or the thing they always said that everyone rolled their eyes at and secretly loved. Pull out the pictures. Let people who only knew pieces of them walk away knowing the whole person a little better than they did before.
If no one stands up to tell your story when you're gone, if no one has the documents that protect the people you love, if no one knows the plan, then the last thing you leave behind isn't a legacy. It's a mess for someone else to clean up while they're still trying to remember how to breathe in your absence.
So I'll ask you what I ask myself. If it happened tonight, would the people you love be spending their first weeks without you in mourning, or in chaos? And have you told anyone yet what story you'd want them to tell or what you want them to know?
