Why the picture ends up distributed
Because information is shared conversationally, one piece at a time, with whoever happens to be present. Somebody mentions something on a drive home. Somebody else is told during a hospital visit. A third person is copied on a letter. None of those is a decision to divide the picture up, and the result is that it has been divided up.
The pattern is more pronounced where the family is spread out, because the conversations happen with whoever is nearby at the time, and different people are nearby in different years.
This is worth saying because families who discover the fragmentation late tend to interpret it as secrecy, which is usually wrong and always unhelpful. It is an artefact of how families actually talk.
What the fragmented picture costs
- Things get arranged twice, because nobody could establish whether they had been arranged once.
- Decisions get made on the strongest opinion rather than on the best information.
- Somebody who did know something is not in the room when it is needed.
- The person who ends up organising things spends the first week doing research rather than deciding.
The last of those is the largest and the least visible. A week spent establishing what is already true is a week nobody has, and it is entirely avoidable.
The assembly, which is a task and not a summit
The instinct is to convene everybody and have a difficult conversation. That is usually the wrong shape, because it is hard to arrange, easy to postpone, and tends to produce disagreement about decisions rather than agreement about facts.
The version that works is smaller. One person asks each of the others, separately, what they know. Not what they think should happen. What they have actually been told or shown.
- Ask each person the same three questions, individually, in whatever way suits them.
- Write the answers down as they were given, including who said what.
- Note where two answers disagree, without resolving it yet.
- Send the assembled version back to everybody, so each of them can correct their own part.
- Keep it somewhere all of them can reach.
The three questions
Ask each person, separately
- What have you been told about what is already arranged?
- What have you been shown, and where was it?
- What have you been asked to do, if anything?
They are deliberately about the past rather than the future, which is what makes them answerable and unthreatening. Nobody is being asked to make a decision, take a side, or contemplate anything they would rather not.
The disagreements are the useful part
Where two relatives report different versions of the same thing, that is not a problem the exercise has created. It is a problem the exercise has found, several years before it would otherwise have surfaced.
Resolving it is usually a matter of asking the person concerned, calmly, on an ordinary afternoon. Discovering it later means resolving it between siblings on the worst week of their lives.
Who should do the assembling
Whoever will actually do it, which is not necessarily the eldest, the nearest, or the one who usually organises things. The qualification is willingness rather than standing.
Why it should be one person
Because two people asking the same questions produces two documents that disagree, and the family now has a third problem. One person collecting and everybody correcting is the arrangement that converges.
What that person is not
Not in charge, not the decision maker, and not the one who will have to do everything later. It is worth saying that out loud when asking, because the fear of being volunteered for the whole thing is the most common reason people decline a small task.
Where the person concerned is still here
Which is the usual case, and it changes the exercise for the better. The assembled version can simply be checked with them, which resolves every disagreement at once and requires no negotiation between anybody else.
The conversation that goes well is a practical one. It is not about what anybody wants to happen. It is about confirming what has already been arranged and where the paperwork lives, which most people find much easier to discuss than preferences.
Where that conversation is difficult to start, how to discuss arrangements with aging parents is the longer treatment of exactly that difficulty.
What to do with the result
Keep it short and keep it reachable, which are the same requirement seen from two angles. A long document is not maintained and an unreachable one is not used.
What reachable actually means, and a ten minute test for whether a family passes it, is set out in keeping family records reachable. It applies just as much to a family spread across three California cities as to one spread across a state.
The other thing to do with it is nothing. The assembled page does not require the family to decide anything, agree on anything, or act. Its entire value is that the information exists in one place, and that value is realised at a moment nobody is currently thinking about.
What a family usually turns out to hold
It is worth knowing what the collection typically produces, because families approach it expecting either nothing or a revelation, and it is almost always neither.
The common result is four or five genuine facts, two or three half remembered ones that need checking, and one thing everybody assumed somebody else knew and nobody actually did. That last item is the reason the exercise is worth an evening.
The half remembered ones
These are the most valuable part of the collection and the easiest to discard. Somebody recalls a company name but not the arrangement, or a conversation but not the year. Written down as uncertain, they become things that can be checked. Left in a head, they are unreliable and unusable.
The thing nobody knew
Frequently it is where a document is. Occasionally it is that a payment has been made towards something. Once in a while it is that an arrangement everybody believed existed does not, which is unwelcome and considerably better discovered now.
Distance, and why this is common here
A family spread between the coast, the valley and somewhere further inland has the same information problem as a family spread across states, and it is less likely to recognise it, because everybody involved would describe themselves as living in the same place.
What matters is not the state line. It is how often people are in the same room, because that determines how the conversational drip of information gets distributed. Four hours of driving is enough to produce a fragmented picture, and a great many California families are four hours apart without thinking of themselves as far away.
The service page for this state sets out that situation in full, and this article is the task that follows from it: funeral cost planning for California families describes the position, while the collection above is what a family actually does about it.
Mistakes families make when assembling
- Turning it into a family meeting, which converts a fact gathering exercise into a negotiation.
- Asking what people think should happen, which is a different and much harder question.
- Resolving disagreements immediately rather than recording them and checking with the person concerned.
- Producing something long and complete, which nobody updates and nobody reads.
- Doing it once and never again, when the point of the date on the page is that it can be seen to be stale.
Between them the family already knows. The work is not discovery, it is collection.
What this does not require
It does not require anybody to have made any arrangements, to want to discuss anything, or to agree with anybody else. A family that completes this and finds nothing has been arranged has still learned something worth knowing, and has learned it on an ordinary week.
Frequently asked questions
Who should hold the assembled information?
Everybody who contributed to it, ideally. It contains nothing sensitive if it is kept as an index rather than an archive, and a copy that only one person can reach reproduces the problem the exercise was solving.
Question 1What if relatives disagree about what was said?
Record both versions and check with the person concerned if they are still able to say. Disagreements found early are ordinary; the same disagreements found later are much harder, because there is nobody left to ask.
Question 2Should this be done as a family meeting?
Usually not. Separate conversations produce better information and less friction, because each person is describing what they know rather than defending a position in front of everybody else.
Question 3What if somebody refuses to take part?
Record what everybody else knows and note the gap. A partial picture assembled deliberately is considerably better than no picture, and people frequently join in later once they see it is not a confrontation.
Question 4Does any of this need to involve an agent?
No. It is entirely a family exercise. A conversation can help you work out what is worth recording about the household's own arrangements, but the assembly itself is yours and nobody else can do it.
Question 5A reasonable next step
Ask one relative the three questions this week. That is the whole start, and it is smaller than it feels. The wider context is funeral cost planning for California families.
