Writing Down What You Would Rather Not Happen

Why the negative list is easier

Because preferences about something you will not experience are genuinely hard to form, and most people are not being evasive when they say they do not mind. They actually do not.

Objections are different. They are formed from things a person has attended, seen, disliked or found comforting, and they exist already rather than having to be invented on the spot. Asking for them is asking somebody to report rather than to decide.

That difference is the whole reason this article exists. The conversation that stalls on the first question moves quickly on the second one, and produces a page.

Why a family finds it more useful

A family making decisions is not usually short of options. It is short of boundaries. The commonest difficulty is not knowing what somebody would have wanted; it is four people each guessing, and having no way to tell which guesses are wrong.

• A negative list rules things out, which narrows the field immediately.
• It settles disagreements without anybody having to claim special knowledge.
• It removes the fear of getting it wrong, which is the source of most of the distress.
• It leaves the family free to decide everything else, which most people actually want.

The third is the one that matters most. Families do not agonise because they have too little choice. They agonise because they are afraid of choosing something the person would have hated, and a short list of what would have been hated removes that fear entirely.

How to write one

It takes about twenty minutes and it does not require deciding anything. The prompt that works is simply: think of anything you have attended, and say what you would not want repeated.

Most people answer three of those five immediately and shrug at the others, which is a perfectly good outcome. A list with three items on it is a list.

Naming a person is allowed, and is often the point

The fourth prompt is the one people hesitate over and it is frequently the most valuable. Saying that a particular person should not be asked to speak, or to organise, or to travel, protects them.

It is not an unkindness. It is the opposite, and it is much easier to write on a page than for that person to say themselves at the time.

What a negative list is not

It is not a legal instrument and it does not bind anybody. Nothing on this site is offering an account of what any document does or does not achieve, and this page is not one.

It is a note from you to the people who will be deciding. Its authority comes entirely from having been written by you, which is generally enough for a family and is not a substitute for whatever formal arrangements a household chooses to make.

Where to keep it

With everything else, and reachable by more than one person. A list nobody finds is worse than no list, because the family will have been told one exists and will spend time looking for it.

The practical test for whether something is genuinely reachable, as opposed to merely written, is in keeping family records reachable.

Telling somebody it exists

Which is a separate step and is the one most often skipped. A page in a drawer that nobody knows about is a page that gets found weeks late, at which point the decisions have been made.

How to raise that with grown children, without it landing as news, is the subject of telling your adult children what you have arranged.

Revisiting it

Less often than you might think. Objections are stable in a way preferences are not; somebody who dislikes a particular thing at sixty usually still dislikes it at eighty. A look every few years is sufficient.

What does change is the people. A list that names somebody who has since died, moved or become unwell needs a small amendment, and that is the change most likely to be needed and least likely to be noticed.

Two lists, and why the order matters

If you intend to write both, write the negative one first. Doing it in the other order almost always produces a stalled attempt and a page with nothing on it.

What happens if you start with what you want

The question is too open, the answer feels consequential, and most people stop after one item and never come back to it. The exercise gets labelled as something to do properly later, and later does not arrive.

What happens if you start with what you do not want

The answers come quickly, the page fills, and the momentum frequently carries into two or three positive items at the end. Almost every completed version of this document was written in that order, and almost every abandoned one was attempted in the other.

It also sits naturally alongside the practical list a family needs, which is set out in a practical funeral cost planning checklist. That one covers what has to be decided; this one covers what should not be.

What families do with it

Something worth knowing in advance, because it changes how much care is worth putting into the wording.

They read it once, at the beginning, and refer back to it when a specific question comes up. It is not read aloud, it is not treated as an instruction, and it is not scrutinised for what was left out. It functions as a set of boundaries within which everybody then relaxes.

That is why a plain list of short statements works better than anything carefully composed. The document is being used as a reference, and references are best when they are blunt.

Where the strong feelings usually are

Across the people who have done this, the items that come up with real feeling cluster in three places, and knowing that makes the list quicker to write.

Money spent on the wrong things

By a wide margin the most common, and usually specific. People frequently do not mind what is spent overall and mind a great deal about one particular category of it.

Somebody being put in a difficult position

Being asked to speak, to travel, to organise, or to pay. Naming that in advance releases the person from having to decline something at a moment when declining is almost impossible.

Being described inaccurately

Less common and strongly felt when it arises. It is worth a line if you have one, and it is worth nothing at all if you do not, which is the general rule for everything on this list.

Mistakes worth avoiding

1. Trying to write a positive list first, which is where most attempts stall permanently.
2. Making it long. Five items is a useful list; thirty is an instruction manual nobody will follow.
3. Writing it and telling nobody, which produces a search rather than a guide.
4. Including things you merely have no opinion about, which dilutes the items you feel strongly about.
5. Treating it as final. It is a note, it can be changed, and knowing that makes it far easier to write.

Families are rarely short of options. They are short of permission to rule things out.

What this does not require

It requires no decisions, no expense, no professional, and no conversation with anybody until you choose to have one. It is twenty minutes and a piece of paper, and it is the single highest value thing on this list of articles measured against the effort it takes.

Doing it for somebody else

Occasionally the person who would benefit from this is not you, and the question becomes how to ask somebody else for their list without it becoming a conversation nobody wanted.

The same asymmetry helps. Asking what somebody wants is difficult and frequently produces nothing. Asking whether there is anything they would rather did not happen is answerable, unthreatening, and usually produces two or three items immediately.

Write down what they say, read it back, and leave it there. You are not conducting an interview and you do not need the full list today.

A reasonable next step

Answer the five prompts tonight and stop when you run out. Whatever you have written is the list. The wider context is funeral cost planning for California families.