Recently, I sat in a law office at a long conference table with my two daughters beside me. Across from us was an attorney with a stack of legal pages for me to sign. They were documents that I had spent months thinking about and discussing with her — my revocable trust, health care directive, and other papers that signaled we were talking about me, without me.
This lovely young attorney (isn’t every professional we turn to these days younger than us?) was doing her job efficiently, speaking her legalese to us matter-of-factly, pointing to legal sections in documents just as she had done with others many times before. She was explaining things we knew we needed to know, but truthfully, didn’t want to hear, and all delivered impassively, as if we were being given instructions for a used car that was about to die.
To her, it was routine. To us, it was sobering. My daughters were absorbing the reality that their mom’s future wishes were now contained in legal documents. I was sitting there, very much alive, listening to my own death being discussed as if I were already gone.
Difficult conversations
Sitting and listening and glancing at my daughters, I was suddenly struck with a wave of emotions. In the months leading up to this meeting, I was dutifully reviewing legal paragraphs I barely understood and agreeing to Article this or Section that. I was determined to check the box on another To Do item instead of absorbing what it really was.
There was no acknowledgment that these are difficult things to discuss. No box of Kleenex on the table, just in case it was needed for a tear or two, something my daughter told me after the meeting.
This wasn’t the first time I faced a professional adviser in a “sign here” transaction that felt insensitive. Accountants, financial advisers and real estate agents do their jobs, and in doing so, may not even realize their clients may be at their lowest points.
I remember when my husband’s dementia required him to sign documents transferring various accounts to me. The adviser never knew the struggles it took just to get out of the house to be on time, only to have my husband lock himself in the building’s men’s room, making us late for the meeting. When I sat in front of her, she had no clue about how I was feeling at that moment — a moment when I was changing a relationship with my husband, who had been my adviser, partner and confidant for years.
It’s not that professionals are cold-hearted. In fact, some may detach emotionally as a form of self-protection. As one adviser told me, “If I let myself feel the weight of every client’s discomfort, I wouldn’t last a month.”
