A Conversation Every Family Should Have

Posted by: Cathy Arnst on November 26, 2009

We’re continuing a tradition at Working Parents started last year. Asking you to take a moment this weekend to discuss your desires for how you want to live the end of your life. If you are seeing this issue come up a lot in the blogosphere this weekend, that’s because more than 100 bloggers are putting up the same post, in an effort to help start “the conversation”—one of the most important you’ll ever have. If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here.

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented blog rally to promote Engage With Grace a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations—our closest friends and family.

Our original mission to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different.

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.

To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:

Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like just five questions in plain, simple language can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion. Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation. One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.

So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them. Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.

(To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. )

If you or someone you know would like to prepare an advance directive, this site contains downloadable forms for every state and Medline Plus has a section containing lots of background information on directives here.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/