Collection
Kind things to do for ageing parents and relatives
There is a window, usually years long, in which everything here is an ordinary conversation over tea. After it closes the same things happen in a hospital corridor between frightened people who are guessing. The difference between those two versions is almost entirely a matter of when somebody decided to ask.
Several of these will feel morbid to you and will not feel morbid to them. Older people have usually thought about this far more than their children have, and are waiting for somebody willing to hear it.
8 things you can do
In roughly the order they tend to be needed.
Start here. A visit that is not a delivery, and they can tell the difference.
Sit down properly when you visit
A visitor who stays standing signals they are about to leave, and the whole visit is spent anticipating it.
Half an hourFreeA neighbor
Birthdays are obligations. A Tuesday is a choice.
Turn up when there is no occasion
Birthdays and Christmas are obligations. A Tuesday is a choice, and everybody can tell the difference.
An afternoonFreeA relative
The sigh is what stops them asking about anything bigger.
Teach the phone thing properly, not quickly
Doing it for them solves today. Teaching it slowly, written down, solves the next two years.
Half an hourFreeA neighbor
Most people know their parents only as parents, which is the smallest version.
Ask an older person what they used to do
Retired people are asked about their health and their grandchildren. Almost nobody asks what they were good at.
Half an hourFreeA neighbor
The details go when they do, and no family regrets the recording.
Record them telling one story
Families consistently say the thing they wish they had is a recording of the voice, not more photographs.
Half an hourFreeA friend
Removes the job and the low-grade guilt attached to it.
Deal with the thing they keep meaning to deal with
The cupboard door, the unopened letter, the tap. It has been on their list for two years and it is forty minutes of yours.
An afternoonUnder $10A relative
Turns a future emergency into an inconvenience. Do it while it is calm.
Write down how their house actually works
Which tap drips, where the stopcock is, who fixes the boiler. One page, on the fridge, for whoever needs it next.
Half an hourFreeA relative
The hardest one, and the one that makes every later decision easier.
Ask now what they would want
Where they want to be, who decides, what they would refuse. Asked over tea it is a conversation. Asked in a corridor it is a crisis.
Half an hourFreeA relative