Earlier this month, the Shoreline Eldercare Alliance (SEA) gave a presentation on loss and change at Peregrine’s Landing in Clinton, Connecticut. The evening included excellent speakers and an attentive audience.
One of the points that hit home to me as a mediator was the perspective that our society has an especially difficult time discussing death. We use euphemisms to describe it (e.g., “if something happens to me.”) We avoid discussing our own end-of-life wishes, leaving our loved ones to make educated guesses about what we would want but never expressed. We refuse to acknowledge that death is inevitable for all of us.
Elder mediation can help families have difficult — but important — conversations about death. These conversations can happen far in advance of death, when the family is gathered as death is near, or at any time in between.
