There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a family when nobody knows what she would have wanted.
It isn’t grief. Grief comes later, and grief you can survive. This is something else. It’s four people around a table who all loved the same woman, all remember her differently, and now have to decide something on her behalf in the next two hours. Someone will end up making that call. And whoever it is will carry a small, private uncertainty about it for a very long time.
A young woman named Zoë Watkins wrote about sitting in that quiet after her aunt died. She was in her twenties. She had assumed, reasonably, that none of this was hers to think about yet.
She wasn’t wrong to assume that. Most people her age do. When you’re twenty-six and healthy, the whole machinery of wills and health care proxies and advance directives belongs to some other stage of life, one that hasn’t arrived yet. The problem with that assumption isn’t that it’s foolish. The problem is that it’s built on the idea that you get advance notice. That there will be a clear moment when the conversation becomes appropriate, when the subject stops feeling premature, when someone older and wiser pulls you aside and says, now is the time. That moment usually doesn’t come. And then one day it’s too late to have the conversation, and instead you’re having a different one, the one Zoë found herself in, the one nobody is ready for.
Here is the thing that changes how all of this feels, at least for me.
Planning ahead is almost never experienced by the planner. It is experienced by the people at the table.
Every document you sign, every preference you put in writing, every person you name as your decision-maker is a message sent forward in time to the people who love you. The message is simple. You don’t have to guess. You don’t have to carry this. I thought about you enough, while I still could, to make this part easier.
That’s what an advance directive actually is. That’s what naming a health care proxy means. It has almost nothing to do with contemplating your own death and almost everything to do with the people who would otherwise be left guessing. Zoë understood this after losing her aunt. She wrote about it specifically for other young adults, people who feel as insulated from all of this as she did, because she wanted them to know that the insulation isn’t permanent. It’s just a feeling. And the people who would bear the cost of the gap she described aren’t strangers. They’re the people you love most.
The other thing she understood, and this is worth sitting with, is that the size of the ask is much smaller than the size of the dread.
The dread is the whole afternoon. It’s the lawyer’s office, the binder, the formal conversation about mortality, the sense that starting any of this means you’re accepting something you’d rather not accept. That’s the picture most people have, and it keeps them from doing anything at all. The actual task is much smaller. Name a decision-maker. Tell one person what you’d want. Write it down somewhere findable. That’s the entry point. You don’t have to solve the whole thing in one sitting.
The dread is doing all the work of keeping people out, and it’s working, and it’s out of proportion to what’s actually being asked.
Zoë Watkins was twenty-six when her aunt died. She had already lost her father. Two losses in close succession, and what they left her with was not just grief but a very specific kind of clarity: the conversations she hadn’t had yet, the documents that didn’t exist yet, the preferences she had never put into words. She wrote about all of it publicly, for other people her age, because she thought it might move someone to do what she was finally ready to do herself.
If you read this and call your mother this week, or send a text to your sibling, or just write one sentence down somewhere about what you’d want, Zoë’s piece did exactly what she intended.
And so has this one.