My parents are in their mid-60s and in good health. They still do everything on their own and don’t need help from my brothers and me, for now. By every visible measure, nothing is wrong, and there are no signs that will change soon.
Which is exactly why I keep not saying anything about the future.
The window where it’s easy is the window I’m wasting
Right now, any conversation about their future would be hypothetical. There’s no health crisis, no diagnosis, no stairs, or house projects they can’t manage. We could sit at the kitchen table and talk it all through calmly as a thought experiment, because none of it is real yet.
That’s exactly what makes it the right time, yet also what makes it feel unnecessary and easy to avoid. Why bring up wills and living arrangements and conversations like “what if one of you can’t care for the other” when they’re still healthy? It feels morbid, like I’m aging them before their time.
What I’ve started noticing anyway
Both my parents are slowing down. There are small mobility issues now, the kind that don’t affect their independence yet but didn’t exist five years ago. And I know what’s in the family. My grandmother on my mom’s side had dementia. Both of my dad’s parents died of cancer in their 80s. While none of that is a prophecy, it’s a reason not to assume the runway is as long as it looks on a good day at the kitchen table.
I watched a friend go through it unprepared
What shifted my mindset from “someday in the future” to “soon” was watching a friend lose both his parents to cancer a few years apart.
He was close with them, a good son. But the illnesses arrived faster than the planning did, and he spent those years making enormous life decisions while juggling grief and long-term care logistics. I don’t want to do the version of this where the planning and the crisis happen at the same time, as it did for my friend. He didn’t choose that. It just happened, the way it tends to.
I’m the one who moved away
There’s one fact that sits under the surface of all this, and it’s by my own design.
In 2017, my wife and I moved from Calgary to Nelson, BC, a seven-hour drive from both sets of grandparents. We did it for our kids, the mountains, and a smaller life, and I don’t regret it.
But I made a choice that assumed my parents would stay capable, independent, and healthy indefinitely. That assumption is holding for now, but the problem is that when it stops holding, I won’t be 20 minutes away. I’ll be half a day’s drive and a packed bag away, trying to make decisions I never laid any groundwork for in a hurry, probably over the phone.
The distance doesn’t change what I should do. It just raises the stakes of waiting.
The conversation has already half-started
In one narrow sense, it’s already begun. My parents have told me I’m the executor of their will.
That’s a piece of information about the end of their lives, which means they’ve been thinking about their future. I don’t know where the will is, what they’d want if one of them couldn’t care for the other, or what “help” would even look like to them before they’d pick up the phone and call me.
So I’ve started writing the questions down on my phone. Not urgent ones. The boring “someday” versions, the ones I want to ask while my parents can still answer as the capable people they are, rather than from the middle of some emergency.
For now, I’ve got a list of questions, two slower-but-healthy parents, and no excuse left except that asking is still slightly awkward. I’m trying to decide if that’s a good enough reason to keep waiting.
I don’t think it is.
