It’s Tuesday night; you’ve just finished work, so now you figure you’ll talk a little about dementia and death with your friends and family.
Weird, right? Who would do that?
Nobody, which is why hard conversations either happen too late or don’t happen at all.
Instead of this, you order takeout and scroll on your phone. After all, videos of baby raccoons are a lot more fun than talking about uncomfortable stuff. You’ll do that tomorrow. And then tomorrow becomes next week, next year … What makes this worse for queer people is that these types of conversations usually come after big milestones like kids and marriage.
Those tend to come later in life (or, sometimes, not at all), so a lot of things get left unsaid.
The Conversations People Put Off the Most
Nobody wakes up and thinks to themselves, “Tonight I’ll talk about who gets my money if I go bonkers.” And for queer people in particular, a lot of them don’t have a spouse or kids to rely on. That means that, even if you have that one person you trust 100%, they might not have the legal rights to do anything until you take care of the paperwork.
Here are the conversations most people delay having, but shouldn’t.
Who Makes Decisions if You Can’t
If you end up in the hospital and can’t speak, the staff will let your legal next of kin know.
So, who’s that for you? A parent? A sibling?
It’s not the partner you’ve lived with for the past 12 years, that’s for sure. Unless you sign a healthcare proxy, your chosen family gets zero say in … Well, everything.
Hospitals have to follow the law, and without that paper, they might contact someone you barely have any contact with to make life-or-death calls for you.
Yikes, right?
The Type of Care You Want
Do you want aggressive treatment or just comfort care at the end? You probably have some vague idea of that, but have you told anyone about it? If you haven’t, it’s very possible that your partner (or whoever is in charge of making those decisions) will guess wrong because they simply don’t know.
And just the fact that they have to make such a huge decision without having any idea of what you really want can be insanely difficult.
Wouldn’t it be easier to set aside 5 minutes and talk about that?
Who Will Be There Every Day
Big emergencies get a lot of attention from everyone even remotely close to you, but that’s not what wears people down. It’s everyday life that does that.
Who’ll be there to notice if you’ve stopped eating or paying your bills? Chosen family is what people automatically answer to these questions, but what if they live two hours away?
You need a real plan.
How Will Care in the Future Be Financed?
Nursing homes and home health aides are really expensive, more so than most people expect. And queer people are less likely to have family money or a spouse’s pension to fall back on, so money talk is one conversation you can’t afford to put off. If you do, you’ll have to make important decisions in a rush, and probably while panicking.
If you go through this early, you have a shot at choosing an option that would actually be decent.
What Happens If You End Up in a Nursing Facility?
Once you move into any type of facility, you’re trusting complete strangers with your everyday life. A lot of queer people are nervous about having to hide who they are or having staff who don’t respect them provide care.
If there’s no one who will regularly check in on you, that’s a huge issue.
Just look at what’s happening in these facilities across the country, from abuse to nursing home sepsis due to neglect, malnutrition/dehydration, etc. It’s not good. In a nursing home, you want to be safe and taken care of, not look up lawyers who can help you out after you’ve been mistreated in some serious way.
A lot of these issues can be prevented if you have someone in your life who can speak up and have your back.
How You Want to Be Remembered and Supported at the End
Most funerals and memorials are planned by whomever shows up first, which doesn’t always turn out the best. If you never said whether you want a religious service, a celebration, or literally nothing at all, then nothing goes the way you’d want it to.
Also, there’s a big risk of your partner being excluded or your identity ignored if you’re queer because that’s just the world we live in.
Conclusion
It would be weird to throw a dinner party and then start talking about your future catheter situation, so maybe don’t do that. With that in mind, if you avoid talking about the hard stuff forever, you can be 100% sure that you’ll regret it sooner or later.
As uncomfortable as all this is, when you do it, you keep the steering wheel in your own hands.
Your chosen family is still family, and they deserve to have a say in what happens to you. And the earlier you have these conversations, the less mess there will be to clean up later on.
