I talked with a client recently, an older woman, who told me rather suddenly that she now wanted to meet with me monthly because she wanted to make sure that her finances were in good shape.

In truth, her finances have long been in wonderful shape – she has ample annual income, her expenses are entirely predictable, she has good medical insurance, she is already living in a place where they will provide a place for her to live the rest of her life.  Her estate plan is current, including the Patient Advocate form.  We make annual gifts to her family members.  I do her taxes.  We look at her investments a couple times a year, so I know that there is no obvious reason for her to be concerned about her finances.

I had to find a nice way to tell her that more frequent meetings would not likely change anything, would not ameliorate her concern.  More importantly, I had to figure out why this was “suddenly” a concern at all.

So, we talked.  I asked about her health – she tells me she is forgetting things, but aren’t we all?  I asked if she was worried about alarmist news reports of the economy tanking – she said that she really doesn’t think too much about that stuff (which gratified me).  I asked if there was a problem with one of her children – she said that all is fine with family.

Finally, I asked her what was most on her mind – and she told me that her best lifelong friend had just died, sort of suddenly.  This was the real issue for my client, that she was dealing on a new level with her own mortality.  I now understood that I had to help her feel like she has done what she can in order to feel better about her diminishing days.

This, of course, is easier said than done.  As we age, our mind plays tricks on us – it causes us to be concerned about things that didn’t used to concern us – it solves a problem, then reopens it.

Here is what my client and I did, and I recommend that you do this for yourself if you are concerned about your end-of-life circumstances:

1. We dug out her will and her Patient Advocate form and made sure that they still represented her wishes – and I made extra copies so she could keep them on her desk to be able to assure herself regularly that she had everything in place;  we gave new copies of the Patient Advocate form to children, to the care facility and to her doctor;
2. We looked at the beneficiary designations on her life insurance policy and retirement account, again to assure that she had taken care of them according to her wishes;
3. We wrote and mailed letters to her children telling them where important documents are stored; we also provided to them a list of assets, accounts and creditors (so that bills could be paid easily);
4. We updated her Durable Power of Attorney so that one of her children could take care of financial matters should she become incapacitated;
5. We completed a form I have created setting forth her funeral and burial instructions and desires – and sent a copy to her pastor and to her children;
6. She wrote out a list of the things that she wanted her grandchildren to know about her and mailed it to each one;
7. She gave some of her jewelry and artwork and even some of her family photograph albums to her children – mostly so they could share the moment of gifting rather than have them receive things from her only after she had died.

I do not know how much we accomplished, but we did what we could do.  She is still very sad that her friend died.  Her children still live far away, but she has made things as easy as possible for them to take care of her affairs upon her death.  This is really what we want to do, isn’t it?  I think it was what she wanted.