Author shares advice for dealing with death

So it is one of the most uncomfortable conversations that you can have with your parents. We're not talking about the talk. Nope. This talk tends to come later in life about having a plan for when your parents pass away. No one likes thinking about death, talking about death, you know, but some conversations, they really just have to happen, especially when it comes to planning what happens after. So how can you open the dialogue with elderly parents who might not want to go there? Our next guest had to do just that. They don't have to be elderly, to be honest. Sarah Kavanaugh's mother was dying of cancer, yet she never asked her mom what she wanted. Her book, Peaceful Exit, is not only Sarah's experience, it's also what she wished she had done herself. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. So you kind of wrote the rule book or the guide book for people who might want to open that tough conversation with their own parents. Death is not, it's a part of life. It's something that everybody experiences, but why are we so hesitant to want to have a conversation about it? Well, I wrote this book, Peaceful Exit, to make the hardest conversation in the world ten times easier. 90% of Americans want to talk about death. But only 27% feel comfortable doing so. And when my mother was ill and she had aggressive cancer treatment, she was far away from her loved ones. And I really just didn't know what to say or how to ask her what she wanted. And this book is the book I wish my family had had at the time. Right. How do you break that ice? There doesn't ever seem to be, like, a good time to talk about it, really. You know, what's the most opportune time to start talking about it? You were in a situation where you knew that she was likely terminal. Yes. So you feel like you had to have that conversation at some point. So how do you know when it's the right time to really do it? Well, what I recommend in the book is actually to kind of go through a window. Don't go through the front door and sit down with your folks and say, you know, do you want to be cremated? Really go through the process the window and lead with love and say, what matters to you, Mom? I don't want to be guessing. What really matters to you? And you can start with one object in the house and tell a story about it. Find something that you love, that your parents have, and start telling stories about it. I think about this all the time, because I have parents who are aging. They love talking about it. And I'm like, can you scale back on that just a little bit? But there's this thing called, and I'm sure you know what it is, Swedish death cleaning, right? Where it's like you make sure that you have everything. You kind of scale back yourself and your possessions. You already have everything lined up as far as which child gets what, what you want to keep, what you want to do away with. It's something that, in that particular culture, is frankly like a part of life. It's a part of the aging process and just getting your affairs together. Yeah, yeah. It's not so common in America. I think we have a consumer culture. We collect things. There's three sections in the first part of the book. One is... making peace with your relationships but the second part is making peace with your possessions and the third part is making peace with your body and in my eight years of research these three areas just came sort of to the surface about how we live a better life now and then we're able to be at peace and share what we wish for at the end of our lives. How much of a big difference can this make when it comes to having your stuff together and having a plan and knowing what's going to happen for you know your children as opposed to not having a game I think when my parents passed, but they really never had these conversations with us, and we were the ones who had sort of had to think about all those things. The role is sort of reversed, and you have to have those conversations and start asking what it is they want. I wish I had a book like this, because what are some of the most important things when you start to have those conversations that you really need to start asking? What are some of the things? Well, one of the things this book recommends is that you do your own work, and then approach them and say, hey, I read this book, Peaceful Exit, I've kind of sorted things I wish for, And that starts a conversation. The other way to start a conversation is to go to my website, PeacefulExit.net, listen to a podcast together, and then you're talking about a story that's a third-party story. One of the arcs in this book, too, is your death story, because we all grow up with a certain education around death, like, did we have a big loss when we were a kid, did Did in childhood, did our parents deal with loss or grief in a certain way that carries with us into adulthood? So looking at that death story, for me it was like silence, no one talked about it, we didn't talk about grief, we had lots of loss but no one had the language around it. And so then by the end of the book, being able to rewrite that, if you have a negative death story. You come out of it with a positive death story and the ability to talk about it. So it's like working up to that moment where you start to maybe make the plans and ask those kinds of tough questions. Exactly. Because I'm fascinated with... What holds people back? Why don't you have the conversation? Or why don't you make a plan? You know, people put it off. It's probably just sad to talk about it, right? And, you know, I don't know. But it's not sad, though. We celebrate birth. We celebrate marriage. Right. And, you know. You know, it's almost like a good way maybe to get into it is like you're talking about the life first. Tell me about, you know, because everybody wants to know their own family history. Exactly. Right? For a multitude of reasons. But if you take them on that journey, let's talk about... Uh, you know, something that maybe you want your grandkids to know, or we're like, maybe you can, is there anything from your house that you would like to see passed on to, you know, your, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren. And then you start to get into those kinds of conversations. Exactly. Exactly. My first grandbaby was just born and I'm already thinking about what is it that I want to pass on to her? Right. Like what's important to you? What is important to me so that I can pass it on to her? Yeah. So maybe we should start thinking about this. When you're younger, I mean, like you don't wait till you're 50 and your parents are older, you know, like, I mean, even to have a will and even for parents right now who are thinking as I get older. You know, in reverse, how to start talking to your kids about, you know, someday we're not going to be around and, you know, this is what we love. I suggest talking to kids from the very beginning. There's beautiful books out there, children's books about grief, you know, build emotional intelligence in those kids so they're not afraid to talk to you about anything. And once they're not afraid to talk to you about anything, then grief is just part of life. It's just... Loss is part of life and it's much, much easier. Yeah, I would imagine a lot of your audience too, as you said, is the sandwich generation because you have it on both ends, right? You have like the people who are taking care of their aging parents and then also having to take care of their children. That's right, that's right. It's a really tough place to be in if your parents have made no plans. That's right. You don't want to be stuck with the logistics and the, you know, there's lots to happen at the end of life. And you don't want to be stuck with that while you're grieving someone's loss. Right. And I suggest in the book that you create a pexit pod, which is the pod of people that you meet with once a year. So you normalize the conversation. And once you normalize that conversation, it becomes easier to plan. Normalize it. Use this book as a vessel, right, to have those kinds of tough conversations. Sarah, thank you so much. Thank you. Sarah's book, Peaceful Exit, is available now. And her Peaceful Exit podcast can be found on Spotify, Apple, and, you know, all the usual suspects, the usual places. Right. If you want to talk to Sarah, she's going to be at the Santa Monica Proper Hotel on Saturday to talk about her book. Maybe you can get a little advice here. It's a free event that starts at 10.30 tomorrow morning. I like how, you know, it's so painful to a lot of people, but I like how you also said, you know, it could be beautiful. Absolutely.