The Kitchen Table Session — How to Sit Down With Your Parents Once and Write Down Where Everything Is

You have four days at your parents' house and you know this conversation is overdue. You also know exactly how it goes: you start a sentence about the future, your mother says don't be morbid, and somebody gets up to make coffee.

So don't have that conversation. Ask them to help you fill in a form instead, because you would have no idea where anything is if they were in the hospital for a week. That is small, true, immediate, and much easier to say out loud.

The Kitchen Table Session is one facilitated sitting — about ninety minutes, at a table, with a pen. It works from the house inward: where the papers are, who already knows things, which bank, and only then what they actually want. By the time you reach the hard part, the afternoon has been going well for an hour.

What is inside

• 24 pages, eight fill-in worksheets, designed to be filled in together
• Three scripted openings, chosen by which parent you have — the one who deflects with humor, the one who gets defensive, the one who says don't worry about it
• The four corners: where documents, keys and the locked things physically are
• The people list: doctor, lawyer, accountant, insurance agent, the neighbor with a key
• The money map — which institutions, never how much
• The household operating manual, filled in walking round the house
• What they want, recorded in their own words and read back to them
• Ten questions you will be glad you asked, and pages for labeling the photographs nobody else can

Who it is for

The adult child who has been meaning to do this for two years. Best done at a holiday visit, when you are there anyway and there is time in the afternoon.

Format

Instant PDF download. US Letter, designed to be printed and written on by hand. Print two copies — one for them, one for you.

This book records a conversation. It is not legal, financial or medical advice, it is not a will or any other legal instrument, and nothing written in it binds anyone. It asks only where things are and what your parents said — never balances, never passwords, never a decision about care or money.