Helping your terminally ill client down the final path

“You’ve already taken the time to get to know your client. Find out what’s important to him or her in this last journey, and guide the client and his caretakers to the resources that could make a difference,” she says.

But anyone administering to the dying needs to resolve their own feelings about dying. “Many of us find it difficult to talk about death,” Latreille recently told a group of advisors earning their certified senior advisor designation at a three-day CASA workshop.

“Today, deaths happen outside the family, usually in a hospital,” she says. “Our society treats death as a failure with expressions such as ‘he didn’t make it’ or ‘she lost the battle.’ And with medical advances, we can often postpone death, which gives us the illusion that we’ve overcome it. To help someone at the end of his or her life, you have to come to terms with your feelings about death — whether you’re afraid of it.”

Advisors can take a cue from the client and his or her family at this time. “Respect the family’s wishes,” says Karen Henderson, founder of Toronto-based caregiver resource centres Caregiver Network Inc. and How to Care, and a faculty member of the Canadian Institute for Elder Planning Studies, which confers the elder planning counsellor designation. “Offer your services. Say: ‘What can I do?'”

Judy Cutler, director of communications for Toronto-based Canada’s Association for the Fifty Plus (known as CARP), spent two years caring for her mother before she died of colon cancer in 1994 and Cutler preferred to handle everything on her own. “People wanted to help but I needed my space and I needed to be with my mother. But throughout the two years, I really appreciated people leaving telephone messages, dropping off brownies. I’d tell them:‘Just knowing you’re there if I need you is great’.”

But many terminally ill people fear being abandoned by family and friends, who seldom visit or phone because they’re unsure of what to say or how to act. That makes it important to spend some time with your client, especially in the early days after the diagnosis. The client may want to update his or her will, power of attorney and living will.

Margaret Kerr, a Toronto lawyer and co-author of Facing a Death in the Family (John Wiley & Sons, $24.95), says terminally ill clients often add codicils to their wills. “Sometimes, when a will is read, the codicils make the original will quite different.”

A financial advisor or a lawyer who has built a close relationship with a terminally ill client can put things into perspective at what can be an emotional time, says Joann Kurtz, Kerr’s co-author and professor of law at Seneca College in Toronto: “The advisor can say, ‘Now, I know your son didn’t visit you as he’d promised, but do you really think that’s a reason to write him out of your will?'”

Some terminally ill people never mention death, Kurtz notes: “That’s how their family handles it.”

Follow the client’s lead, she says: “It’s possible to help a client put financial matters, wills and POAs in order without actually talking about death, if that’s what she wants. But some people do want to talk about it, and no one will let them.”

Latreille recalls being upset when her mother wanted to discuss who would get her piano, Victrola and dining-room table. “I felt I’d be reducing her to an asset sheet,” says Latreille. “But, later, she said, ‘I know you don’t think my things are worth much.’

“She wanted to make sure she had everything tied up, and misinterpreted my unwillingness to honour what she wanted to say,” says Latreille. “Please realize the discomfort is on your side. This was an important step in her journey.”