This week has had some frustrating moments as I try to help a family dealing with the serious illness of their mother.  Earlier this month the mother went in for problems everyone expected would be dealt with rather easily and successfully.  However, the mother is still in the hospital and not competent to express her wishes. 

The good news is that mother and father both did some estate planning with us earlier this year.  Father is suffering from Alzheimers and the stress of not having Mother around is increasing his confusion.  Daughter and Son keep calling my office with questions we can't answer.  The reason we can't answer them is that Mother, who was extremely intelligent and ran everything efficiently and well, limited what she wanted to tell me and wanted me to do to assist in the estate planning.  We did health care powers of attorney for her but not a living will.  Daughter wanted to know Mother's living will desires and I had to tell her Mother did not want to work with us in preparing those.  Son wants to know something else and I can only give him limited info and advice.

I'm sure Mother thought that she had everything in control, and while she was well I would say that she did.  The problem is that estate planning is about when you are not in control.  Because the parents utilized us more for transactional help than a full-fledged advisor relationship, we now can only be of limited help to the family while Mother is disabled.  Because Mother and Father did not partake in our maintenance program, it is unlikely I would have learned more about them and their needs as the years progressed because they would have had to take the initiative to continue the relationship.  So, here we are, with a family that really needs the kind of help that we are happy to provide, but we can only do so much because the parents didn't take full advantage of what we could offer them.