The wills conversation no one wants

I was sitting opposite Mum at the corner table at the cafe on Beach Road on a Sunday at 10:36 in the morning, and the sun was hitting the water and the place was about half full and a kid two tables over was crying about a babycino. We had ordered our coffees. The waitress had walked away. I had been planning the sentence for two weeks. I said it the way I had practised it: "Mum, can I ask you something about the will, but I want to be clear before I do that I'm not asking what I get. I just want to know what you want, so we can make sure it actually happens." She looked at me over her glasses. She said, "Oh. Right. Yes. I suppose we should." The conversation that followed lasted fifty-five minutes. It saved my brothers and me, I am quite sure, an enormous amount of pain.

This is the conversation almost no Australian family has, and the silence costs more than people realise.

The taboo, and where it comes from

There is a particular cultural prohibition on talking to ageing parents about their will. It is not religious in the formal sense. It is just a kind of inherited politeness, reinforced by parents who don't want to talk about it, by adult children who don't want to seem grasping, and by a vague sense that the topic is somehow indecent.

The result is that most families navigate this period (the parents in their seventies and eighties, the children in their forties and fifties) without anyone ever asking a direct question about what the parents actually want. The will sits in a drawer or with a solicitor. The parents may or may not have updated it since 1994. The children may or may not know if there is a will at all. The assets may or may not match the document. Nobody asks. Nobody tells.

When the parent dies, the will (if it exists) is opened, and the family discovers, usually for the first time, what the parent's instructions were. Sometimes the instructions are clear. Often they are not. Often they reflect a family configuration from twenty years ago. Often they create a fight that nobody intended and that the parent, if they were still alive, would be horrified to watch.

The taboo is not free. It just defers the cost.

What happens without a will

If your parent dies without a will (intestate), the law of the state in which they died distributes the estate according to a statutory formula. The formula varies by state but follows roughly the same pattern in Australia: spouse first, then children, then parents, then siblings, then more remote relatives. If there is no spouse and there are children, the children share equally. If there is a spouse and children, in most states the spouse takes a "statutory legacy" plus household effects plus a share, and the children take the rest.

This sounds tidy until you look at three common situations. First, blended families, where the deceased had a second spouse and children from a first marriage; the statutory formula often produces results none of the parties would have chosen. Second, estates where the bulk of the value is in the family home, jointly owned; the home passes outside the will entirely (by survivorship), and the will-based assets may be much smaller than the family expects. Third, families where one child has been the carer for years; intestacy gives them no recognition, no extra share, nothing for the time they put in.

Without a will, the family fights are predictable. They are not always loud, but they are almost always present. The lawyers get paid. The siblings stop speaking. The grandchildren grow up not knowing each other.

A will is, in this sense, the last gift a parent can give to their children: a clear set of instructions that takes the decisions out of the children's hands.

The "not about the money" reframe

The reason most adult children don't have this conversation is that they think, or fear their parents will think, that the conversation is about money. About what the children get.

It almost never is. In my experience, in the dozen or so families I have watched go through this, the conversation is about wishes. The wedding ring goes to the granddaughter who admired it at Christmas. The fishing rod goes to the son who used to go to the pier with Dad on Saturdays. The painting in the hallway, the one Mum bought in Italy in 1972, goes to whichever child remembers the trip most fondly. These are not financial assets. They are story assets. The will is the instrument that records the stories.

The reframe that worked for me, and that I have given to several friends since, is the one I used at the cafe: "I want to know what you want, not what I get." It does several things at once. It signals that the asking is not greedy. It positions the conversation as one of service to the parent's wishes rather than negotiation about inheritance. It opens the door to the parent saying, in their own voice, the things they want said.

Most parents, when they realise the conversation is being held in those terms, are relieved. They have been thinking about these things for years. They have wanted to talk about them for years. They have not had a child willing to ask without a financial subtext. The first time someone asks, the conversation often comes out almost ready-made, with the answers already half-formed in the parent's head.

How to actually start

Pick a quiet setting that is not their house. The cafe works. A bushwalk works. The drive home from a doctor's appointment works. Avoid the family kitchen, which is loaded with too many memories and too many ghosts and where the conversation can be interrupted by anything (the phone, a neighbour, the kettle). Get them out of the house and onto neutral ground.

Open with the reframe. "I'm not asking what I get. I'm asking what you want." Repeat it once or twice in the first ten minutes. The parent's anxiety will subside roughly in proportion to how often they hear that sentence.

Have a list of questions ready. Not a long list. Five or six is enough for one sitting. The questions I used:

• Do you have a current will, and where is it kept, and who is the solicitor (or executor) if there is one
• Are there specific items (jewellery, furniture, paintings, the watch from your father) that you'd like to go to specific people
• What do you want to happen to the house, given that we're a family of [n] children and the house is the largest asset
• Do you have any preferences about your funeral or memorial that the will doesn't cover but that we'd want to know
• Is there anyone outside the immediate family (a niece, a long-term friend, a charity, the church) you'd like the estate to remember
• Are there any conversations between the children that you'd like to leave instructions about, even informal ones, so we don't have to guess

Take notes, openly. Use a notebook, not a phone, because phones look transactional and notebooks look respectful. Tell them you are taking notes. Show them the notes at the end. Offer to type them up and send a copy.

End the conversation when you have what you came for, even if there's an awkward gap. Do not stretch. Forty-five minutes of useful talk, followed by a coffee top-up and a chat about something else, is a successful Sunday morning.

The 60-minute coffee that prevents 5 years of fighting

The single most important fact about this conversation is the RATIO. Sixty minutes of awkward but well-intentioned talk, conducted while the parent is still well and capable, can prevent years of post-death fighting between siblings about what Mum or Dad would have wanted.

I have seen the alternative up close, twice, in friends' families. In both cases, no will conversation was had. In both cases, the parent died with a will that was either out of date or unclear. In both cases, the family fought (politely at first, less politely later) for between three and five years over assets that, in dollar terms, were not enormous. In both cases, the relationships between the siblings were never quite the same again. The legal fees, in one case, were about $80,000. The lost relationships, in both cases, were priceless and permanent.

A clear conversation, recorded, while the parent has capacity, is among the highest-yield hours an adult son will ever spend on family work.

Three follow-on moves after the conversation

The conversation is the start, not the end. Three follow-on moves, in order:

First, send the parent a written note within a week summarising what you heard them say. Do not send it as a legal document. Send it as a letter that begins "Mum, here's what I heard, please correct anything I got wrong." Give them the chance to amend. Most parents will amend something, often something minor, and the process of amending strengthens the document.

Second, encourage them to make or update the will with a solicitor, not a will-kit, and not a DIY template. Will-kits are fine for very simple estates and a disaster for anything with a house, a super fund, a blended family, or a small business. A solicitor's will costs between $400 and $1,500 in 2026. It is one of the most cost-effective hours of legal work an Australian family will ever pay for.

Third, make sure other assets that pass outside the will are aligned with the will's intent. Superannuation is the big one. Super does not, by default, pass through the estate. It passes via a binding death benefit nomination to a nominated beneficiary, and if there is no nomination, the trustee decides. Life insurance is similar. Joint property passes by survivorship. The will can be perfectly clear and the actual outcome can still differ wildly from the parent's intent if these other instruments are not aligned.

When the parent refuses

Not every conversation succeeds on the first try. Some parents will refuse, change the subject, or get visibly upset.

The right move, when this happens, is to back off, not push. Drop the topic for a week or a month. Try again later, at a different time, in a different setting, using a slightly different framing. Sometimes the right framing is health-led ("I went to my own solicitor last week to update my will, and it made me think about asking you whether yours is current"). Sometimes the right framing is sibling-led ("Brian and I were talking and we want to make sure we're on the same page about your wishes"). Sometimes the right framing is event-led, after a friend of theirs has died and the topic is naturally in the air.

The conversation almost always happens on the second or third attempt if it doesn't happen on the first. The patience is the part that ages well.

The aphorism I'll close on

Sixty minutes of awkward beats five years of broken. Ask early. Ask kindly. Ask once.