“Sean, your Dad has Covid”
The text was sent to me on November 22nd, 2020 by my mother in Columbus, Ohio. I read it anxiously while working remotely in my home in Zurich, Switzerland. My father has been a wealth manager for over 50 years and even at the age of 82 he remained healthy enough to continue serving a small group of clients. But I was realistic and understood that a Covid diagnosis at his age was frightening. My mother is also vulnerable generally having lost the use of her legs due to Multiple Sclerosis.
I will never forget the roller coaster month that followed that text. Crises can be brutal, but they can bring clarity into our lives like nothing else. Allow me to share a few insights from the experience.
“No One Can Visit Your Father“
“Mr Cochran, your father’s blood oxygen levels continue to fall despite high-flow oxygen support. He is in critical condition and we need to understand when and whether to intervene with intubation”, the doctor informed me over the phone.
My father went from a Covid diagnosis on November 22nd to an Ambulance to the intensive care unit by November 23rd where he remained in critical condition. No one can go into the Covid ward to see him directly and my routine is to make international calls to the hospital every day for updates or to give input for his treatment. Each time I seem to speak to different doctors as they are all overwhelmed and forced to rotate through various hospitals in Ohio. Our family decided to instruct that he not be intubated as we learned that the odds of coming off mechanical ventilation at his age are poor. However, this means that we risk a fatal heart attack given that his blood oxygen is so low that organs such as his heart could fail at any moment.
Occasionally I hear from my father on Skype calls which illuminate the screen of my phone at odd hours seeming to ring in from somewhere supernatural and inaccessible within the off-limits Covid ward 3,000 miles away. Some conversations with him are lucid. Many are not.
“No One Can Visit Your Mother Either”
“Mom, we are going to have to go through a few matters urgently under the circumstances”, I tell my mother over the phone. If one partner in a relationship is in the hospital with Covid it also implies that the other partner is quarantined. Every day she observed herself anxiously for symptoms which (remarkably) never came. Separately, we had to look closely at the implications of my father’s situation on her life, her residence, her finances, her independence. Financial planning and life planning over the phone under these circumstances is not easy.
A Triumphant New Year
After more than a month of this terrible routine, I received a skype video call on December 31st 2020 from my father. When I answered the video call the background was not the usual hospital bed but rather his living room! The nurses were installing oxygen support in his home and he was now sufficiently stable to attempt a (slow) recovery from his own house. He actually left the hospital to a standing ovation from the nurses and staff on New Year’s Eve.
…so what can a covid experience like this teach us?
Manage Your Risks Before They are Real
Liaising with my father’s employer, HR department, health insurer, and disability income insurer was not fun. But imagine if these protections weren’t there (and for many they are not). Audit your insurance protections to better understand your vulnerabilities. My father is still employed at age 82, so he is not in the “early retirement” camp but many of you reading this may aspire to be. For those of you on the road to financial independence, do not take for granted the protections that come with corporate employment when you make your calculations. Many of you may have a “number” in mind that constitutes the financial savings required to declare financial independence or perhaps to retire early. Be sure to include insurance in those calculations or to understand the risks you bear if you don’t.
Uneven Financial Awareness can be a Dangerous Liability
My father is a wealth manager and given that fact my mother has always relied on him when it comes to their financial planning. This division of awareness is fine under normal circumstances, but I can tell you that she had to learn a lot about financial planning when it first seemed that my father would not survive. Taking inventory of financial assets, financial liabilities, ownership structure, estate planning, and general income planning is not something you want to do in a hurry in the midst of emotional circumstances. Fortunately, my mother could count on others around her for financial advice in this situation and the learning curve became fast and steep. Does your partner share your understanding of your finances? And if not, who will your partner or your children turn to in a crisis? Figure this out during the calm and not during the storm.
Is Retirement Really Your Goal?
My father is in his 80’s and he has been a successful financial advisor for many years. As he emerges from this close brush with death it might seem like retirement would be a logical next step. But, believe it or not, retirement is not his preferred option at all! For my father, working with clients and remaining connected with financial markets is how he prefers to spend and structure a certain proportion of his time. Work provides a sense of purpose, relationships, and consistency which shows that the challenge of “retirement planning” is not only financial but also one of life design. If you solve for financial independence (i.e, passive income in excess of your living expenses) then you are only halfway there. How much time have you spent on considering how to structure your non-financial life (time, relationships, attention) in a more financially independent or flexible future scenario?
Covid has disrupted many of our jobs but it has also changed the face of work and accelerated many positive developments relating to financial independence and lifestyle flexibility. In recent years it became popular to seek an “escape from the cubicle” of your employer in order to seek the freedom of entrepreneurship or financial independence. But if your employer supports working more flexibly and remotely in the future and you like your colleagues then what are you seeking independence from? And have you considered whether a “retired life” (at least in the traditional sense) is really even preferable to what you might be able to achieve in the workplace that now emerges?
The idea of escaping from an oppressive corporate employer could be an outdated narrative. And the idea of sustained happiness in a hammock on the beach with nothing to occupy you is definitely a mirage. Escaping an outdated narrative to land in what is ultimately a mirage is not a recipe for well-being! Update your reflections on our new reality and on what is worth wishing for in the post-Covid environment. Intentional life design requires that you steer from where you really are (now) to where you really want to be.
What Matters Most
This is the most important lesson of all. When immersed in a true crisis your sense of what matters most becomes razor sharp. If I need to choose between efforts to save my father’s life and certain work commitments the answer is clear and swift actions follow. When faced with the urgent need to establish financial planning for my mother, I easily put down other tasks and focus on controlling the chaos.
But what about the time period just after the peak crisis fades? This is where key insights either lodge into your psyche or they fade away along with the decline of adrenaline. Do not let a good crisis go to waste once the peak subsides. This is when your newly awakened self has the potential to realize that your parents will not always be around. Your children will not always remain at this age or living in your home (or at least, let’s hope not). And when the river of time flows past these moments, they are gone. This insight is not an opinion, but rather a fact and one that we need to hold firmly and clearly in awareness. Use your heightened, post-covid awareness to do something with this insight before it expires from immediate consciousness!
I am about to take a 2-month sabbatical and I have planned it in light of the clarity that this experience has triggered. First, my immediate family will travel from our home in Switzerland to the USA to spend 2 weeks with extended family. We will all be (finally) fully vaccinated as of this week and we plan to fly out the day after my second shot. Thereafter, I will bring my parents, my wife, and my children all to Italy to spend 5 weeks together this summer in an Italian country home. During the pandemic I purchased a rental property in Piemonte, Italy (a story for another post) and I am now equipping it to handle my parents’ health requirements. In fact it will soon be the most wheelchair-accessible and oxygen-equipped house in the village!
I have not seen my parents in 2 years and very recently I thought I’d already held my last conversation with my father. Likewise, my parents have not seen their grandchildren over this 2-year period either. We will never again intersect at these ages and capturing all of us together for an attempt at a great Italian family adventure (even if complicated) is quite simply what matters most right now.
During Covid, did you discover any key insights relating to your own life planning and life design? Did you learn anything profound about what matters most for you? And as we now cautiously emerge from the shadow of COVID are you doing something with these insights?
*Thoughts expressed are personal reflections from the author not pertaining to or endorsed by any particular organization, nor does this constitute an investment or sales recommendation.