What poker can teach us about relationships
Two families, two funerals, two very different afternoons afterward. In the first, the grown children gathered around their mother’s kitchen table with her will open in the middle of it. Nothing in it surprised anyone. The house would be sold and the proceeds divided evenly; the few things with meaning attached — a ring, a set of tools, a quilt — had names beside them, talked about out loud while their mother was still alive to explain them. There were tears at that table, but no lawyers after it. In the second family, the will was a short, old document nobody had discussed, and the estate that followed took years, cost a fortune in fees, and ended with siblings who had once been close no longer speaking. I spent a long career as an attorney sitting with both kinds of families. The difference between them was rarely the size of the estate. It was whether the game had been played for keeps in time.
People imagine a will is a financial document. After decades of drafting them — and litigating the ones that failed — I will tell you what it actually is: it is the last hand a person plays at the family table, played after they have left the circle and can no longer explain a move. Every ambiguity in it will be interpreted by tired, grieving people at the worst possible moment. A will that brings a family together leaves those people nothing to guess at and nothing to fight over; one that tears a family apart is usually not wicked — just silent where it needed to speak.
The estates that scattered families had a pattern, and it was almost never simple greed. It was surprise. A child who learned only at the reading that the arrangements were nothing like what she expected. A possession with no instructions attached, carrying a childhood’s worth of meaning for two siblings at once. An old document, written for a family that no longer existed, deciding the fate of the family that did. Surprise is the spark; grief supplies the fuel. In the marbles games of my childhood, fights never started over the marbles anyone expected to lose — only over the ones nobody had agreed were in play.
The wills that brought families together had the opposite pattern, and any family can copy it. The decisions were made early, while the conversations were still easy to have. The reasoning was shared — sometimes in a letter kept with the will, sometimes across the kitchen table where the will would one day be read — so that even a child who received less understood that it was a decision and not an accident or another sibling’s maneuver. Where a division was unequal, the reason was almost always spoken aloud: the daughter who had provided years of care, the son who had already been helped with a house, the grandchild being raised in the home. Fair, in the families that survived their estates, did not always mean identical. It meant explained.
Poker players have a saying: you do not get to complain about a hand you refused to look at. In estate work, nearly every disaster I litigated began as a hand the family refused to look at while looking was cheap. The conversation about the will felt morbid, or awkward, or likely to start the very argument it was meant to prevent — so it was postponed, year after year, until the one person who could have settled every question in an afternoon was no longer there to answer any of them. The argument arrived anyway — at maximum cost, with the author beyond reach.
And this is not only about documents. What scatters a family at the end is unfinished business of every kind — the unspoken apology, the unexplained decision, the favorite child everyone suspected and nobody confirmed. What holds a family in the circle is the opposite habit: saying the thing while it can still do some good.
So here is the takeaway, in two parts, and both are this month, not someday. First, the paperwork: if you do not have a will, get one; if you have one, read it as your child will one day read it — in grief, looking for answers. Anything it leaves ambiguous, fix while fixing is a phone call. Second, the conversation: tell your children — in person, in plain words — what the broad shape of your arrangements is and why. You do not owe them an accounting. You owe them an absence of surprise. The families who gathered around the table afterward were not the ones with the most money. They were the ones whose parents played the last hand openly, while they were still in the game.