I was listening to a podcast, and they were talking about emergency contacts. Never would it have occurred to me at this stage to have anyone other than my dh. But one person had a bff over her dh.
That got me thinking about who I would make secondary emergency contact. Neither of my kids picks up the phone, and they aren’t in town. Neither of my siblings is good in a crisis. They are many years older, and they would alarm my kids and they aren’t in town either. I suppose that one of my in-town bffs would be a good choice?
Ds2 is executor of our wills, and he’s on some financial things, but if dh and I were incapacitated together I fear it would be days before he listened to msgs! lol That’s fine with financial matters, but if I need someone to make medical decisions I don’t want to wait days!
There are forms where your emergency contact needs to be someone other than your spouse
For years and years, it was my mother in law. She picks up her phone.
For our most recent trip where I had to have an emergency contact, I had our daughter who would pick up the phone after they left a message. My husband, it was his mom.
My iPhone doesn’t even ring anymore for calls not in my contact list. It makes a person identify themselves and then the phone will ring. That seems new. I was waiting for a delivery, figured out this was the process
My ex sil is notorious for never answering her phone.
Her son, my nephew was telling a story about trying to get ahold of his mom. He finally called his dad (they were still married) who answered and handed his phone to his wife who was standing next to him.
It was asked, who is your emergency contact? Grandma of course, she answers her phone. Family lore!
My emergency contact is H but he’s unreliable about answering his phone. My kids are 3-5,000 miles away and may or may not answer but do check text messages. My sibs are always traveling. Hmmm, maybe I should choose a niece or nephew.
When the kids were little, my secondary emergency contact (after DH) was a good friend who could pick them up if necessary.
Lately, we’ve had our oldest as the go-to, but he’s travelling so much for work that we’ve just put the middle kid as the contact. Which reminds me I need to tell her!
And youngest, who lives nearby, is the de facto contact, the one who picks up the mail and makes sure the house isn’t on fire when we’re away.
We were taking about this regarding my mil. She’s 90 so this is not applicable to you.
She was thinking of discontinuing mobile meals. Thankfully the person doing her assessment talked her out of discontinuing. One reason is someone checks in every week day.
She also has her local son who drops off his dog and a good neighbor.
My H is my primary but when we are traveling together it’s our D. I also have two neighbors who are our local contacts if something happens to the house or the dog when we are traveling.
My MIL was my back up to H for years until she got Alzheimer’s. By then older S was 18 so he was my backup. Still is though sometimes I can list more and put both kids. I figure between the 3 of them, someone will get the message
My iphone ICE (In Case of Emergency) in Health app are set to 1) Husband 2) local-ish kid 3) long distance kid 4) long distance sister, who would always answer if call/text were invoked from my number
I have H has my primary ICE but he doesn’t always hear/answer/see messages. I had wanted our kids to be secondary but they are often 3000-5000+ miles away. Today, I asked niece if she could be my emergency contact, as she lives near our home and is at least in same island and city. She said she would. I said in the decades I was emergency contact for my nephew, I was never called. Similarly, in the years our kids listed my good friend in LA as their emergency contact (she could get there and help sooner than we could from 3000 miles away), she fortunately was never called.
My daughter lives 90 minutes away but we are not in regular contact. I list her and her husband who always responds to my texts, plus two friends in Brooklyn and Manhattan. (No husband ever, and my only living sibling is not reliable.)
Every now and then when my DH and I have to each fill out an emergency contact, sometimes one of us will put son number one and the other will put son number two, hoping that one of the two of them would answer their phone! I had a bit of an awkward situation, not terribly long ago. A friend who has two grown daughters asked if she could list me instead of them as their emergency contact. I asked if there was a reason since typically one lists their immediate family (her daughters or sisters) as an emergency contact. She said that her daughters were unreliable and irresponsible and she didn’t want to use them. Well, that would’ve been a bit of a predicament for us as (A) we are traveling a lot in the next six months and not going to be available and (B) if her daughters are unreliable, what are we supposed to do if we are contacted to try to deal with some emergency?
I think the only time I was called as the contact for my mother was after she had died. Her eye doctor was trying to confirm an appointment that she’d probably made the year before and they couldn’t reach her (duh) and called me. I had tried to cancel all appointments when she died but that one wasn’t on her calendar.
I list my sister at doctor’s offices. She also has my POAs for medical decisions. My D1 is listed on bank accounts and both are listed as beneficiaries on investment accounts but I doubt they have their phone numbers so it would take a while to get things to them. We don’t have an usual last name but not terribly common, so I think in an emergency they’d try to contact one of the listings for that name and ask. There is another family with a number of kid who had the same names as us (the Irish aren’t terribly creative with names). If they reached one of them, I’m sure the response would be “Oh, try the other ‘Mary Smith’” (although with cell phones, it would be more difficult; one of my brother’s owns a business so his numbers are published).
