How would you Cope?
Dominic Thomas
Feb 2026 • 3 min read
How would you Cope?
Amour
It’s the award season for films and one previous winner is the French film Amour (2012). It’s beautiful but a really tough watch about a topic that many of us will experience.
George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are a retired couple, they have been married for decades and are enjoying their retirement in Paris. Anne used to teach piano and has helped launch several professional careers.
Life changes dramatically for them when Anne has a stroke and the couple navigate all it entails. This is a brutally frank depiction of living with a degenerative condition. They experience a mixture of responses and support and have some firm views of their own.
The sudden upheaval shifts their focus from the finer things of life to the basic tasks of surviving as comfortably as possible. Fortunately they have ample financial and emotional resources to weather the initial challenges and are able to look back appreciatively on their long life together.
When we create your financial plan, we emphasise the importance of living on your own terms and having those experiences that you can whilst you are fit and healthy enough to do so. When we have a decent level of health we take these things for granted, often ignoring the warnings from health experts and our good fortune.
None of us know how long we will live, but it’s also the case that we don’t know how long we can live with good enough health. The ONS data for 2024 showed that in England 531,953 people died, the bulk of them (69%) were over 75 as you might expect, but 26% were 50-74 (yes, so 5% were under 50). The data doesn’t tell us how unwell they were or for how long; we do know most causes of death but not the duration of the decline. Strokes account for nearly 10% of deaths each year.
You may be reading this and thinking – come on Dominic, could you be a bit more cheery and less pessimistic. In truth, I doubt the data will really encourage anyone to make the most of this short time on earth, what may be encouraging is the confidence you can take from a well-crafted financial plan, based around your values and hopes about the future.
It’s the ‘living with regret’ that I think most people struggle with, realising a little too late that they had other choices. Your plan can be a bit like a sliding doors moment, a what if …
Let’s ensure that you live your life on your own terms as far as possible, and whilst we are at it, let’s tell everyone that this is the real purpose of a decent financial planner, not simply to find a better ISA or pension. Those are the tools not the purpose.
It makes a lot of sense to also talk through the difficult issues of personal crisis and life changing health issues.
The charity The Stroke Association report that on average around 400 people a day in the UK have a stroke. That’s about 1 every 3 minutes.
Here is the trailer for Amour which took best film in a foreign language at the Oscars and BAFTAs in 2013. This may be a good way to prompt some discussion about the subject and how we might think about it together in relation to your plan.
Click here to tell a friend about the power of a proper financial plan.
References:
What is the data for Stroke in the UK?
