8 How Do I Prepare for My Demise?
Nick clearly hadn’t thought enough about what was coming. Nick was only partly way into it when he already felt unprepared and overwhelmed. Fortunately, Nick had a long-time friend and mentor who, seeing Nick’s struggles, stepped in to help Nick catch up. Nick’s friend took him to see an estate attorney, connected him with the local hospice chapter, and spent hours communicating with hospitals, care centers, and nursing homes. Within a couple of weeks, Nick had a clearer path and had regained his peace of mind. Nick only felt chagrined that he had dropped the ball so badly and leaned so heavily on his friend and mentor to pick it up. His friend, though, reassured Nick that he knew Nick would have promptly done the same favor. The two then looked at one another for a moment in silence, knowing that Nick would have no such opportunity, their silence ending first in a handshake and then a rare hug.
Preparation
A little preparation is generally good and wise for most things. Preparation can make the journey, whether a weekend away or a short business trip, more conducive and secure. Preparation, though, becomes essential in big, important things. Fail to prepare for your wedding or the birth of your first child, and you may have just multiplied your risks and eliminated much of your reward. Your transcendence following your earthly journey, though, is easily your most important thing of all. Preparation for your transcendence is therefore crucial to your successful journey. Fail to prepare for the end of your earthly life, and you may end up at the wrong destination while leaving a trail of tears and hardship behind. Don’t procrastinate. Prepare, and your journey won’t be tears and hardship but glory.
Faith
The single most-important preparation you can and must do for your transcendence is to seek, accept, and embrace it. You should not expect your involuntary transcendence. You don’t get raised up in your glorified body against your will. Indeed, desiring your transcendence is alone insufficient. You must seek and accept it on the terms it necessarily requires, terms that it would have every reason to demand but instead graciously offers. You cannot on your own approach the ideal that transcendence requires. Neither you nor anyone else is good, pure, holy, righteous, or otherwise perfect and ideal enough to do so. You, and everyone else seeking eternal glory, have access to it only through the perfect one himself whose exact representation fully instantiated him and poured himself out over your imperfection, if you will accept him. Embrace the ideal one’s instantiation sacrificed and risen for your own resurrection. Do so publicly, genuinely, and with your deepest possible appreciation, and his grace and glory will be yours forever. Your preparation requires embracing him.
Medical
Medical issues are likely to complicate your passage. Some of us pass on without warning, disease, decline, or disability, and thus without the need for medical care. Most of us, though, don’t. Modern medicine has means of diagnosing disease, even when we don’t see or feel it, and even when it produces no disability. If you wish to prolong your life through disease, whether that disease is manifest or hidden, and disabling or not, you may require or benefit from medical care. Make arrangements in advance for your medical insurance coverage, addressed in a later chapter. Choose your healthcare providers, and keep up with appointments and otherwise cooperate with their terms and conditions, so that you continue to have their care. As far as you are able, monitor, track, and address your health and medical needs. Unless you must do so or they prefer to support you and be involved, don’t leave it to family members to identify, choose, and communicate with your healthcare providers, leaving them responsible as go-betweens. Your medical care should be your concern for as long as you are able, if you wish to be prepared.
Directive
Preparing for your journey to transcendence may also require or recommend that you put in place an advance medical directive. Families can struggle deeply when their loved one facing terminal illness has not expressed any preferences over medical intervention. Medicine may be able to prolong life without meaningful personal capacity, while invading privacy and diminishing the patient. Whether and how to medically prolong life, under what conditions, can be a difficult decision for family members to make and bear. You can reduce that burden by designating a trusted family member and informing them of your wishes well in advance. See more discussion around this issue in the later chapter on your healthcare.
Care
Preparing for your journey to transcendence may also require or recommend that you make arrangements or cooperate in arrangements for your physical care. If you know that the course of your decline will leave you incapable of your own basic care, then work with nursing care managers to determine what your needs may be, when and for how long you may need nursing or attendant care, and by what arrangement or in what location or facility you would best receive that care. You will likely have attorneys, social workers, facility administrators, and other professionals available to you to inform, guide, and assist you in evaluating the appropriate care, qualifying for insurance or program assistance to pay for it, and ensuring that you have access to it when needed. Make those arrangements while you are still able. Enlist the support you need from your spouse, adult children, or other confidantes to provide in advance for the care that you expect to need. Those steps may do more than anything to help you navigate your journey without distress.
Comfort
Preparing for your comfort and consolation in the course of your demise can also be possible and warranted. Your community’s hospice chapter or similar service commits itself to easing pain for the terminally ill, keeping them in their homes or communities and among family members, and affirming their transcendence. Hospice intervention can help medical care providers understand your wishes to avoid unnecessary pain while remaining as much in your home or other preferred setting and as close as possible to your family members. Don’t ignore your need and desire for comfort and consolation. Seek hospice support, or cooperate with your family members who offer to do so on your behalf. Allow your family members and the professionals whom they recruit to plan for your comfort.
Housing
Also consider your changing housing needs as you prepare for the course of your decline. You may need or prefer to leave to your surviving spouse or other relatives the disposition of your home. Your demise may either be too swift or too slow to concern yourself with actually selling your home to move into other, more-suitable housing. On the other hand, you may need or wish to move nearer your adult child or children for their care, or nearer to medical or other care providers, into interim housing. If so, make and execute those plans promptly and diligently, or enlist family members and professionals to help you do so. See the later chapter on that subject of your housing through your decline. Alternatively, you may in your physical or mental decline need or wish to modify your home. For instance, you may need or prefer to move your bedroom to the main floor, to build handicap-access ramps, or to install lifts, railings, or other assistive devices. Get professional help evaluating home modifications for your care needs. Doing so may enable you to remain comfortably in your home through the remainder of your journey.
Facility
If, instead, you know that your care will require your move at some point to an assisted-living center, nursing home, or similar facility, then get the nursing life care manager, social worker, or other administrative help you need to schedule, qualify for, and accomplish that move. One of the hardest challenges that some swiftly or slowing declining individuals can face are the frequent moves they may have to make from facility to facility because they failed to adequately plan for their needs. Waiting lists to get into preferred facilities can be long. If you don’t plan and prepare, you may find yourself in temporary facilities that are not conducive for your care and comfort. Even if you are unable to make your own plans, your willingness to request that your spouse, adult child, or other closest caretaker do so for you may be all you need to put yourself and your family members in a better place with respect to your facility care. Your family members want you in the best place, too. Ask them to help you get there when you need it.
Estate
Executing your estate plan is another big step you can take to prepare for your transcendence and to leave your family members in the best possible circumstances. Your estate plan directs the disposition of your property and interests following your demise. With no estate plan, your family members must designate your estate representative to distribute your property according to state intestacy laws, through a probate court proceeding. With no estate plan, you can fail to honor and support the family members, friends, charities, and others whom you would have wished to designate. With no estate plan, you may also delay the distribution of your property and increase distribution costs. When you put an estate plan in place, you can assure your family that you are looking out for the best interests of every member, while reducing family conflict and speeding probate resolution and relief. See the following chapter on your estate plan. Act now on your estate plan to ensure your peace of mind that your representative will carry out your wishes.
Trust
To prepare properly for your demise and the care of those closest to you who remain behind, you may also wish to place certain assets in trust. A trust holds your property for as long as it lasts, even into perpetuity, for the benefit of those whom you designate. You may, for instance, need to care for a mentally incompetent spouse or adult child, or for minor children. You may alternatively wish to provide for the education or other care of children, grandchildren, and other heirs. You may alternatively wish to establish or fund a charitable or land trust to benefit your community or favored cause. See the following chapter addressing this subject in greater detail.
Affairs
To prepare properly for your demise, you may also need to designate your closest family member or another trusted individual to manage your financial and legal affairs in the event of your decline and mental incompetency. Well before you are incapable, you may wish to have the help of your spouse, adult child, or another trusted individual to handle your financial and legal affairs. You may need or wish to focus on other things over the last leg of your transcendent journey. In that event, you may execute powers of attorney to authorize others to act for you. But if you anticipate your incompetency, you may prefer to consent to a conservatorship that will formalize the rights and obligations of your trusted individual to manage your financial and legal affairs during your life, before your transcendence. Keep your legal affairs in order. Execute a power of attorney or consent to a conservatorship when you see the handwriting on the wall for your decline and mental disability.
Appreciation
The above paragraphs focus on practical steps to smooth your transition from this earthly life into the transcendent beyond. But your preparation need not be entirely practical. You should also make and implement plans to reflect over your life in gratitude and appreciation. You may, for instance, wish to retrieve photo albums, old correspondence, yearbooks, and other records of your past, to remember and celebrate the challenges you overcame and relationships you had. You may wish to travel one last time to a special location, perhaps to meet a special person or accompanied by a special person. You may have a last performance or other event you’d hope to attend. You may have last paintings to paint or words to pen. Don’t plan and prepare only to navigate the practical issues that you’ll face. Include the beautiful, moving, and profound in your preparations. Indeed, give your sense of gratitude and wonder its due priority.
Reflection
How prepared do you feel for your journey into the beyond? What steps have you been planning to take that you haven’t taken yet? Are you assured of your transcendence? Consult your pastor to ensure that you have fully and genuinely embraced the faith. Do you know your probable medical needs in the course of your demise? Are you adequately insured to cover those needs? Or do you need to make an adjustment, perhaps with an independent insurance agent’s help? Have you granted your spouse, adult child, or another trusted individual an advance medical directive, informing them of your preferences for life-extending care? What attendant care do your physicians predict that you will need? Is it time that you be in touch with hospice for your end-of-life comfort and consolation? Do you need to change housing or make home modifications to accommodate your decline? Will you need assisted living, nursing-home care, or other facility care for which you can begin arrangements now? Have you executed or updated your estate plan to reflect your current interests and wishes? Do you need to form and fund a trust to provide continuing financial support for your dependents after your demise? Should you execute a power of attorney now so that your spouse, adult child, or other most-trusted individual can begin now to help manage your financial and legal affairs?
Key Points
Preparing for your demise can ease concerns and smooth your path.
Make confirming your transcendence your first and highest priority.
Arrange in advance for your medical care and treatment if possible.
Execute an advance medical directive designating a trusted caretaker.
Arrange in advance for your physical care and attendant needs.
Authorize hospice to advocate for your comfort and consolation.
Modify or change your housing to accommodate your decline.
Identify and qualify for nursing facility care in advance if possible.
Execute an estate plan reflecting your wishes for property distribution.
Form and fund a trust to provide for continuing dependent care.
Include time to reflect over your life with gratitude and appreciation.
A power of attorney or conservatorship can help manage affairs.