I'm participating with many other bloggers in a blog rally for Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes. At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions, often shown as a single Powerpoint slide, designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.
Engage with Grace targets a time of year when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations -- our closest friends and family. To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, this year's Engage With Grace conversation might open with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:
Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this -- just five questions in plain, simple language -- can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.
So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.
To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post is based on text written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here.
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5 comments:
Ugh Ugh Ugh.
I don't WANT to.
WaaaaaaaahhhHH!
Excellent advice, once again.
Have they considered taking it a step further and addressing things like "Have you written a legal will?", "Does your spouse know where this and other important documents such as insurance policies are filed?", "Have you made decisions regarding your children if you should both die together?", "Do you or your spouse know how long they and/or your children will be covered by your benefits following your death (if applicable)?", "Have you considered other insurance policies beyond life insurance to ensure that your family is taken care of (such as mortgage coverage)?"
I'm sure the list could go on, but these are just some of the things widow/ers are faced with in the hours and days following the death. And even though no one wants to think in those terms, I think it would help people with terminally ill spouses to be prepared if/when that time comes.
Thanks for all you are doing to help widow/ers and caregivers alike, Supa.
Rob and I did this within the first six months of getting married. It's not particularly uplifting but it's a whole lot nicer than having the worst happen and being the one to figure out everything all by yourself (been there, people, and it's a whole lot of suckage).
After my first husband died, I nagged my parents to get living wills and have POA's. They only did it to get me to shut up, but they did it.
This kind of stuff should be taught in schools.
Alicia, I know, I don't want to either! But this pushes me to finally do it. Plus some of the legals, as 3SF mentions.
3SF, I think their idea is that it's much easier to do the legalities if you have opened the conversation, and that is the hardest part. In my experience, too, that was the heaviest part: at least in terms of Advance Health Care Directives, which while they are sometimes binding, don't really offer much more specific detail than the Five Questions do. So, sometimes easy is best. I see this project as a spark for me!
Annie, Bless your soul. I tell other people it's important, but I haven't done it either. I absolutely think it should be part of basic schooling, if not premarital counseling. I mean, even religions don't really push this type of thing!
Thanks, all, have a thankful (or at least bearable) holiday!
X
Supa
YES!
As unpleasant as it is.. it's necessary. That's definitely come to the forefront for many recently but, I remember as a teenager urging my parents to do that and now, as a 31 year old mom of two.. knowing how necessary it is.
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