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Last week an adult daughter called the bereavement center very distraught. She was worried that she had made the wrong decision in withdrawing life support from her mother. I killed her… I killed her she repeated.

After expressing my condolences, I asked about her mother …her likes… dislikes… what kind of person she was…what kind of mom she was. After the woman was settled I asked if she and her mother had talked about what her mom wanted at the end of life. She was very clear that her mother did not want to be hooked up to machines or to be a burden, and that she would have wanted to be remembered as the very lively woman she was. Even though she knew what her mother would have wanted, the two did not talk about advance directives. If they had, the daughter’s anguish could have been averted. She would still have her grief, but not the anguish.

National Healthcare Decision Day is April 16^th, 2011.  The day mobilizes national, state, and community organizations, healthcare providers, and others to promote awareness, completion and discussion of advance directives.

Most of us know the benefits of planning ahead and being prepared for major life transitions.  We are careful to plan for such major life events as graduations, weddings and births, but most of us tend to avoid planning for the one event that is absolutely inevitable for all of us, namely the end of our life – our death.

Advance Care Planning is a process for reflecting on, discussing and ultimately making our health care choices for the future so that we may receive the care we want as we approach the end of our life. It means knowing treatment options and values. It means talking about them with trusted individuals who will follow our wishes.

Advance Directives are the written documents that result when we complete the Advance Care Planning process. A 2005 Pew Research Center study found that, although 84 percent of those surveyed said that they support laws that let terminally ill patients make decisions about whether to be kept alive through medical treatment, only 29 percent report that they actually have completed a Living Will¹.  Even when documents are completed, they are often put in a “safe” place and forgotten rather than copied and distributed to health care providers and family members so that they are readily available when needed.

For the bereaved, Advance Directives are a gift. Knowing what your loved one wanted and abiding to that can provide comfort in a difficult time.

To help you get started:

      .                  Caring Connections at 1-800-658-8898 (Helpline)
or 1-877-658-8896 (Multilingual Line), or at http://www.caringinfo.org/

      .                  Five Wishes at 1-888-594-7437 or at http://www.agingwithdignity.org/five-wishes.php (Note: The Five Wishes document is only legal in 42 states and Ohio is NOT one of them)

      .                  Advance Care Planning booklet Courage in Conversation: A Personal Guide available from Hospice of the Western Reserve, Cleveland, OH 1-800-707-8922 or at http://www.hospicewr.org/planning/ 

     Note: Some information in this booklet is accurate for Ohio only

      .                  Your personal attorney

      .                  American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging website at http://www.abanet.org/aging/

1.         Kohut A, Keeter S, Doherty C: More Americans Discussing – and Planning – End-of-Life Treatment: Strong Public Support for Right to Die.  The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Washington, D.C., 2006.

Diane Snyder Cowan is the mother of two grown daughters and a national leader in using music in grief therapy, as well as the director of Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Bereavement Center of Hospice of the Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio.   She is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist. To learn more about Diane, visit her blog.  

Read other Diane Snyder Cowan columns here. 

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