“My family knows what I’d want.”
That sentence, or a version of it, gets said with great confidence. It’s the reason the folder never gets started. If the people who love you already know, the paperwork is a formality, and formalities can wait.
Except that the National Institute on Aging cites a study in which people asked to predict a loved one’s end-of-life decisions got nearly one in three of them wrong.
And these are not strangers. They are husbands, wives, daughters, the people who had been in the room for forty years.
They weren’t careless. They were guessing, because a guess is all you have when the words were never said out loud — and under pressure, in a corridor, at two in the morning, people guess with their own fears rather than yours.
What I found out after writing about that book
Last Friday I wrote about Keep Sharp, and about how its most useful section is the one on what happens after a diagnosis — including the flat instruction to get the legal and financial arrangements do…