5. Planning for Life and Preparing for End of Life
Topic 1 of 6
Planning
Planning ahead will help your loved ones to maintain choice and control. This requires conversations with your elders about their thoughts and wishes, their hopes and fears. There will be many conversations about difficult topics.
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We often put off conversations about emotional topics like wills, end-of-life care plans, and funerals to avoid conflict or sadness. There’s also a lot of fear in talking about death and dying. This is completely understandable.
Some elders might also fear that just having these conversations will take control out of their hands and cause them to lose their independence.
We need to reassure our elders that having these conversations and putting the necessary legal and financial documents in place will actually give them more control over their lives, not less, provided they have reputable legal and financial experts helping them. These experts should specialise in wills, estate planning, powers of attorney, and guardianships.
Importantly, your elder needs their own solicitor. This solicitor should not be yours because, sadly, some people do take advantage of their elder’s trust.
Talk to your elder about how they want to manage their financial, lifestyle, and medical decisions, both now and in the future. This should include whom they want to help them if they reach a point where they no longer want to manage these matters themselves or lose the capacity to do so.
This module will also give you essential information about the word “capacity”: what capacity means, how it is evaluated, and how important it is to understand the way capacity affects all legal and financial decisions.
Handling tough conversations
Conversations about life and death can be challenging for us all. But conversations, discussions, chats are essential in caring for our elders. These chats help to manage getting on. They are the start of making plans.
Planning is essential in a crisis or a gradual unravelling to make the best of all situations. Our elders set the agenda. You need to know what needs to be discussed, to be patient, to listen, to take notes, to always have your elder at the centre of these conversations and to be prepared to have many conversations about the same topic. These conversations should not feel like an ambush or an intervention. Never ever let your elders feel like they are a burden, an embarrassment, or helpless.
The emphasis should be on ensuring they have control over decisions and a plan in place in case they are unable or unwilling to make decisions themselves.
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You don’t have to approach conversations about advance care directives or enduring powers of attorney armed with all the facts, your notebook, the documents or a solicitor. It might be more helpful for you and your elder to approach this at the same speed and at the same time.
Doing this together, learning about it together, is an empathetic and constructive way to make this a normal process.
Maybe it could be a subject that comes up when you’re watching something together on TV. TV dramas are a good conversation starter. Or it could come up while you’re discussing a friend’s situation, or it could be introduced when you say you’re going to do it for yourself.
Whatever the context, the underlying message is to keep important decisions in the hands of those who should make them: your elders.
Module 5
Resources
MODULE 5
