A local column by Scott Bond

For years, I have been talking with my wife about updating our wills. We knew that the first and only will that we had done together was 23 years old, drafted to ensure that our daughter would be taken care of by family. Somehow, the time was never right to make a new will; we were too busy, the cost was not in the budget, and any number of good excuses prevented us from taking action.

Over the last year our perspective changed. We are working through the process of probate for my wife’s parents and are experiencing the legal system in a way that we never thought about before. We now see how important a will and an advance directive can be, and we engaged an attorney and began the complex process of creating a living trust, advance directives, and powers of attorney. It is a difficult conversation to talk about what happens when you are no longer here or incapacitated and unable to direct your own care. Now I remember the real reason that we avoided it for so long.

At a recent meeting, I heard about a simple approach that helps us make the difficult decisions about our end-of-life care. This presentation on how to make planning decisions and others like it have been developed to help people manage these family discussions and decisions and to help ensure our personal dignity by allowing us to communicate our most personal wishes to our family and caregivers.

These programs are typically designed with help from medical and legal experts and are intended to provoke us into thinking more creatively into managing our issues.

The programs typically ask us to consider several key issues such as: Whom would you like to make your end of life decisions, including the extent of the comfort care that you would like to receive? How much medical intervention do you wish to have? Most advance directives will list several questions for you to answer in order to give your physician and your family a clear idea of how you would like to be treated medically.

Sometimes these questions, such as “how you wish to be treated,” go beyond the legal documents that my wife and I developed. We did not think to express our wishes about having warm baths, massages or what our favorite music is that we would want played for us. We did not think about our wishes for how much company we would like to have or if we wanted someone to hold our hand or talk to us during the day. Would we like to be cared for with kindness rather than sadness? Would we like to have pictures of our family close at hand?

More than the disposition of heirlooms, our personal possessions, and end-of-life medical decisions, there are questions which may ask us to express our wishes for the care of our bodies, our minds, our emotions, and our spirits.

The wishes that you express through this process, and record for yourself and your family, are a gentle guide to help you make choices that are right for you and your family. While it is not comfortable to think about or talk about, I feel good about putting myself in the position of making choices that reflect who I am and what I want in my last days.

Scott Bond is the director of Senior and Disability Services for Oregon Cascades West Council of Governments, the Area Agency on Aging for Benton, Linn, and Lincoln counties. He can be reached at 541-812-6008 or by e-mail at sbond@ocwcog.org.