When Planning Is a Matter of Life and Death

Barring medical marvels as yet unrevealed, we are all going to die. We try to keep ourselves and our loved ones in good health, but it’s important to be prepared for the eventuality of death.

While this is not a cheerful topic, considering these things in advance can help us manage a very difficult thing, when the time comes.

We’ve put this under “Psychology Sunday” as it pertains to processing our own mortality, and managing our own experiences and the subsequent grief that our death may invoke in our loved ones.

We’ll also be looking at some of the medical considerations around end-of-life care, though.

Organizational considerations

It’s generally considered good to make preparations in advance. Write (or update) a Will, tie up any loose ends, decide on funerary preferences, perhaps even make arrangements with pre-funding. Life insurance, something difficult to get at a good rate towards the likely end of one’s life, is better sorted out sooner rather than later, too.

Beyond bureaucracy

What’s important to you, to have done before you die? It could be a bucket list, or it could just be to finish writing that book. It could be to heal a family rift, or to tell someone how you feel.

It could be more general, less concrete: perhaps to spend more time with your family, or to engage more with a spiritual practice that’s important to you.

Perhaps you want to do what you can to offset the grief of those you’ll leave behind; to make sure there are happy memories, or to make any requests of how they might remember you.

Lest this latter seem selfish: after a loved one dies, those who are left behind are often given to wonder: what would they have wanted? If you tell them now, they’ll know, and can be comforted and reassured by that.

This could range from “bright colors at my funeral, please” to “you have my blessing to remarry if you want to” to “I will now tell you the secret recipe for my famous bouillabaisse, for you to pass down in turn”.

End-of-life care

Increasingly few people die at home.

• Sometimes it will be a matter of fighting tooth-and-nail to beat a said-to-be-terminal illness, and thus expiring in hospital after a long battle.
• Sometimes it will be a matter of gradually winding down in a nursing home, receiving medical support to the end.
• Sometimes, on the other hand, people will prefer to return home, and do so.

Whatever your preferences, planning for them in advance is sensible—especially as money may be a factor later.

Not to go too much back to bureaucracy, but you might also want to consider a Living Will, to be enacted in the case that cognitive decline means you cannot advocate for yourself later.

Laws vary from place to place, so you’ll want to discuss this with a lawyer, but to give an idea of the kinds of things to consider:

National Institute on Aging: Preparing A Living Will

Palliative care

Palliative care is a subcategory of end-of-life care, and is what occurs when no further attempts are made to extend life, and instead, the only remaining goal is to reduce suffering.

In the case of some diseases including cancer, this may mean coming off treatments that have unpleasant side-effects, and retaining—or commencing—pain-relief treatments that may, as a side-effect, shorten life.

Euthanasia

Legality of euthanasia varies from place to place, and in some times and places, palliative care itself has been considered a form of “passive euthanasia”, that is to say, not taking an active step to end life, but abstaining from a treatment that prolongs it.

Clearer forms of passive euthanasia include stopping taking a medication without which one categorically will die, or turning off a life support machine.

Active euthanasia, taking a positive action to end life, is legal in some places and the means varies, but an overdose of barbiturates is an example; one goes to sleep and does not wake up.

It’s not the only method, though; options include benzodiazepines, and opioids, amongst others:

Efficacy and safety of drugs used for assisted dying

Unspoken euthanasia

An important thing to be aware of (whatever your views on euthanasia) is the principle of double-effect… And how it comes to play in palliative care more often than most people think.

Say a person is dying of cancer. They opt for palliative care; they desist in any further cancer treatments, and take medication for the pain. Morphine is common. Morphine also shortens life.

It’s common for such a patient to have a degree of control over their own medication, however, after a certain point, they will no longer be in sufficient condition to do so.

After this point, it is very common for caregivers (be they medical professionals or family members) to give more morphine—for the purpose of reducing suffering, of course, not to kill them.

In practical terms, this often means that the patient will die quite promptly afterwards. This is one of the reasons why, after sometimes a long-drawn-out period of “this person is dying”, healthcare workers can be very accurate about “it’s going to be in the next couple of days”.

The take-away from this section is: if you would like for this to not happen to you or your loved one, you need to be aware of this practice in advance, because while it’s not the kind of thing that tends to make its way into written hospital/hospice policies, it is very widespread and normalized in the industry on a human level.

Further reading: Goods, causes and intentions: problems with applying the doctrine of double effect to palliative sedation

One last thing…

Planning around our own mortality is never a task that seems pressing, until it’s too late. We recommend doing it anyway, without putting it off, because we can never know what’s around the corner.

Dealing With Overwhelm

Whether we live a hectic life in general, or we usually casually take each day as it comes but sometimes several days gang up on us at once, everyone gets overwhelmed sometimes.

Today we’re going to look at how to deal with it healthily.

Step 1: Start anywhere

It’s easy to get stuck in “analysis paralysis” and not know how to tackle an unexpected large problem. An (unhealthy) alternative is to try to tackle everything at once, and end up doing nothing very well.

Even the most expert juggler will not successfully juggle 10 random things thrown unexpectedly at them.

So instead, just pick any part of the the mountain of to-dos, and start.

If you do want a little more finesse though, check out:

Procrastination, And How To Pay Off The To-Do List Debt

Step 2: Accept what you’re capable of

This one works both ways. It means being aware of your limitations yes, but also, of your actual abilities:

• Is the task ahead of you really beyond what you are capable of?
• Could you do it right now without hesitation if a loved one’s life depended on it?
• Could you do it, but there’s a price to pay (e.g. you can do it but it’ll wipe you out in some other life area)?

Work out what’s possible and acceptable to you, and make a decision. And remember, it could be that someone else could do it, but everyone has taken the “if you want something doing, give it to someone busy” approach. It’s flattering that people have such confidence in our competence, but it is also necessary to say “no” sometimes, or at least enlisting help.

Step 3: Listen to your body

…like a leader listening to an advisory council. Your perception of tiredness, pain, weakness, and all your emotions are simply messengers. Listen to the message! And then say “thank you for the information”, and proceed accordingly.

Sometimes that will be in the way the messengers seem to be hoping for!

Sometimes, however, maybe we (blessed with a weighty brain and not entirely a slave to our limbic system) know better, and know when it’s right to push through instead.

Similarly, that voice in your head? You get to decide where it goes and doesn’t. On which note…

Step 4: Be responsive, not reactive

We wrote previously on the difference between these:

A Bone To Pick… Up And Then Put Back Where We Found It

Measured responses will always be better than knee-jerk reactions, unless it is literally a case of a split-second making a difference. 99% of our problems in life are not so; usually the problem will still be there unchanged after a moment’s mindful consideration, so invest in that moment.

You’ve probably heard the saying “give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe”. In this case, that can be your mind. Here’s a good starting point:

No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness

And if your mental state is already worse than that, mind racing with threats (real or perceived) and doom-laden scenarios, here’s how to get out of that negative spiral first, so that you can apply the rest of this:

The Off-Button For Your Brain

Do remember to turn it on again afterwards, though

Step 5: Transcend discomfort

This is partly a callback to step 3, but it’s now coming from a place of a clear ready mind, so the territory should be looking quite different now. Nevertheless, it’s entirely possible that your clear view shows discomfort ahead.

You’re going to make a conscious decision whether or not to proceed through the discomfort (and if you’re not, then now’s the time to start calmly and measuredly looking at alternative plans; delegating, ditching, etc).

If you are going to proceed through discomfort, then it can help to frame the discomfort as simply a neutral part of the path to getting where you want. Maybe you’re going to be going way out of your comfort zone in order to deal with something, and if that’s the case, make your peace with it now, in advance.

“Certainly it hurts” / “Well, what’s the trick then?” / “The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts”

(lines from a famous scene from the 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia)

It’s ok to say to yourself (if it’s what you decide is the right thing to do) “Yep, this experience is going to suck terribly, but I’m going to do it anyway”.

See also (this being about Radical Acceptance):

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

Take care!