When someone has an illness that has taken them to the end of their life, it is the most difficult for families. People feel like they don't wanna give up, so they do absolutely everything, and sometimes the best thing is don't do something, stand there. Because a lot of the medical intervention we do in the last six weeks of life is not only useless, it's abusive. And so what we need to do on the front end, again, is to have that person tell us not how they wanna die, but the conditions under which they would think it's still worth living, and this is a power of attorney for healthcare.

It says, "If I can't communicate with you..." It's not just speaking. If you can blink or tap or anything that lets me know you understand what I'm asking you, then you are in charge. But if I cannot communicate, this is the person I want you to talk to, because I trust that person to walk the way I would walk, not the way they wanna walk, but the way I would want my life to go. And it gives you some spaces where you can tell them the kinds of things you would want. There's a new reform called POLST, it's P-O-L-S-T, that is even more specific. What would you want, and how long do you wanna try that for?

You know, it's, it's very important to be as clear as you can. Now, when should you do a power of attorney, a living will, or a POLST? And these are called advance directives, 'cause you direct everybody in advance what you would wanna do at the time. You have to do these documents when the state you live in thinks you're grown, because after that, nobody is legally able to make decisions for you unless they have one of these forms or they have a guardianship.

A marriage license is not a power of attorney. Next of kin is a courtesy, it is not legal. So if your spouse makes a decision and anybody else in your family seriously doesn't like it, they could be in court, and then you've gotta wait while you're getting decisions made, maybe suffer longer. So you wanna do these documents up front. I gave my kids their power of attorney forms with their 18th birthday cards, because in the state of Illinois, that's when people think they're grown. Having this up front makes the actual circumstance much better, because there's so much emotion and family dynamics that come together when somebody's about to make their transition.

And families can destroy the foundation that their loved one created because of fighting around the time that person passes. So what the advance directive does is it allows you to hold up this paper and say, "This is what Mama told me to do." And then they cannot legally accost you unless they can prove you're not doing what she said. It doesn't matter whether it's your nosy older brother or your baby sister who's It doesn't matter, because Mama has taken the responsibility to take that off your shoulders, and it is a responsibility. This is something we need to do, not just for ourselves, but for our families, to keep from breaking the family, you know, to make sure that they still have Thanksgiving next year, which is, you were Big Mama, that's what you wanted done.

They won't do that if they've got to fight over your death.

So it's important to take the responsibility to do it up front, and I think holidays are the best time to do that. You're sitting around the Thanksgiving table, and you just pass the forms out, and it's like, "This is a rite of adult passage. This is what our family does, like registering to vote. You know, this is what it means to be an adult." And if you do it that way for everybody, then the older people don't think you're trying to kill them, and the younger people don't think you're trying to make them old. This is just something our family does. It's a value. We love each other, and we are not gonna fight over this, so I'm gonna take the responsibility to tell you what I want you to do, and then there's not a fight.

They're in so much pain 'cause they're losing you. They don't need to be in pain and lose themselves or each other.