Photo courtesy of myself.
So your parent has come to you with bad news: the great grocer in the sky has put her on the bargain shelf of life with a fast approaching expiration date. Furthermore, something called “hospice” is going to be a part of your lives until after said expiration.
In the words of Merriam-Webster, ‘hospice’ is, “a facility or program designed to provide a caring environment for meeting the physical and emotional needs of the terminally ill.” It is also, “a lodging for travelers, young persons, or the underprivileged especially when maintained by a religious order,” but we’ll be dealing with the former definition in this context.
Depending on your area, insurance, etc., you may or may not have multiple options in choosing a hospice provider. That said, how you get to your first face to face meeting with a hospice representative will vary. With my father, it was a simple matter of scheduling a meeting time over the phone. But don’t be afraid to shop around if you can.
Now the hospice representative that comes to your house the first time is a lot like a professional match maker. Just like a match maker, the hospice representative wants to find out your likes and dislikes, your life situation, what’s important to you, and of course who will be a good fit for you. Only instead of in romance, it’s in palliative care. And of course both hope to find matches that last the rest of their clients’ lives.
My Dad’s match maker was a nurse who worked as an administrative head. Which made sense, as there was paperwork to sign and a physical examination to be done, so a quick kudos to the company making that money saving connection. The meeting consisted of somewhat strained small talk – go figure – a description of the services offered, contractual paperwork, and documents regarding “end of life” or “life sustaining” choices.
If you’re one of the precious readers who have been with us since the beginning, and/or have already had this first meeting, you can gleam how the small talk went – “How are you doing today?” “Oh you know, just waiting around to die. You?” And so on and so awkward. In regards to the services offered, we’ll be going into those in subsequent posts, and contractual paperwork is fairly straightforward, so today let’s discuss by far the most uncomfortable moments of the meeting: filling out How You Want to Die forms. Woo!
As you may have guessed, that’s not technically what they’re called. Official document titles vary state to state, but odds are good something like “end of life” or “life sustaining” will be in the name somewhere. I find my own wording to be most apt though, given the forms are all about what you would like and not like to go down when you’re in the middle of checking out of the hotel of life. Maybe you don’t want the bag boy to carry down all your luggage, maybe you’d like to have a feeding tube, the simple truth is the bag boy and your significant others won’t know if you haven’t told them.
This, it seems, is an extremely sensitive subject to broach, for the match maker was the epitome of politeness and compassion when she brought the forms out of her nifty Welcome to something something Hospice Care folder. I say “apparently” because I was fortunate enough to have a father who had long decided his choices and had not been shy about expressing them to me after my mother checked out early. For other families, however, this topic may not have come up in earlier conversations.
Have you seen those commercials for final expenses insurance policies and the like? Where evidently someone has died unexpectedly and the family was left in the lurch to cover funeral expenses? Well as corny as those commercials are, they bring up a good point: families don’t always talk about death enough.
Pro Tip #18: Ask your parents/significant other/siblings what their wishes are.
That not being the case with my father, and given his cut and dry nature, he and I quickly started going through the forms. It is important to note your parent’s match maker may or may not have you keep the forms overnight, to make sure your parent has had enough time to decide on whether he would prefer the morphine tartare or the salmon.
Regardless of how they get filled out, what matters is that they are. And ideally, that parents didn’t wait until hospice came to have these documents squared away, because we all know we don’t all go with advanced warning. Along that vein, it is just as important to have the forms in an easily accessible place. Because no one wants to be arguing with their aunt Marna about what their dad’s check out preferences were while she’s finding a red eye flight out from back east and you’re riffling through legal papers hoping he had them written down somewhere at three in the morning.
Pro Tip #19: Have your parents/significant other/siblings/self get the wishes in writing. Save people a boat load of time and hassle.
Once all that stuff and the physical exam is done, the match maker now has a pretty solid idea of your parent’s needs and wants, and which services your family will be using. All that’s left to do is wait and see what the match maker comes up with for your parent.
Next time on Progeny of the Dead and Dying: Goldi-Dad and the three nurses.
Progeny of the Dead and Dying 