Disability Worksheet

1. Have you updated your will and beneficiaries on all accounts?

2. Do you have power of attorney or enduring power of attorney?

3. Who should have POA if neither of us could?

4. Who would I want to make medical decisions?

5. Do you have a medical directive or living will?

6. Who would I want my executors to be?

7. Do both of us know where important legal documents are kept?

8. If incapacitated would you want a family member or a professional to take care of you?

9. Who is an emergency contact other than your spouse?

10. Who would you want to take care of any children if you both died?

11. If you knew you were dying how would you spend your last days?

12. At the end would you like to be heavily drugged or lucid?

13. Would you want to know when you will die?

14. Do you have any existing conditions?

15. What diseases run in your family?

16. What have your close relatives died of?

17. Will we purchase life or critical illness insurance?

18. How will we handle aged parents when the time comes?

19. Would you want a memorial donation made?

20. What would you like your obituary to say?

21. Do you want a funeral and if so what should it look like?

22. Would you want to be cremated or buried?

23. Do you want to be an organ donor or have your body be donated to science?

24. Who do we want as beneficiaries, money and possessions (other than your partner)?

25. How would we cover medical or funeral expenses?

26. What treatments would you want or not want?

27. Does your religion preclude some treatments?

28. Would you consider alternative or experimental treatments?

29. Would you want to die at home?

30. Would you consider medically assisted dying?

31. Do you believe in extraordinary measures to save a life?

32. Would want to be kept alive on life on life support?

33. Scenario 1: Your spouse has been kidnapped. The kidnapper has asked for ransom that would mean selling your home, cars and emptying your retirement fund. The police advise not doing it since the perpetrator is a killer but has not kidnapped anyone before. What would you do?

34. Scenario 2: Your ninety year old father-in-law is on life support and won’t recover. Your spouse is not ready to say goodbye yet so doesn’t want to pull the plug. You have to cover the $1000/day bill and are trying to save for a house. What do you do?

35. Scenario 3: Your wife is in her first trimester and you are both excited to be having your first child. A severe traffic accident puts your wife in the hospital with unsurvivable injuries. The doctor advises she can be kept on life support until the baby is deliverable, she is however in tremendous pain. What do you do?

36. Scenario 4: You are rock climbing with your spouse when they fall. You climb down and find them extremely injured but breathing. It would be difficult due to the terrain to carry them out but to summon help would require you to leave them. Either way they won’t survive. What would you do?

37. In the above scenario you decide to stay to be with them when they pass. It is now two in the morning. You are exhausted, have built a fire, eaten the granola bars you had but your partner is still breathing but with difficulty. Would you stay, leave them or suffocate them to end what would end anyway (no one would ever know)?

38. Scenario 5: A large building collapses during a time when your spouse was running errands in the vicinity. Your spouse doesn’t come home after that but their body is not found in the rubble. Do you spend time and money putting up flyers, hiring private detectives to look at other scenarios or have them declared dead?

39. Scenario 6: Your partner is paralyzed from the neck down and sex is either impossible or unwanted by this person. How would you manage this need?

40. Scenario 7: Your spouse is injured and requires assistance while they recover (injections, wound care and bedpans). It will likely be six months to a year. They want to recover at home with your assistance only. Your boss will allow you to work from home during this time. Because of the

round the clock nature of the care you would rarely get to leave the house. How would you deal with this?

41. Scenario 8: Your spouse is an organ donor and has told you they would want their death to have meaning. They have had a brain injury and doctors aren’t hopeful. You have been approached by two doctors. One wants to use their organs to save a twelve year old and a mother of three small children. The other has an experimental treatment that is highly controversial and has only a twenty percent chance of improving brain function. What would you do?

42. Scenario 9: You have been on the transplant list for years. You have so much you want to do with your life but have been too sickly to do so. A friend of a friend says they can find you an organ on the black market. You have heard they do this by stealing from hospitals, killing people already on the transplant list or killing people for their organs. Would you do it?

43. Scenario 10: You are on a runaway train and make your way to the engine car. Your spouse is tied to the tracks up ahead. There is a switch coming up but if you take it the train will crash into and kill a crowd of school children. What do you do? Now imagine your children attend that school and may or may not be in the crowd. Does that change what you would do?