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?

Would You Stay With This Person If They Were Disabled?

“A disability is not inability.” Unknown

It is hard when you are young to imagine what it is like to grow old. When we envision the future, it is not us trying to get around with a walker or needing care to meet our bodily functions. We may vow to grow old together with visions of being the active seniors featured in ads for senior living facilities and not for extended care homes that have round-the-clock nursing care.

We marry a young healthy partner with the knowledge we will both age, but may not have the commitment to handle whatever the world throws at us. I have been witness to marriages where one partner suffers a medical incident that challenges the commitment to through sickness and health. In my youth, I met a man in his thirties that was in an extended care facility. He had come there after suffering brain damage in a fight. He was always very calm and polite, but mainly just sat and smoked cigarette after cigarette, never participating in any activity. His wife had divorced him following his injury. I can’t speak to if they had a good relationship prior to this incident, but it saddened me that it seemed he was just dumped in this place. But what would I have done in her place?

Medical science has increased our lifespan and, as such, we are far more likely to have one or both partners suffering from something that leaves us with less than our full capacity. Given this, at some point in their lives, many couples will face this question. In most situations where this comes up, the couples are elderly and have been together for many years. In these cases, the marriages often survive, though it may look very different – perhaps with one partner at home and the other in a care facility. Studies confirm that if an injury or chronic illness happens when the couple is young, the marriage is more likely to fail.

The word disability covers a wide span of circumstances. Steven Hawking is wheelchair-bound, but a genius that contributes much to the world. Some disabled people have no more than deafness. Some are just missing one limb. Others are in a persistent vegetative state. What disabilities would too much for you to handle? Could you attend to bodily care like wiping your partner after toilet use?

While it may seem gruesome to delve into disease and death, it is this very person you are committing to that will likely have to make important decisions should anything happen. You might even want to put your wishes on paper. Terri Schiavo certainly didn’t marry thinking about the vegetative state she would be in six years later at age twenty-six. Terri’s husband and parents spent the next fifteen years in a legal battle to determine her fate.

The chances of something awful happening when you are young are small. Often, when something happens, it is more treatable and temporary. Marriages survive all manner of crises with the right mindset and commitment. “Some people said their partners were instrumental in their recovery, which they acknowledged could be difficult. People often depended on partners for emotional support and sometimes for physical care, and some needed them to be supportive and to give them hope throughout their recovery,” says Healthtalk.org. We continually grow and change in our relationships and they often don’t look like what we once dreamed. They say you need to fall in love over and over again with the same person. Healthtalk.org went on to report, “People sometimes felt their partners needed to grieve for the person they’d lost and accept that things were different now.”

No one knows until they find themselves in this place and even then, might be tortured over the choice. The statistics tell us that should someone develop a disease or severe injury happens during their marriage, the likelihood of divorce increases. Economists postulate it is due to the loss of future income, but I feel it can go so much deeper than that. Pondering this question might have you looking hard at the reasons you want to marry in the first place. Depending on the disability, it isn’t just income you are losing. It can be someone to help with household chores, it can be someone costing you money in terms of medical supplies and nursing costs, it could be a loss of a sex life. Would having a partner that needs extra care and attention cause you to not get out of marriage what you are after?

We can’t know for sure what the future holds, we could get hit by a drunk driver walking into work tomorrow and be paralyzed. What we can do is look at the family to see if there are illnesses like Alzheimer’s or Huntington Chorea that have a genetic component. When you are finding out your partner’s medical history, you are also looking out for your children and future generations.

Let’s be honest... Our vows say: for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, but most people aren’t interested in the worse or the sickness. That is why the divorce rate is so high.