Join us for a conversation with author Virginia (Gigi) Morris, who has been studying and writing about end-of-life decision making for more than 25 years.
While it’s important for people to prepare for future health issues by signing a living will, naming a health care agent, and discussing one's wishes, these steps are just the beginning.
Our health care agents — the people we name to make medical decisions for us when we cannot speak for ourselves — are too often woefully unprepared for this task, and need to be more prepared for what is to come. When a loved one is seriously ill, the decisions are more complex and the emotions more intense than anything we expect. People who have made these decisions don’t talk about the pros and cons of surgery or dialysis, but about a paralyzing sense of fear, desperation, grief, guilt and, perhaps more than anything else, an overwhelming need to fend off death. These agents are often traumatized by this process, with perhaps a third suffering from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder for months or even years after the fact.
In this talk, Morris will discuss how to choose a health care agent, what to discuss with an agent, and — critically — what they can expect and how they can prepare an agent for the task ahead.
Virginia (Gigi) Morris is the author of How to Care for Aging Parents and Talking About Death Won't Kill You. She has been a guest on Oprah, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, Primetime, ABC World News with Diane Sawyer, Katie, The Diane Rehm Show, and a host of other national media. She testified as an expert on these issues before the US Congressional Joint Economic Committee at the invitation of Sen. Amy Klobuchar. She now serves as clinical instructor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, and an ethics consultant at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. She is currently making a series of videos to prepare people to be health care agents.