Getting Dead Set Your Way is an act of love
How preparing for Dying to Know Day (August 8th 2023) by Getting Dead Set Your Way is an act of love for those you care about.
In 2013, a group of committed individuals came together to make change around the conversation related to death and dying. Now, August 8th is Dying to Know Day and the theme this year is Get Deadset My Way.
At Exsitu, we talk a lot about the impact of individual input on care outcomes. You cannot provide someone with the correct care if you don’t know how they feel about:
· Medical decisions
· Care and how it is administered
· When treatment should end
· What matters in the day-to-day
· Their values and
· Where that values system intersects with choices and dignity
We’re worthy of so much. We should speak up for our rights and insist on being loved, respected, and cared for.
Most of us exercise boundaries every day. We do it with customer service and the boss. We help the kids figure out the contrast between gratefulness and feeling entitled. And we know how to find our voice in most situations.
Until health comes into play. Or we age. Or end-of-life comes calling.
Then, we might even dampen that advocacy down and choose a path of least resistance and follow along. Or we’re afraid to share what we need because we don’t want to be a burden, because we’ve got some silly notion, we’re taking up too much space as it is. We’re deciding that asking for support is too much.
I put it to you we need to stop thinking of it as “what am I taking away here?” to “what am I giving to others by making the choices I need?”
Getting Dead Set My Way is about community and kindness
I could beat the drum for being your usual sassy self. Or tell you that if you set up your care plans and end-of-life documentation, you’ll still get what you want, even if you lose capacity and cannot speak for yourself. That might happen. But even that’s not the whole ballgame. I could talk about how you can design something that is beautiful, meaningful and wonderful. Or how you could satiate your every whim and desire by outlining note by note how your unique care song goes.
But the biggest benefit in setting up your care plan and asking for what you want as you age is an act of caring for others. Setting goals to maintain your physical and mental health, drawing up a treatment line, and deciding what your version of quality of life looks like is an act of supreme love for your family, friends and community.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
By choosing to outline how you get Dead Set Your Way, you are:
· Creating a plan to support your overall wellness and wellbeing for as long as possible. That gives you greater autonomy and lower necessity for support
· Reducing how many decisions your loved ones have to make on your behalf if you lose capacity
· Leading the charge towards your ageing and/or end-of-life experience with confidence. And that sets the tone for others around you in how they should feel or behave
· Stating you’re willing to accept, manage and maintain your health, even if sometimes, it’s a little scary to consider what lies ahead
· Reminding people that ageing or illness do not disqualify you from having an opinion or the ability to advocate for what you want and need
· Sharing your care needs over time, services and people to ensure that, come what may, everyone (not just you) continue to enjoy a reasonable quality of life
By committing care to a plan, we’re normalising the act of care
We all need support at some point. Every human being with physical, social, psychological, and emotional needs benefits from support.
And those that support us benefit, too.
Our society cannot survive, let along thrive, until we recognise the important role that caring plays. And that means leading by example and caring for ourselves while we’re also recognising the contribution others make. All without shame or devaluation.
None of us ever know what is coming around the corner. We all benefit from having care plans and a focus on planning for what might happen if we die. I’d argue it also helps remind us that our existence is wonderful yet fleeting. And that our ability to connect with ourselves genuinely directly reflects how we connect to others on a family, neighbourhood, workplace, industry, and societal level.
When we care enough to plan for our death, we’re caring enough to save our loved ones from grief, stress, mistakes and missteps. That’s important, especially when they need it the most. We’re preserving our dignity through articulating our choices – and saving the people we care about and for us from trauma as much as we can.
How is that anything other than a last act of love?
This August, choose to Get Deadset My Way and help us in:
· Normalising setting wellness and well-being goals through all ages of our life
· Promoting healthy discussions and tackling trickier subjects in a compassionate way
· Developing strategies that help people age better and die well
· Encouraging a healthy relationship with health and life cycles within our community
· Giving communities the chance to plan rather than waiting for the next crisis
Love comes in many forms. Some of them look like homework at the start. But all open our minds and our focus to the possibilities within people and the world in ways we never could have imagined before we engage with the process.