Having the Tough Conversations About End-of-Life Planning

I didn’t watch as emergency medical technicians helped my mom onto a stretcher and took her out of the house she’d lived in for 42 years, but I knew she wasn’t coming back. Maybe that’s why, on that sunny Florida morning in June 2016, I opted to let them go while I hung back to gather my purse and keys.

That decision was one in a long line of choices I made after my mom was diagnosed with dementia in 2012. At the time of her diagnosis, she was 77 and I was 34. She was in denial and refused to discuss a care plan. I was an only child. My dad died when I was 14. My mom’s siblings were gone. All the decision-making fell to me.

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