Bringing life full circle

Hospice of the Central Coast’s new program allows you to make your wishes known

Everyone has an opinion, and everyone’s talking at once. You recognize the voices — your mother’s soft but rising pitch; your father’s deep, gravelly tones; your husband’s insistent pleas; your son’s whine. The one opinion that counts, though, the only voice that really matters, is the one you cannot hear — yours. And no one else can hear it, either. But they’re all going to assert their opinions about what should be done for you now that a stroke has left you unable to speak for yourself.

If only you had taken a moment to make your wishes known, had initiated that conversation with your family about how you would like the end of your life to unfold. If only you had told them you had definite opinions about the extent of your end-of-life care.

Your family has no history of heart disease. It never occurred to you that you might suffer from it. And you certainly had no way of knowing you would become so desperately ill at 52. That’s just it. None of us really knows how or when our life will end, only that it will.

So why don’t more of us do ourselves the favor of discussing and chronicling our wishes and preferences for how we would like the end of our life to look? Because it’s a scary topic, and most of us can’t even imagine it, let alone design it. But if we could imagine it, if we could come up with a plan not for how we will die, but for how we want to live and be cared for until the end, it just might become something worth imagining.

Hospice of the Central Coast can help. Life’s Full Circle™, a free new program created by life-planning specialist Shary Farr, gives registrants early access to information about compassionate comfort care should they become terminally ill with a prognosis of six months or less to live. This is how it works: You sign a statement (a declaration, not a legally binding document) that declares your intentions for hospice care when the time is appropriate. You keep one copy, one copy is sent to your doctor, and a third copy goes to Hospice of the Central Coast. Should you ever lose the ability to manage your own care, this letter, in conjunction with an advance healthcare directive, should give your healthcare team and loved ones the information they need to provide the kind of care you desire.

“We’re getting people to think about this way before they need it,” Farr says.

The compassionate comfort of hospice care is designed not to pursue aggressive curative treatment but to provide palliative care that includes medications for symptom control and pain relief, physical and social care, counseling, and other hospice services, including a possible stay at Hospice House if it becomes medically necessary. Although signing up for Life’s Full Circle isn’t a prerequisite to receiving hospice care, it can help guide you and your loved ones through the process.

“Most people want the quality end-of-life care that hospice provides,” says Farr, “but they’re waiting for someone else to initiate that conversation. There’s a dance that happens between patients and their doctors. The doctor’s job is to save lives, to make the most of each life, so he or she is reluctant to bring up hospice and waits for the patient or family to do so. The patient is waiting for the doctor. There comes a time, though, when it must be addressed, before it becomes a medical crisis.

“If the doctor sees this letter of intention for hospice care in your medical file, he or she might be much less reluctant to start the conversation. This is a gift to your family and your doctor. By declaring your wishes, you make it easier for everyone to start the conversation.”

Perhaps the place to begin is to have that discussion with yourself — to figure out what you truly want, then write it down, and share your wishes with your family and your doctor. Then take the next steps, such as filling out an advance healthcare directive and signing the Life’s Full Circle declaration to ensure yourself the quality of life you desire at the end of your journey.

The Life’s Full Circle program also includes:

• An individual life-planning session with Farr
• A wallet identification card
• An annual opportunity to review and revise your
  wishes
• Assistance with completing advance healthcare
  directive forms

“We waste a lot of time being afraid of death,” says Farr. “At some point, we need to come to terms with it, remove the fear of the unknown by making plans for it. Once we deal with the details of our lives and empower others to take over when we need them to, we become free to live. We can be more present and more mindful as a person, which is the ultimate in well-being.”

For more information about Life’s Full Circle™, please call 626-1943.

Shary Alexa Farr

A life well lived

Shary Alexa Farr has always known her life would be about death. Not focusing on death or fearing it, not about how it would happen or when, but about the quality of the passage itself. By the time she was 6, she knew it would be her mission to help others plan for the inevitability of death that they might live more fully and consciously until then.

“I came into the world wanting to do this,” says Shary. “I never had any choice about it. When I was 6 years old, I was reading about death, fascinated by it, and yet aware that the adults around me seemed to treat it as a punishment, something hush-hush and shrouded in secrecy.

“I grew up wanting to help people minimize the fear of death and improve the quality of the end of their lives, to help them see that each of us can honor ourselves by creating how we want the end of our life to be. It occurred to me that people weren’t taking advantage of the choices they had to ensure a gentle death.”

Shary’s mother died suddenly, when Shary was only 15. Farr’s grandmother, having just lost her only child, vowed to pursue her life differently; and when cancer brought her own life toward its conclusion in 1977, she decided a life well lived deserved a similar end.

“My grandmother put me on as power of attorney and reviewed her will with me,” Shary says. “She helped create a relationship for me with her attorney and took me to her bank. When she died, her life was in order, and my grief wasn’t contaminated with responsibilities for which I was totally unprepared. My grandmother got so much done while she was still well enough to make quality decisions. I had always wanted to help make death less frightening for people, to help them see how many choices they have around it. She showed me the way.”

Since her grandmother’s death, Shary has worked in health services, at present as a lifeplanning specialist for Hospice of the Central Coast and the Conversation with Life^© Program at Community Hospital. Shary is also the creator of Life’s Full Circle™, a new hospice program that helps people see the value in establishing end-of-life plans, including preregistering for hospice services well before the need arises.

“Making peace with death,” Shary says, “can diminish our fear around it, enhance our lives, and enable us to live in the moment. Once we plan for our death, there really isn’t a whole lot of room for fear. We’re too busy living.”