The example of your father’s girlfriend is a prime one that I see all the time. People call me and say, “Mom’s got dementia, we need to get this stuff in place in order to, you know, I need to make medical decisions,” or to admit her in a nursing home they want a power of attorney, and I say, “Okay, great. Do you have one? Let me look at it.” “Well, no, we need you to do one, Brian,” but mom’s incompetent. That’s the reason the nursing home wants power of attorney or the bank wants power of attorney, because they don’t trust that mom can make decisions for herself anymore, because of the this disease. Yeah, you can do it, and then I have to explain to the family that once mom’s incompetent, she’s not competent to sign anything, including a power of attorney. By me generating this document, and preparing it, and doing it, that really isn’t any good because mom doesn’t know what she’s signing, so then we have to go a whole other route through the legal system in order to get a guardian and a conservator put in place for mom in order to accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish.
The cost skyrockets because now you’re talking court, and you’re talking a lot of other things versus basically some pre-planning, and the point is that whenever you realize you need these documents, when you need the document and I put the emphasis on the word need, it’s usually too late. You have to get these when you don’t need them which I know it seems strange, you don’t eat when you’re not hungry, you eat when you’re hungry, were very reactionary creatures I guess, if you will, but in this realm of the world, if you start your planning, if you start the process when you actually need it, it’s generally too late. With a lot of these things, with the dementias and things like that, until they cure it they’re not reversible so mom’s not going to get any better. Her brain function’s not going to get any better, so doctors are not going to sign letters saying, yeah, Brian, she’s okay to sign this power of attorney, she knows what she’s doing. If the doctor’s diagnosed her with dementia or with Alzheimer’s, unless it’s early, early in, she’s never going to get better from that, she’s not going to be able ever to take care of herself and make those decisions that would be legally binding and show that she’s competent.
Tamara Patzer: Why do you think people put off this type of planning? I’m listening as you’re educating me and I’m saying it makes perfect sense that I should talk to somebody and literally get my ducks in a row so that I don’t put my children through any unnecessary pain and issues if something were to happen to me. What is it about this type of planning that people have a tendency to just say, I’ll do that tomorrow or I don’t really want to think about it, I don’t want to do this right now?
Brian Douglas: I think you hit the nail on the head, Tamara, which is the I don’t want to deal with it, the ostrich, head in the sand approach. If I don’t think about it, it can’t hurt me. Death, dying, feeding tubes, incapacity, when you talk about it in those terms, they’re very unpleasant terms to talk about. Nobody wants to think of their own mortality, no one wants to think of me sitting in a nursing home, not able to do anything, maybe inflicted with Alzheimer’s where my brain still works fine but I can’t do anything else, so you’re a prisoner inside your own body. Those are really depressing and horrible topics to talk about in the greater scheme of life, but I think the education side of it, number one we don’t sit and talk about those things and make it that painful. The topics come up but we plan for those things just by going through the process, it doesn’t have to be where we sit here and go through every possible infliction you could have and every horrible thing that could happen to you. That’s not what I want to do.
I think really it’s just the issue of the mortality that I don’t want to think about dying, and then the cavalier approach that I hear more often than you would be surprised, probably, is that who cares? I’ll be dead. It’s not my problem, I’ll be dead and then someone else can deal with it, and it’s just kind of a way that people can deal with it … they address it without ever addressing it. To those people I always say, well, that’s if you’re lucky. What I mean by that, and I always kind of joke, I’m like, if you’re lucky, you’re going to go to bed one day and not wake up. As far as getting out of here, getting out … that’s about the best you can hope for, but there’s a lot of other ways that it can go, with the Alzheimer’s and things like that where you can be in a bad situation for a long time. At that point, what have you done to your family or yourself, or whatever, if you haven’t done any planning whatsoever? I always tell people, if you tell me when and how you’re going to die, I call it the it. It happens to all of us. It could be death, certainly it is death. It could be you get sued for something and we have asset protection issues because maybe you’re a doctor or a lawyer, a professional, you have higher liabilities. It could be you get in a car accident and you get sued for that because something happens. It could be dementia. It could be a young couple having their first children, and they’re thinking they’re going to have natural childbirth and something happens in the middle of this labor, and the doctor grabs you and says emergency C-section right now. That is a huge medical procedure that happens instantly. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through it or experienced that, but all of a sudden now you’ve got the mother of the first child being cut in half essentially, to do this thing, and so the medical complications that could come from that are huge. Generally they don’t, but you have to be prepared for that if you’re that young couple. It happens to all of us, now if you can tell me what your it is, I can plan really, really well for it. It’s easy and so could you, but since we don’t know what the it is, what we have to do is build ourselves options.
