This has been a real eye-opener, it raised issues I had not yet considered. I don’t want my wife to have to make the decisions discussed in the article.
I never thought of a pacemaker as a life wrecker.
We have the wills and life insurance.
We also have our burial plot and most funeral expenses paid for. We got a nice corner lot with a tree, I hope the tree lasts.
73 married, 3 kids age 35-44. My wife and I have identical wills: everything goes to spouse and then a 3 way split. I have insurance (although I don’t know why, but it is old and cheap), no living will (my wife and kids know what I want) and no power of attorney. I should. One way to minimize funeral expense is to leave your body to a med school. I have toyed with that idea. I want no religious ceremony and neither does my wife.
I read that article on the pacemaker in last Sunday’s Times magazine. I have a pacemaker and that article is written from a very narrow perspective. I have had a pacemaker for three years. Before it was put in they detected a 7 second period with no heartbeat. I live a rich full life (for a 73 year old, anyway) and if a pacemaker gives me an extra ten years, I’ll take it. Maybe when I am 80 and decrepit, I won’t allow them to replace it with a new one, but I have seven years to decide that. If I start to go gaga, then my wife will refuse it. But in the mean time, don’t condemn pacemakers because some have gotten useless life extensions from them.
Female, unmarried, no kids, 27ish.
My lil’ bro is set up as my beneficiary for my life insurance and AD&D. They’re provided by the company I work for; someone might as well get something out of them if I die, and given that he’s a counselor (mostly for at-risk kids), kiddo could use the money more than my parents.
Everything else, I pretty much assume will default to next-of-kin, and I trust them to divide it up appropriately. I keep having half-assed intentions to stick a note somewhere with login and password information for a couple of online communities/emails so that somebody could post a death notice if necessary, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Both my parents know that I want as many organs to be donated as possible, which is the other big thing I’d care about.
28, single, no kids.
I’ve done nothing except fill out my organ donor card and inform my parents that if I’m not mentally aware, they can turn the machines off.
I read that article, too, and it was heartbreaking. But I didn’t read it so much as a blanket condemnation of pacemakers as a condemnation of a system that leads to people undergoing invasive medical procedures with far-reaching consequences for themselves and others, all because the system provides poor incentives for ensuring fully informed consent and coordination of care.
Female
Married
No children
25
I have life insurance which will also pay out if I’m unable to work due to disability. But nothing else. I took out the life insurance when I bought a house, so my husband wouldn’t have to worry about paying the mortgage. I’ll probably sort out a will when I have children.