Remember To Love

On Monday January 27th, there was a federal roundtable on Advance Requests for euthanasia. Some of your colleagues participated. While I was speaking with one of the physicians who will be participating, she passed on a great analogy about advance directives. She said: 

It’s like asking your child what they want to be when they grow up, and then holding them to it.

We all recognize that people are going to change as they grow and develop and that holding a five year old to their desire to be an astronaut is not practical, nor is it fair. When you are five, you don’t have all the information and your thinking changes as you experience life. But that growth and development doesn’t stop when you turn eighteen or twenty-five or indeed eighty-five. Life continues to shape all of us.

The best we can do is to ask someone we trust to share our journey and help us make the best decisions at the right time for our care at every stage. 

With that in mind, I invite you to watch this newly-released 4-minute video, “Remember to Love”, featuring Joan, a woman living with dementia.