Managing the End of Your Life

Dying on your own terms.

Over the last five years I have spent a lot of time with elderly people. As Healthcare Surrogate for my uncle Larry and aunt Norma, I spent a lot of time visiting them and taking care of things that occurred in their lives on a regular, almost daily basis. During that time I have gotten to know quite a number of other retirees who also live in the senior facility where I had moved them to when I relocated them up here from South Florida.

When I initially was asked by my uncle to accept the job, I had of course some knowledge of senior life, being over seventy myself at the time and now pushing eighty. Both my mom and my mother in law had recently passed away and my wife and I did our best to spend as much time with them as we could as we saw how their advanced age impacted their daily lives.

For me, that left me with two conclusions:

1. Getting old sucks!

2. It doesn’t have to.

Of course there is the physical reality of the body getting weak and tired and the probability that you may spend a lot of time looking back and re-evaluating the way you lived your life and the choices and decisions you made.. But there is also the matter of how much your economy and your personal relationships play a part in the choices you can make when you reach your senior years.

While it’s true that ‘money isn’t everything’, it is also true that money plays a big part in whether you can choose your own senior lifestyle, or you are left to the whims of the government or the willingness of family members to take care of you. These alone are reason enough to get a good career choice decided upon and figured out as early as possible if you can. And make sure you develop some kind of retirement plan that will be there when the time comes and necessity requires that you rely upon it.

To be honest, I was stunned to find out how much it would cost when I first decided to place my uncle and aunt in a senior facility near where I live. Not only how much it would cost initially, but how much the price would rise over the period of their residence there, nearly doubling in just five years.

Of course, having been an independent evangelist and missionary for most of the past forty years, all of the things I am telling you now were not a part of my own m/o. I made ministry my priority and just expected the Lord to provide whatever my family and I needed to survive on. With a wife and four children, that was often a challenge and probably was not the best plan. Looking back with all honesty, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you and your spouse are 100% in agreement that it is the way God wants you to go.

All of this took on new relevance when I suffered heart failure on July 28th of last year. We had just returned from taking a weeks vacation to North Carolina with our teenage granddaughter Rose and, 24 hours after our arrival back home, I suddenly experienced heart failure. I was standing on the front porch and I told Jolyn and my son Jon that I thought I was having a heart attack. And I was right!

They threw me into the back seat of Jon’s car and rushed me to nearby Celebration Hospital, but I died on the way. When they arrived at the Emergency Room Jolyn rushed in to get some help telling the staff there that I’d had a heart attack and had just died on her lap. She later told me that the two male nurses in attendance took their time walking out to the car until they saw Jon trying to lift my lifeless body off the ground where I had fallen on top of him as he tried to get me out of the car. At that point they realized she was not fooling and they immediately rushed in to take over, shocking me quickly with the paddles to try and resuscitate my apparently lifeless body.

My aunt Norma passed away in 2022 and with my uncles passing this April 12th, I have been totally immersed in trying to do all the stuff required to closeout their estate and get back to my own heart failure recovery and our daily our life and work. It is not an easy task as he was such a private person and he gave me little help to find the information I would need to do the the job, while at the same time trying to finish an audio version of a book I wrote about Bishop Frank Costantino last year.

I thank God for my wife Jolyn. She is such a trooper and I couldn’t ask for a better partner. She has been there every step of the way to help me as I tried to take care of my aunt and uncle and help them have a good end of life.

So, in conclusion of this tardy and unusual report, let me say this: Do whatever you can to get your end-of-life affairs figured out as early as possible so you don’t have to go through something like this, and you don’t leave it to family members whom you would like to feel good about you after your passing.

Although I occasionally watch videos on youtube about people who have had near death experiences, the only constant seems to be that they all went through a tunnel with a light at the end of it. Other than what the Bible states in Hebrews 9:27, the after life is still much of a mystery when it comes to the particulars of life in the hereafter. After fifty years of trying to live the life I felt called to as a believer, I can say this with authority.:

It’s hard enough. Don’t make it harder by having a “que sera sera” approach to life while you are alive. I’m sure this will make life easier for you while you are alive, and make it easier for those you leave behind to have good memories to fall back on when they remember you in their life and prayers.

Blessings,

Craig Marlatt