Tools to Finish Strong - Compassion and Choices

Print and Online Resources

The End-of-Life Decisions Guide and Toolkit

Compassion & Choices’ My End-of-Life Decisions: An Advance Planning Guide and Toolkit will help you work through your end-of-life priorities and empower you to have valuable discussions with your healthcare providers. It includes tear-out sheets for advance care planning. The 40-page toolkit is available for download or a free hard copy can be ordered. Some of the unique and important features of this toolkit are:

The Values Worksheet includes a series of questions that help you think through your priorities for care at life’s end.
An Assisted-Living Facility Rider helps ensure that an assisted-living facility will respect a resident’s wishes for end-of-life care.
A Hospital Visitation Form helps ensure that people you most want to be with you are admitted on a priority basis, whether or not they are family members.
A Sectarian Healthcare Directive helps ensure that a patient’s instructions will be respected in a situation where institutional policy conflicts with those instructions and that, depending on state law, the provider will assist with the transfer.
My Particular Wishes is meant to inform physicians, nurses or other care providers of your consent to or refusal of certain specific therapies. It also guides a family member or any other person you name in making decisions for you, if you cannot articulate these decisions yourself.

Click here to order a FREE hard copy of this 40-page toolkit here.

Dementia Values & Priorities Tool

This interactive tool will document your wishes regarding the care you want and create an addendum that can be added to your existing Advance Directive.

Access The Tool

LGBTQ+ Advance Care Planning Tookit

Compassion & Choices is proud to partner with SAGE to create a comprehensive end of life planning guide for LGBTQ+ people, by LGBTQ+ people. This tool walks through decisions around health care proxies, hospice care, how we honor life, and so much more. An excellent resource for individuals, chosen family members, and professionals working in deathcare

Download It Here

Finish Strong | The Book

Finish Strong: Putting Your Priorities First at Life’s End, by President Emerita / Senior Adviser of Compassion & Choices, Barbara Coombs Lee, is the guide to achieving the positive end-of-life experience you want and deserve. Finish Strong is for those who know they should prepare for the end of life, but are unsure how to think and talk about it. The book aims to help you live true to your values and priorities as vigor wanes, and how to make sure your wishes are honored. This book describes concrete action to take in the here and now, to help live your best life to the end.

Click here to Purchase Your Copy of Finish Strong

Access the Finish Strong discussion guide here

Clinician Conversation Toolkit

Studies show the single most powerful thing a person can do to improve the chance for gentle dying, is simply an courageously, talk about it with your clinicians. Our toolkit provides you with a step-by-step guide to finding clinicians who will support you in advance and during a serious diagnosis. This includes:

Our simple Finding a Partner Doctor postcard, which provides you with a list of the questions to ask to ensure you and your provider are on the same page.
Information about our Doc to Doc Consultation Program, a resource you can provide to your clinicians if they have questions about how to legally support your end-of-life wishes including information on medical aid in dying, voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, palliative sedation, and more.
Links to our powerful diagnosis decoder, an easy-to-use online tool that helps you find the right questions to ask to get the care you want. This includes a version for a person with any illness, as well as a customized version for those facing cancer or dementia.

Diagnosis Decoder tool on a iMac monitor

Advanced Directive Forms

Find your state's advance directive at CaringInfo

Medical Aid in Dying Information Packets in Authorized States

State-specific booklets that provide step-by-step instructions for how to use the law, how to find a physician and what to consider when talking with your physician. Also see the Medical Aid in Dying tracking sheet

Stories

David Bierman

David Bierman’s wife, Katherine Bierman, struggled during her last months of life as she succumbed to COPD.

“Watching Kathy suffer was difficult, but the anguish she endured was exponentially worse.”

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Lee Corrina Cano

Despite dying two decades apart, Lee Corrina Cano’s father and father-in-law both suffered unnecessarily in their last days.

“Watching someone you love go through a difficult and prolonged death changes you. It makes you realize that this issue of agency at the end of life is not a technical or legal issue to be debated stoically.”

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Jim Kelly

Since his cancer diagnosis, Jim Kelly has completed his advance directive and become an advocate for medical aid in dying in Illinois.

“End-of-life processes can look very different, but we all deserve autonomy to determine what kind of care we do and don’t want, and when enough is enough.”

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Meghan Reese

Meghan Reese’s mother planned to use Colorado’s medical aid-in-dying law, but her choice was robbed from her through a prohibitive system.

“The stress this law, in its current form, put on my mom and my family is indescribable. Her death was the opposite of peaceful. Improvements to Colorado’s End-of-Life Options Act are necessary.”

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Meghan Reese and her mom, Kathleen McDaniel

Ellen Tanner, Mary Tanner and Ashley Baugh

Ron Tanner moved from Illinois to Colorado to access the state’s medical aid-in-dying law and end his suffering from corticobasal syndrome.

“Terminally ill Illinoisans shouldn’t have to leave their home to die peacefully.”

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Victoria Beelik

Victoria Beelik reflects on her experiences taking care of her parents at the end of their lives and the contrast in their last day.

“My dad was able to pass gently and with peace, but 10 months later, my mom passed away with great suffering and fear. I can never unsee what happened with my mom.”

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Mike Reagan

Mike Reagan, Peaceful Presence End-of-Life Services founder, recounts his experiences and insights as a death doula in Colorado.

“In an ideal world, all doctors would suspend personal judgment on the ethics of medical aid in dying and surrender to a position of respecting and facilitating their patients’ wishes.”

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Suzy Flack

Suzy Flack’s son, Andrew, died peacefully using California’s medical aid-in-dying law. Illinois does not yet allow the option.

“Andrew died peacefully because of the option of medical aid in dying in California, where he lived. I’m comforted by that. I also wish he could have had that option here in Illinois.”

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