Tools to Finish Strong - Compassion & 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.

Recursos en Español

Compassion & Choices está comprometido en apoderar a las personas para que obtengan la atención y cuidados que desean durante una enfermedad grave o al final de su vida. Una forma de lograrlo es ayudando a las personas a planificarlo y convertirse en defensores de sí mismos y de sus seres queridos.

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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.

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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

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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

Cathy Deering

Cathy Deering, pharmacy technician and mother of three, witnessed her father’s heartbreaking and painful death from ALS.

“My dad spent his last day struggling to breathe for over eight hours. His death was cruel. The option of medical aid in dying should have been available to him.”

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Maggie Schneider Huston

Maggie is advocating for patient-directed care after her father struggled to get his doctors to honor his wishes for a peaceful end of life.

“The lessons I’ve learned from my parents’ deaths are both practical and painfully profound: Make an advance directive and discuss it with your healthcare team. Make sure your loved ones know your wishes. Choose empathetic doctors who will listen to you.”

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Victor Silva

Thanks to many dinner table conversations, Victor knew his parents’ wishes for their end-of-life care and was able to honor them.

“I knew Mom wanted to be comfortable at the end of her life, and I had promised her that I would make sure that she was as happy as she could be until the very last second.”

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Lisa Bradley

When Lisa’s mother developed dementia and eventually enrolled in hospice, her end-of-life planning helped make her passing peaceful.

“I’m so thankful that I was able to be at Mom’s side without having to worry about making decisions for her end-of-life care, because she had already made those decisions for herself. I was able to just be present.”

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Barbara Webster

Barbara Webster’s brother Chuck wanted the option of medical aid in dying to end his suffering from a rare form of bladder cancer.

“If Chuck could have died the way he wanted, he would have been surrounded by friends and family, telling stories, listening to Etta James, and being lauded by those he loved. Instead, he experienced exactly the end he feared.”

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Sanford Wood

Sanford Wood’s wife made her end-of-life wishes known: She wanted comfort care and to not prolong the dying process.

“Several years before Pam passed away, she and I talked about what we wanted for our end-of-life care and created living wills. Most of all, Pam just wanted to be kept comfortable.”

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Beth McKenna

Beth McKenna is advocating for medical aid in dying in Illinois after witnessing her father’s peaceful death using the option in Vermont.

“I’m so grateful to have shared those profound moments with my father at the end of his life, and to see him go so peacefully and on his terms.”

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Maureen Ruddy and Donna Prosser

The suffering that Donna’s husband and Maureen’s brother endured before he died inspired their advocacy for end-of-life care and options.

“Whether it’s palliative care or medical aid in dying, people need to be treated as members of their healthcare teams to make informed decisions about what they need.”

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