You live your life to try to benefit your community and the people you love. You may even donate to charity and perform random acts of kindness for strangers. For those with a strong calling toward compassion or kindness, the idea that they can continue to help others even after their death could be a beautiful concept.
That is exactly what organ donation and other anatomical gifts can achieve. If something unexpected and tragic were to happen to you, it could be possible for doctors to turn that tragedy into a miracle for someone else or even several other people.
Creating advance directives can help you ensure that your family will follow your wishes about decisions like organ donation.
Families often decline organ donation
If you haven’t spoken clearly to your family about your organ donation wishes, they may not even know that you like the idea of saving a life after your death. Those unsure about a family member’s preference will potentially err on the side of caution by declining.
If you don’t have medical paperwork explicitly talking about your preferences, your family might undermine your real final wishes. Research into how families decide about organ donation shows that grief often influences how families decide. Their denial and belief their family member might still recover accounts for more than 50% of the cases where families refused to donate organs.
Creating an advance medical directive and talking about anatomical gifts specifically takes a lot of pressure off of your family. In a moment of tragedy, they will not have to make a difficult decision or rack their brains to try to remember a conversation they had with you years ago. Instead, they can defer to your written directions and have the peace of mind that comes from knowing they did exactly what you wanted.
Drafting comprehensive estate documents will help your loved ones comply with your unique wishes.