Talking about death does not make it happen. So what stops us from exploring the options for best living towards the end of life? Kent Mathews with the Family Caregiver program with the Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging (PPAAA) has supported hundreds of individuals and families over his years as an MSW, Chaplain and staff with the PPAAA. He understands and knows the deep fear and loneliness that can come as people age and bodies change. He shares his insight and professional knowledge in supportive ways that empowers the individual and the family to live the lives they want.
Aging with Altitude is recorded in the Pikes Peak region with a focus on topics of aging interest across the country. We talk about both the everyday and novel needs and approaches to age with altitude whether you’re in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida or Leadville, Colorado. The Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging is the producer. Learn more at Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging.
Transcript:
Talking about death does not make it happen. So, what stops us from exploring the options for best living towards the end of life? Kent Mathews with the Family Caregiver program with the Pikes Peak Area Agency on Aging (PPAAA) has supported hundreds of individuals and families over his years as an MSW, Chaplain and staff with the PPAAA. He understands and knows the deep fear and loneliness that can come as people age and bodies change. He shares his insight and professional knowledge in supportive ways that empowers the individual and the family to live the lives they want.
Michaela Nichols – I am here with Kent Mathews, Care Manager in the Family Caregiver Support Center at Pikes Peak AAA. He has over 27 years of experience as a social worker and has worked in hospice care as well
Michaela - End of life issues can often be hard to talk about. Many people hope that they will be able to make their own decisions or that a loved one will be able to make their decision near the end of their life, but they lose that ability. So being unprepared can put loved ones in uncomfortable positions.
Q – Kent, can you talk a little bit about what barriers individuals experience when beginning to make end of life plans?
A – The most common barrier I hear coming from caregivers, but also when I was doing hospice work, coming even from hospice patients, when it comes to advance directives (is that) they would say, well I’ll execute them or I’ll fill them out when I need them. Not knowing that they probably wouldn’t be able to execute them when they needed them, because they would be in a physical state where they were unresponsive and couldn’t speak or they couldn’t even begin to fill out those documents. So, I think that’s one barrier. Another one is we don’t like to talk about or think about our end of life. We don’t like to think about our deaths. We live in a very death averse society. Generations ago, when we were still a very rural society and we weren’t as urbanized as we are now and still a lot of people living on farms and out in nature and what not we were still very in touch with the cycle of creation – birth, life, death, all of that. And now we are really, really, removed from that and that’s a huge barrier as well. I think another barrier that comes to mind is people don’t have an easy place to go to get good information about what’s really going on with their physical condition. I recently ran across a statistic that said if (a doctor is) asked to do a treatment and a doctor knew the treatment wouldn’t do any good, 40 percent of the doctors said they would still recommend the treatment. Which is, in my estimation, just rather appalling that they would even do that. A lot of the time people rely on their doctors to give them that information to tell them what’s really going on. But most doctors aren’t equipped to do that, they don’t have the...
