Before I Go (The Essential Guide to Creating a Good End of Life Plan)

"I wish i had known what they wanted"

Too often, a person's wishes for end of life care, and for after they have gone, have not been recorded and leave their loved ones guessing. With this valuable guide, you can now begin to document this for yourself, so your relatives will be able to honor your wishes more easily, saving them unnecessary stress and upset at a potentially intense rime.

Before I Go addresses the emotional, spiritual, and practical aspects of end of life planning to help you make well-informed decisions about your end of life care and prepare well for your death. Jane Duncan Rogers guides you with equanimity, care, and humor through subjects such as how to have a conversation about dying, the impact of grief on relatives responsible for estate matters, and DIY funerals and what that entails. She states clearly what you need to have in place to ensure the best end of life possible, helps you identify your values and beliefs in this area, and demonstrates which actions you then need to take, and when. With a full resource pack of essential information available to you, including guiding questions, exercises, and recording tools as well as downloadable worksheets and supportive online courses, decision-making will be made much easier and you will find relief and peace of mind knowing you have taken care of outstanding matters.

You can update your wishes at any time and feel confident that if anything happens to you suddenly, you and your family will be as well-prepared as possible to deal with it. With your end of life wishes clearly defined, you gain the freedom to continue living your life to the fullest, knowing the difficult decisions have been handled.

Jane Duncan Rogers is an award-winning life and death coach who helps people prepare well for a good end of life. Having been in the field of psychotherapy and personal growth for 25 years, she is founder of the not-for-profit Before I Go Solutions®, dedicated to educating people about dying, death, and grief. Jane lives within the Findhorn community in Scotland, UK.

My husband died in 2011, after just over a year of living with the presence of cancer in our marriage. Having this final year together meant we had an opportunity to deepen our love for each other, make sure there was nothing left unsaid between us, and then get on with living as best we could while he was still healthy enough for that. It was a very precious 14 months for us both, and I've written about it in detail in my book Gifted By Grief A True Story of Cancer, Loss and Rebirth. You can read more about this at www.giftedbygrief.com

In Chapter 10, published three years after Philip died, I wrote about some particular life issues we had examined while he was still alive. Our friend Barbara in Los Angeles had emailed with a long list of questions, insisting we answer them before it was too late. After about the third email along the same lines, I spoke to Philip about what we were then referring to as The List (of questions). Here's an extract from that chapter in the book:

"Come on, were going to do The List properly now" He was still reluctant, but, lying in bed, with me and the laptop next to him, he didn't have a chance. "It's going to make a huge difference to me in the future, darling, and besides, Barbara will just nag us if we don't."

"Yeah, all right then."

Poor Philip - for a man afraid of dying, this was an amazing act of courage, another step in the acceptance of what was happening. We began at the beginning, and continued on until the end, referring to it later as our final project together. In those two hours, I asked him the questions, and he gave me his answers. There were all kinds of practical questions, from the most basic such as, "What kind of coffin do you want?" to which he replied, "Any old box will do" to more sensitive ones, such as, "Are there any of your personal items you would like to leave to anyone in particular?" This one we discussed in more detail

It was tough; these are difficult questions to ask of somebody who knows he is going to be dying sooner than later. Feeling a great sense of achievement afterwards, we were very close, connected and loving for the rest of that weekend. Who would have thought that? It ended up being a couple of hours of slightly macabre enjoyment.

Many people contacted me about this chapter in the book, saying what a very good idea it was to answer these questions, but also lamenting the fact they were not getting around to it themselves. Thus the idea of bringing the questions to many more readers was born. By January 2016 I had researched and compiled what was then called The Good Death Guide: 27 Questions to Ask and Answer Before You Die. I offered to run a local group to enable people to complete this workbook, and it sold out with a long waiting list. It seemed I had hit on something important. After further revisions, research and more courses, this product became the workbook Before I Go: Practical Questions to Ask and Answer Before You Die, and my life started to change. Whereas before I had been working as a life, death and small business coach, now I was focusing on my first love, running groups.

I'd originally trained in 1990 with Louise L Hay, author of the famous book You Can Heal Your Life, and founder of Hay House Publishing. I was the first woman in Europe to offer study groups based on her book, which I did for about ten years or so. It was during this time that I also trained in counselling, and began a private practice in Oxford, England. I also ran a large complementary health clinic during these years. It was only with a move to Scotland in 2007 that I morphed into coaching. Now, with founding the not-for-profit organization Before I Go Solutions®, all my skills are coming together, as I encourage people to face up to what can be a difficult and emotional topic - the fact that they are going to die one day.

**Contents and Sample Pages**