Obviously we’d encourage people to plan ahead, but also, most people don’t die suddenly—slow declines are vastly more common. Personally, when I think about people I’ve known, almost all of them knew they were reaching the end well in advance.
Slow declines aren’t always synonymous with losing hope for a substantial recovery (or recovering enough so that death doesn’t seem to be imminent). In the case of my late wife, there was a clear path to recovery: become healthy enough to have kidney transplant surgery (obesity makes the surgery itself much more dangerous, and there were other issues too), which would likely have solved a lot of her most severe problems. (I immediately volunteered to be a living donor; we had the same blood type, but I never found out if I was otherwise qualified to be a kidney donor.)
Obviously we’d encourage people to plan ahead, but also, most people don’t die suddenly—slow declines are vastly more common. Personally, when I think about people I’ve known, almost all of them knew they were reaching the end well in advance.
Slow declines aren’t always synonymous with losing hope for a substantial recovery (or recovering enough so that death doesn’t seem to be imminent). In the case of my late wife, there was a clear path to recovery: become healthy enough to have kidney transplant surgery (obesity makes the surgery itself much more dangerous, and there were other issues too), which would likely have solved a lot of her most severe problems. (I immediately volunteered to be a living donor; we had the same blood type, but I never found out if I was otherwise qualified to be a kidney donor.)