The work that needs to be done in the last year is mostly the work that should have been done in earlier years.
End of life planning isn’t a single moment. It’s a sequence of conversations, documents, decisions, and arrangements that gets done across years — ideally — or compresses into weeks or days, with much worse outcomes, when families wait. The families who navigate the end well are the ones who started the work years before they thought they needed to. The families who scramble are usually the ones who treated end-of-life planning as something that could happen later.
This post is the timeline. What to do across years, months, weeks, and days. The sequence that produces a good ending — for the parent, and for the family that has to live afterward.
For the legal-document framework, see Estate Planning Checklist for Adult Children and Living Wills: A Guide for Caregivers.
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