The Importance of Estate Planning
Shary Alexa Farr has always known her life would be about death. Not focusing on death or fearing it, not about how it would happen or when, but about the quality of the passage itself. By the time she was 6, she knew it would be her mission to help others plan for the inevitability of death that they might live more fully and consciously until then.
"I came into the world wanting to do this," says Shary. "I never had any choice about it. When I was 6 years old, I was reading about death, fascinated by it, and yet aware that the adults around me seemed to treat it as a punishment, something hush-hush and shrouded in secrecy."
"I grew up wanting to help people minimize the fear of death and improve the quality of the end of their lives, to help them see that each of us can honor ourselves by creating how we want the end of our life to be. It occurred to me that people weren't taking advantage of the choices they had to ensure a gentle death."
Shary's mother died suddenly, when Shary was only 15. Farr's grandmother, having just lost her only child, vowed to pursue her life differently; and when cancer brought her own life toward its conclusion in 1977, she decided a life well lived deserved a similar end.
"My grandmother put me on as power of attorney and reviewed her will with me," Shary says. "She helped create a relationship for me with her attorney and took me to her bank. When she died, her life was in order, and my grief wasn't contaminated with responsibilities for which I was totally unprepared. My grandmother got so much done while she was still well enough to make quality decisions. I had always wanted to help make death less frightening for people, to help them see how many choices they have around it. She showed me the way."
Since her grandmother's death, Shary has worked in health services, at present as a life-planning specialist for Hospice of the Central Coast and the Conversation with LifeŠ Program at Community Hospital. Shary is also the creator of Life's Full Circle? , a new hospice program that helps people see the value in establishing end-of-life plans, including preregistering for hospice services well before the need arises.
"Making peace with death," Shary says, "can diminish our fear around it, enhance our lives, and enable us to live in the moment. Once we plan for our death, there really isn't a whole lot of room for fear. We're too busy living."