While happily scrolling my facebook feed today, checking out what my friends’ kids wore to the first day of school, and who is outraged about what today, I was suddenly stopped in my tracks by this headline: “Last hospitalized Pulse shooting survivor discharged after nearly three months.”
Pulse? That was the horrifying mass shooting in Orlando that happened, when, a long time ago, right? Long enough ago that I’ve had time to be horrified, outraged, sickened, sad, and then . . . going on with my life. So the news that one of the victims is only now getting out of the hospital, that one of the victims has been under hospital care for nearly the whole of summer, stopped me in my tracks.
Because it’s easy to forget that tragic, massive events don’t end once the story has been thoroughly reported. They don’t unfold like in the movies, where victims or car accidents, or fatal diseases, or even mass shootings, either die or survive. In the movies, victims who die are buried and eulogized, victims who survive get up and leave.
In real life, injuries bring your life into a different dimension. Three months in the hospital can decimate whatever order you had in your life, and if, as is likely, the recovery will continue after release for months or years longer, your life will and must be different.
Which is why planning for the possibility of disruption in your life is so very important. Legal, financial, and personal contingency plans make the difference between hardship and disaster. They make the difference between stress about the injury, and stress about every single thing in your life. They make the difference between having the people you know love and care about you around helping, and not having them there.
Writing a will is important, but it’s only one small part of what you will do with an estate planning attorney. You will also get help putting a plan in place that gets as close as possible in the event of a traumatic injury, to keeping you focused on your injury and recovery, not on everything else.
When you plan with Pam, things go more smoothly.