How To Write A Living Will
MyLivingWill™- Specify Your Health Care Advance Directives
We have removed the obstacles to writing a Living Will and Power of
Attorney for Health Care. It is convenient, low cost, and simple. The
MyLivingWill™ service steps you through a series of questions in a "wizard"
format. It will ask you about your wishes regarding different types of
treatment under different conditions, and allow you to set up your Advance
Directives --- your Living Will and Power of Attorney for Health Care. All questions are written
in plain language, so you don't have to be a legal expert to create your own
Advance Directives. You simply answer the questions about your medical
care wishes and we automatically and instantly format a document that forms the
basis of a legal Living Will and Power of Attorney for Health Care, custom-made
for your local jurisdiction. If you live in Canada, the
documents can then be printed and signed in front of witnesses to become legally
binding documents. There is also plenty of supplementary information to
help answer all of your questions.
A Living Will gives you some say in the way you will be treated before you
die, in a situation where death is otherwise inevitable. This can be
used in two ways --- to put a swift end to intolerable suffering, or to endorse
the use of experimental treatment to try and save your life if at all possible.
Most people die in hospitals and often this is after receiving treatment
administered in an effort to prolong a person's life. Medical staff are
duty bound to use everything within the powers of modern medicine to keep a
patient alive as long as possible, and within those powers there are regulations
to be followed. Medical staff are obliged to preserve a patient's life
without necessarily considering the financial or emotional concerns of the
patient and loved ones.
A Power of Attorney for Health Care allows you to nominate a
Healthcare Representative who can make health care decisions for you when you
are incapacitated and unable to make decisions for yourself. It can be
used to complement your Living Will.
The most common use of a Living Will is to express your desire for a
voluntary passive euthanasia. Simply put, this means that medical
staff should not artificially preserve your life under specific circumstances
which are determined by you. In addition, your Living Will or "healthcare
directive" can express your views on the health care that you wish to receive if
you were ever in a permanent coma.
Make unlimited updates free of charge. Don't pay a lawyer every
time you need to update your Advance Directives. We allow your Living Will
and Power of Attorney for Health Care to be kept securely online at
LegalWills.ca
so that you can make unlimited updates for as long as you are
a member here. Not only will you always have legal documents, but they
will always be kept up to date.
You can still have it reviewed by a lawyer. If you wish, we can
arrange for your Advance Directives --- Living Will and Power of Attorney for
Health Care --- to be reviewed by a lawyer, who will check the documents for
consistency and completeness.
(Currently not available in Ontario.)
Join for FREE and get started right now with writing a
Living Will
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MyLivingWill™- Frequently Asked Questions
The MyLivingWill™ service steps you through a simple question and answer
wizard, formats your answers into a readable format, allows you to store your
information securely online and allows you to make unlimited updates. You
can then designate your own personal "Keyholders®", who with their unique ID can
unlock your Advance Directives at the appropriate
time.
The complete pricing structure is available on our Products & Prices
page.
According to current laws in most jurisdictions, in order to be legal
documents your Advance Directives must be signed
in the presence of two witnesses.
However, "electronic signature" laws are moving rapidly and we are
closely monitoring these laws to support the future electronic notarization
of documents, or even the electronic signature of your Advance Directives.
It is only a matter of time before this becomes
standard practice in preparing legal documents. According to today's laws
you will need to print the Advance Directives you
create with the MyLivingWill™ service and have them signed according to the laws
in your area. More details about this process are available on the help
pages within the wizard.
Although the unsigned versions of your Advance Directives
stored online at
LegalWills.ca
are not legal documents, if you
wish you can allow one or more of your designated Keyholders® to have access to
the documents that you have created here
at
LegalWills.ca.
This could be important if your legally signed
copies cannot be located. In this situation, your
LegalWills.ca
documents can still provide some guidance to a
loving family, as they can understand your wishes regarding your health care if
you are unable to communicate these wishes yourself.
If properly signed according to the laws in your area, your Advance Directives
are legal documents that cannot be over-ridden
by your family.
Unlike a Will, a Living Will comes into effect before you die. In
particular, a Living Will comes into effect if you are mentally incapacitated
(e.g. in a coma) or your death has become inevitable, and you are unable to
express your wishes yourself.
It expresses any wishes you have for a right to die with dignity, or if you
have some views on the health care that you wish to receive.
You can choose to have a 1-year, 10-year, 25-year or Life membership at
LegalWills.ca,
during which time you can make as many updates or amendments
to your Advance Directives as you wish at no
extra charge. Details of the membership packages available can be found on
our Products & Prices
page.
Stepping through the question and answer wizard for the MyLivingWill™ service
could take less than ten minutes, particularly if you are already comfortable
with the decisions that you wish to make. However, some questions may
require some thought, and there are some issues that you may need to discuss
with your family and loved ones.
When working through the MyLivingWill™ service you do
not have to complete the document in one sitting. You can answer a couple
of questions and then store these wishes securely online here at
LegalWills.ca
until you have a few more minutes to answer additional
questions. If you wish, you can spend many weeks or months making
unlimited updates until you are happy with your final results, at which point
you could have your final copy reviewed and signed.
All of your information stored at
LegalWills.ca
is safe and secure.
Your information is so highly encrypted that nobody has access to this
information other than yourself and your trusted Keyholders using their randomly
generated personal key. Even the owners and administrators of
LegalWills.ca
are not able to access your information due to the software
design and encryption methods used.
Note, however, that some services require temporary decryption of a member's documents
as part of the operation of providing that service.
For example, if the member wants to have their Will reviewed by one of our legal
professionals, or wants to have their documents printed and mailed to them, then
the software will automatically decrypt these documents as part of the member's
instructions to have these services performed.
All data passing from your computer to
LegalWills.ca
is authenticated and
encrypted using 256-bit "SSL encryption". This is the most advanced level
of encryption available today, and it means that any information sent from your
computer is scrambled in a way which makes it completely unintelligible if
intercepted. When you are on a secure section within the web
site, a padlock will appear on your web browser.
This is your assurance that the encryption is in place and that you are
communicating across a secure link.
Furthermore,
LegalWills.ca
uses an industry standard high security
streaming-encryption algorithm known as "RSA" to encrypt all of your information
before it is stored online. To give you a feeling for the level of
security provided by this encryption, it has been estimated that with the most
efficient algorithms known to date, it would take a computer operating at 1
million instructions per second over 300 quintillion years (that's 3 with 20
zeros behind it!) to break the encryption. That's several trillion times longer
than the age of the Earth.
All of our data is securely stored in a highly encrypted format on database
servers. To protect against catastrophic data loss, daily backups are
performed on each of our servers. Hence, if
any one of our servers experienced technical difficulties, the data would not be
at risk.
Furthermore, physical protection of our primary systems includes:
- Fire detection and fire suppression systems with dry pipe pre-action
sprinkler systems
- N + 1 redundant power supplies, providing dual power feeds and backup
batteries, water coolant systems and generators
- N + 1 redundant climate control, providing primary and backup chiller
units, cooling towers, and water storage
- Local network operations center (NOC) for monitoring all data center
operations
- 24x7 monitoring and support of network connection and server
availability
- 24x7 uniformed guard service with interior and exterior closed-circuit
television surveillance
- Electronic access at all data center entrances, including biometric hand
scanners
- Electronic key management systems and individually keyed cabinets
As you can see, we take the security and privacy of all of our member
information very seriously.
Services such as MyFuneral™,
MyLifeLocker™,
MyVault™,
and MyMessages™ do not create legal documents and
make no assumptions about your country of residence.
We have worked extensively with lawyers in Canada to ensure that the legal
documents created by the MyWill™,
MyExpatWill™,
MyPowerOfAttorney™ and
MyLivingWill™ services are up to date
with the laws in all of the provinces in
Canada, including: Alberta,
British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador,
Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Nunavut, Ontario, Prince Edward Island,
Québec,
Saskatchewan, and Yukon.
Hence, our
services can be used to generate legal documents in any Canadian Province or Territory.
If you have any doubts about the legal standing of any documents in your
jurisdiction, feel free to seek legal counsel in your area to have your
documents reviewed.
There is a considerable amount of information included in the on-line help of
the MyLivingWill™ wizard. This will answer most of the common
questions regarding the steps included in creating your own Advance Directives.
For information about the other services available, or about
LegalWills.ca
in general, you can browse this website or send an email to
[email protected].
We will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Create your Living Will right now using the MyLivingWill™ wizard
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