Age Your Way: Create a Unique Legacy

It’s your aging journey. Shouldn’t you be in charge?

That last act of our lives can last for decades. But when it comes to planning for this often-challenging time, too many of us have our heads in the sand. We know the day may come when we are no longer able to manage our lives independently due to aging, injury or illness, but still delay disclosing vital information until it’s too late. As a result, we cede control of how we live and even how we die to family members or sometimes strangers, leaving them to guess what we want going forward without the legal directives and financial resources they need to assist at this difficult time. It’s painful and unfair for everyone involved. Luckily, it’s also entirely avoidable.

Age Your Way was written to provide a solution. In this comprehensive, step-by-step guide, author Debbie Pearson, RN shows you how to apply control to your own aging process and avoid the heartbreak that can result from a lack of planning. Whether the goal is to create your own plan or to assist a loved one in a time of crisis, you’ll gain the incentive you need to move forward and a complete understanding of the steps needed to make sure information and wishes are clear, including:

• Understanding the three stages of aging and planning options for each one
• Getting the proper legal and financial information in order and available
• Documenting your unique health history and medical preferences
• Assisting a loved one in creating their own aging plan
• Making ethical decisions on behalf of someone else
• And more…

Featuring real-life stories of patients and families at every stage of the aging process, Age Your Way is more than a book—it’s a program to help you take control of your final act, document your preferences, and provide your loved ones and caregivers with the information they need to both manage your care and honor your unique wishes for living and dying.

Being a nurse is not only Debbie Pearson's life's work: it's her passion. For more than 40 years, she has dedicated herself to caring for others, first during a long career as a hospital nurse, and later as a home health care nurse. Working with patients one-on-one, connecting with each individual through sight, voice and touch, she gained a deeper understanding of what patients and families need as a result of aging, injury or illness.

Helping those people eventually became her life's work.

Realizing there was a growing and unmet need for advocacy on behalf of those who can no longer care for themselves, Debbie transitioned to case management, founding Nurses Care Management (NCM) in 2000. She and her team were often given guardianship over incapacitated individuals, and were tasked with making crucial decisions for people who were no longer able to communicate their wishes or decide what would happen next in their lives. This experience--trying to somehow unlock answers to crucial questions that were hidden inside her patients--inspired Debbie to design a simple, effective format to help people accurately gather vital information and document how they want their wishes carried out. That system became Age Your Way and The Blueprint to Age Your Way.

Today, Debbie's love for nursing has become a mission, and the powerful tools she has created are helping patients, their families and their loved ones. It's all an extension of Debbie's heartfelt belief that what lives on as our legacy is what's in the hearts and minds of the people you leave behind. Or as she herself puts it, "I want to make a difference and leave something valuable for others."

Debbie is a native of Austin, Texas and a graduate of Brackenridge Hospital School of Nursing and University of Texas School of Nursing. She has spent her entire career in her beloved Austin, where she continues to live with her husband, Hank. She has three children, eight grandchildren and a large extended family.