When a friend of the family became gravely ill, I brought the subject up with my father. He had his first heart attack at the age of 42. It had been 8 years since the attack and I know that he did not like to talk about these things because he had issues with his own mortality. I just mentioned how frantically our friends were trying to get things in order and I would not like to have to do the same. I told him were my husband and I keep our living wills and important papers and asked where his were. He did tell me, unfortunately he died 4 years later and had done remodeling work in the mean time and there was still the mad search for papers. I knew what he kept them in, just not where it was located.