9 Conversations Virginia Families Put Off Until an Emergency Forces Them

A national estate planning report from Trust & Will, released this year, found that 42% of Americans wouldn’t know what to do if a family member died today.

These are the conversations Virginia families put off until an emergency forces them.

Note: This is general information, not legal, financial, or medical advice. Laws, forms, and requirements are subject to change.

1. Naming a Health Care Agent

A health care agent is the person Virginia law lets make medical decisions for someone who no longer can, and many families put off choosing that person for years.

Under Virginia’s Health Care Decisions Act, that choice is supposed to be written into an advance directive before a crisis hits, not decided in a hallway.

Without a signed directive, doctors turn to a list set by state law instead: A guardian first, then a spouse, then children and other relatives in descending order.

A hospital that can’t find a signed directive falls back to whoever that list puts first.

That’s not who you’d pick.

Nationally, Pew Research Center found only 31% of adults have created a living will or advance health care directive at all.

Naming an agent in that document is what keeps the decision out of a stranger’s hands.

The gap doesn’t close.

You can file a signed directive with the state’s advance directive registry, so a hospital can pull it up instead of guessing.

2. Signing a Power of Attorney

A power of attorney gives someone the legal right to handle your money and property if you can’t, and Virginia doesn’t require a court’s involvement to set it up.

Virginia adopted its current power of attorney law in 2010.

It makes every power of attorney durable by default.

That means it keeps working even after the person who signed it becomes incapacitated.

Signing a power of attorney takes a notary and a few minutes, nothing more.

No judge is required.

Even so, Trust & Will’s 2026 national survey found that just 11% of Americans have signed a financial power of attorney.

Without a signed power of attorney, paying a parent’s mortgage or selling a car during a medical crisis typically means going to a circuit court.

The court then appoints a guardian or conservator instead.

That process runs through a judge, not a kitchen table.

3. Writing a Will

A will decides who in the family gets what when you die, and Pew Research Center’s research found just 32% of U.S. adults have written one.

Virginia’s intestate succession law fills that gap automatically.

It doesn’t always divide things the way people assume.

No will means no say.

A surviving spouse inherits the whole estate only when every child in the family is also that spouse’s child.

When one child comes from an earlier relationship, a third of the estate goes to the spouse and the rest splits among the children.

With no spouse and no children, the estate moves to parents, then siblings, then more distant relatives in order.

Some of them are people the family hasn’t spoken to in years.

That order comes straight from Virginia’s descent and distribution law, and it applies whether or not anyone in the family agrees with it.

4. Deciding on Resuscitation Wishes

A Durable DNR order (short for Do-Not-Resuscitate) is the medical order that tells emergency responders whether to attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) if your heart or breathing stops.

Pew Research Center found only half of adults with an aging parent say that parent has told them what they’d want done in a medical emergency.

It only works if a physician has signed the order before the emergency happens.

By then, it’s too late.

The state calls its version a POST form (short for Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment).

State health regulations treat it as part of the same Durable DNR framework doctors and emergency crews already recognize.

The form has to follow the patient, not sit in a drawer at home.

It travels from a nursing home to an ambulance to a hospital.

Emergency medical services (EMS) crews can honor it whether they’re holding the original, a legible copy, or an approved bracelet.

Without a signed order on file, Virginia law directs EMS personnel to attempt resuscitation on anyone in cardiac or respiratory arrest, whatever family members say in the moment.

5. Long-Term Care Preferences

Long-term care preferences mean deciding, before an emergency, where you’d want to live if you could no longer manage stairs, cooking, or driving safely.

Pew’s research also found that only 44% of parents 65 and older have discussed this with their adult children, the lowest of the topics Pew asked about.

Funeral wishes came up far more often, at 68%.

Living arrangements finished last.

Virginia’s No Wrong Door network, run through 25 Area Agencies on Aging, exists to help families sort through options once someone suddenly can’t live alone.

It works faster when a family already knows what their relative wants, instead of guessing from a hospital corridor.

6. Funeral and Burial Wishes

The conversation about funeral and burial wishes comes with a local twist. State law doesn’t default to a strict family hierarchy the way people expect.

Nationally, Pew Research Center found that just 20% of adults have made arrangements for their funeral or burial.

You can name someone to handle your funeral arrangements in a signed, notarized document, and Virginia law gives that person priority over everyone else.

The catch is timing.

That document has to reach the funeral home within 48 hours of it receiving your remains, or the priority doesn’t apply.

Without that designation, any next of kin defined under Virginia law, not just a spouse, can step in and make the calls.

Nobody automatically outranks anybody else.

When relatives disagree, a Virginia circuit court decides who’s in charge by weighing the decedent’s wishes and each relative’s closeness, not a fixed order of blood relation.

7. Default Caregiver

Family caregiving isn’t rare. More than 1.5 million people provide unpaid care for an adult relative or friend across the state.

AARP (the nonprofit that advocates for older Americans) has measured the scale of that work.

It adds up to nearly 1.4 billion hours a year, worth $27 billion if someone had to pay for it.

AARP’s count doesn’t ask who agreed to the role in advance, only who ended up doing it.

Much of that care lands on one person by default, not by agreement.

It’s usually whoever lives closest.

A sibling two states away can assume someone local will handle everything, while the local sibling assumes the same thing about somebody else.

That mismatch shows up fastest during a hospital stay, when someone has to be reachable, present, and available on short notice.

8. Financial Account Access

Financial account access is where a good power of attorney meets a bank’s paperwork, and the two don’t always move at the same speed in an emergency.

Virginia law lets a bank or brokerage ask for extra certification before honoring a power of attorney.

A business that wrongly refuses a valid power of attorney can face liability under state law.

Trust & Will’s 2026 survey found that 21% of people with a will or trust rarely or never review their documents once they’re signed.

A bank can be the first to catch a power of attorney nobody has checked in years.

That review can take days a family doesn’t have when a mortgage payment or a medication refill is due.

Joint accounts don’t fix everything.

A joint account lets a co-owner pay bills, but it doesn’t reach an account held only in one person’s name, which is where many retirement and investment accounts sit.

Sorting that out ahead of time beats finding out at the bank counter.

9. Document Location

A signed will, power of attorney, and advance directive only help a family that can find them.

A circuit court clerk can’t probate a will nobody can locate, no matter how carefully it was written.

That family ends up in the same intestate process as a family that never made a will at all.

The paperwork existed.

Nobody could reach it.

A fireproof box in a closet does no good if only one person alive knows the combination.

Telling at least one other adult where those documents live takes minutes and costs nothing.

Virginia’s Small Estate Act can speed things along for an estate worth $75,000 or less.

An heir can skip formal probate with a signed affidavit, but only if the family knows the option exists.

That same Trust & Will survey found the 42% figure rises to 56% among people with no estate planning documents at all.

The same figure drops to as low as 18% among those who already have a trust in place.