What happens if I become incapacitated without a power of attorney?

Your family goes to court. A conservatorship is the fallback, and it is a proceeding rather than a document.

Your family goes to court.

Without a durable power of attorney, nobody has authority to sign for you — not your spouse, not your adult children, not the person who has been handling everything for years. Banks will not take instructions. The mortgage company will not talk to them. A house cannot be sold.

The only route left is a conservatorship: a petition, a court investigator, a hearing, notice to relatives, and if the court appoints someone, ongoing supervision and periodic accountings for as long as it lasts. It is public. It is far more expensive than the documents that would have avoided it. And it is contested more often than people expect, usually by a relative who disagrees with the choice of conservator.

The two documents that prevent it

A durable power of attorney for finances. Names who signs for you financially. The word durable is the whole point: an ordinary power of attorney ends at incapacity, which is precisely the moment you need one.

An advance health care directive. Names who decides medically and records what you would want. Add a HIPAA authorization, because the right to make a decision is worth little without the right to see the chart.

They must be signed while you still have capacity

This is why they are so often too late. Capacity is judged at the moment of signing, and a family that arrives after a stroke or a diagnosis has advanced is frequently past the point where anything can be signed at all. The window closes without announcing itself.

After a diagnosis, there is often still time

A diagnosis of a progressive condition is not the end of the window; it is a warning that the window is now finite. Capacity is not all-or-nothing, and many people retain the capacity to sign these documents well after a diagnosis. That is a reason to act in the next few weeks rather than to assume it is too late.

The step everyone skips

Tell the people you named, and give them a copy. The most common failure we see is not a defective document. It is a perfectly good one in a drawer, unknown to the person named in it, while a hospital asks a question nobody in the room can answer.