aul scheier KNEW how he wanted to die long before he did: at home, with his wife and children. And last July, that’s exactly what happened. The retired dentist from Orchard Park, N.Y., a Buffalo suburb, succumbed to lung cancer in his bedroom with Lorraine, his wife of 62 years, nearby, and having spent his final days with their four grown children, Kathy, Lynn, Debbie, and Tom.

That didn’t happen by accident. Always a practical and decisive man, Paul had begun sharing his end-of-life wishes with his daughters more than a decade earlier: No ventilators, he told them; no major surgeries except to alleviate pain; no brink-of-death resuscitations. They took good notes.

So in the spring of 2013 when malignant nodules appeared in Paul’s right lung, where a large cancerous tumor had been removed a year earlier, he was ready. His doctors told Paul that he had between six and 12 months to live and that chemotherapy might buy him a little more time. Paul said no.

He knew how debilitating chemo could be. He had recently weathered a terrible infection stemming from a hernia and gallbladder operation—and he didn’t want to sign on for more pain. Better, he reasoned, to spend his remaining days playing golf, having lunch with old friends, and enjoying time with his wife and children.

“At my age, I wasn’t going to go through chemo,” he said in an interview last summer. “I felt it was getting close to my time, so why not live happily for the next six months or year? We knew what the end result was going to be anyway.”