Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 201D · Massachusetts
Massachusetts: how to sign your advance directive
Massachusetts has no statutory living will and no statutory form at all. Chapter 201D is a health care proxy statute and nothing else. There is no prescribed document to download, because the Commonwealth never wrote one.
Why WearableDocs
In Massachusetts, the directive has to be found
It does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate — but a document no one can produce when asked for is a document that fails in practice. WearableDocs puts the signed directive on a card you carry and a page that opens in seconds, instead of a phone call to whoever might know which drawer.
You answer a few questions — your name, your state, and what you refuse — and WearableDocs builds the directive. Print it, sign it, upload it. Changing your answers later is part of the plan, so nothing is locked in.
What Massachusetts asks
What you need to sign in Massachusetts
- Instruments
- Health care proxy only. No statutory living will, and no statutory form. Instructions typically sit in a separate free-writing Personal Directive
- Form
- No statutory form exists
- Execution
- Two witnesses, no notary
- May not witness
- Your agent
- May not be your agent
- A facility operator, administrator or employee — unless related to you
- Copy rule
- None found
- Delivery
- No — the directive does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate.
- Registry
- None
- Age
- 18
- Patient objection
- §6 — the principal's objection prevails unless a court orders otherwise
- Carried device
- Nothing for the proxy. A commercial "I Have a Health Care Proxy" wallet card circulates — a private product, not a statutory device
- Citation
- Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 201D
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Massachusetts actually recognizes
That sounds like a gap and functions like a freedom. With no statutory form, there is also no formality to fail: no witness count the statute demands, no notarisation requirement, no prescribed language. The proxy is valid if it meets ch. 201D, and ch. 201D is short.
The instructions take a different route than in any other state. Massachusetts practice is a Personal Directive — a free-writing statement of your wishes, referenced by the proxy rather than stapled to it. Two documents, but only one of them has a statute behind it, and the page should not blur which is which.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Massachusetts
The only card a Massachusetts patient is likely to carry is sold by a hospital and required by no statute. Ch. 201D has no device provision and no copy-equivalence rule, so nothing about the proxy gains force from being carried.
What circulates in Massachusetts instead is a commercial wallet card — the "I Have a Health Care Proxy" card, sold or distributed by hospitals and advocacy groups. It is worth being precise about what that is: a private product, not a statutory device. No Massachusetts statute says a card does anything. It works the way a note in a wallet works — someone finds it, reads it, and knows who to call.
That is a real function, and it is also exactly the function WearableDocs performs, with a code instead of a phone number and the document itself at the other end. Massachusetts is a page where the honest claim is entirely about findability, with no statutory hook to lean on and none claimed.