Prenups, or pre-nuptial agreements, don't always have the most positive connotation. 

While they are legal agreements entered into by couples before marriage — often to keep finances separate despite being otherwise legally joined  — they can be a touchy subject for couples starting to build a life together.

But that stigma seems to be fading away. A new report from The Harris Poll said that this year, 15% of U.S. adults surveyed signed a prenup, which is up from just 3% in 2010. It also found that 35% of unmarried people say they're likely to sign a prenup in the future.

In the Americas, prenups go back to 17th century Canada, when French colonist men married women who came to the country with financial assistance from King Louis XIV. These women were so highly sought after that they were able to convince their husbands to sign prenups. This came at a time when men outnumbered women, so women had a leg up. Eventually that gender ratio evened out, and prenups went away.

They got popular again in the U.S. much later. A 1970 Florida case Posner v Posner ruled that prenups should be a standard practice.

One big possible factor in their usage today is the fact that millennials now have more debt than previous generations. One survey found that nearly three quarters of millennials have over $100,000 in debt on average, not including mortgages. 

The most common debt is credit card debt followed by student loans. There's also medical debt and personal loans. 

Prenups can protect your partner from taking on your debt in the case of death of divorce. In some states, your spouse can be held accountable for all of your debt acquired during the marriage.

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Kelly Chang Rickert is a family law attorney in California who specializes in prenups, and she sees debt come up in divorce cases all the time.  

"It's not unusual for me to have a divorce where one side has a Neiman Marcus card and charged up $70,000, and the other side... they are responsible for half the debt because it was acquired during the marriage," Chang Rickert said.

But the breakdown of who's responsible for what differs from state to state. For instance, some states are community property states, meaning unless you sign a prenup, everything acquired during the marriage must be split 50/50. That's how things work in Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.

In other states, laws differ. There can be different rules around what makes prenups enforceable. For example, in Connecticut there's a specific window of time between when the prenup is presented and when the marriage happens for it to hold up. So, it's important to see what a state requires beforehand.

Another reason more people could be getting prenups is because they're getting married later in life and have more assets to protect coming into the marriage. According to Pew, in 2019 the average age a man first got married was 30, and for women it was 28. That's three years later for both men and women compared to 2003 and four years later than 1987.

"These days, a lot of people work for themselves," Chang Rickert said. "If you're a social media influencer or you're an artist or you're a writer, a lot of people make money off their creative efforts. So if they have a business coming into the marriage, a lot of them don't want to share that in case it doesn't work out."

This leads to the question of how finances are split. This determines what a prenup could look like. In the 70s and 80s, it was common practice to put all your money into shared accounts with your spouse. But over the past several years, the number of married couples who keep some of their finances separate has risen.

Experts say if couples have a joint account for things they share, they can opt to keep everything else separate, and in the case of divorce, they'll only have to worry about dividing the joint account. But it's important to note that separate accounts won't stay separate unless a prenup is signed stating that.  

"Even if you don't have a prenup, you kind of do: It's called the law," Chang Rickert said. "So if you don't have a prenup, you're just going by what your state law says. California says community property, so your debt is my debt. That's what the state law says. So if you don't like that, then you should craft your own."

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Rickert Chang recommends getting a prenup ideally a year before your wedding. She also points out a few pros of prenups. For one, the stereotypical scenario we see in movies where a rich guy asks his fiancé to sign a prenup — it could actually be a good thing.  

"If you were smart about it, and the guy's like, 'I want you to sign a prenup saying I don't want community,' then what you could do is you can negotiate it," Chang Rickert said. "You could be like, 'Fine, I won't touch your stuff, but in lieu of that, I would like 50,000 a year or 1,000, 100,000 a year,' and that way you can negotiate, and you can actually get money by agreeing to sign a prenup."

There's also certain professions where it's strongly encouraged to protect the other person. 

"Definitely lawyers or doctors, I think you should always get prenup," Chang Rickert said. "Not just only because it's my business — I don't want you taking half of it, but also it's a business that I can get sued on. So, I would like to protect you from any lawsuits that I might get."

As prenups have become more common, more people have dug into this topic on social media platforms like TikTok. Chang Rickert has an account of her own where she educates people on prenups to help break down myths and stigmas, including that they aren't just for rich people and not just in case of divorce.

Now, there aren't necessarily more divorces now. CDC data shows that divorces declined between 2000 and 2020. 

However in the case of a divorce, not signing a prenup could really pile on to the cost of divorce, which can already be pretty high, costing between $15,000 to $20,000 on average.

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You've likely heard of a birth doula. That's a person who provides physical and emotional support to a new mother during pregnancy and childbirth. The same exists for people leaving this world. It's called a death doula and it's growing in popularity.

In American culture, Cindy Kaufman says death has often been seen as taboo. However, for her, it’s intimate and peaceful. She realized caring for somebody in their final moments of life on earth was her calling when her grandmother died.

“I spent the last few days of her life sitting bedside with her," Kaufman said. "I was very comfortable in that space, and I noticed other people were not comfortable in that space.”

Kaufman is now a certified end-of-life doula, also called a death doula. She says she serves as a companion and advocate for someone facing the end of their life. She helps them design a vigil plan for their final hours.

“If they have pets, do they want the pets up in bed with them?" Kaufman said. "Do they want a particular music playing? Is there a favorite scent that we could have in the room so they can smell the lavender that they love? Or is there some things that they would like to have someone read to them, whether it's something spiritual or some poetry or passages from a book? And then we talk about at the moment when they take their last breath. What type of ritual or offering could we do for those who are present?”

Kaufman says end-of-life doulas also play a big role in the lives of caregivers. She assisted Jeff Fountain after his wife Barbara was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“They fill a gap that the medical people aren't really designed to fill,” Fountain said.

Fountain says Kaufman helped normalize the process of dying so he wasn’t afraid to embrace it. He believes the profession is growing because the attitude toward death is shifting.

“When I was a kid and somebody died, it was the most morose, sad, awful, painful thing," Fountain said. "You know when people would get together for a funeral and everything? And now it's very different. The people are happy for them.”

Happiness is exactly what Mickey Weems wants his loved ones to feel when his time comes. He has stage four terminal prostate cancer and has selected a doula to help guide him through legal, medically assisted suicide. Another term for it is medical aid in dying.

“When it comes to the point where I can no longer take care of myself, I have the turquoise bag," Weems said. "And in the turquoise bag is the substance that will take me to the next world. Whenever I choose, I can take it. And I have a death doula, her name is Joy Rodriguez, who will help me go through the whole thing to make sure I do it right and this is smooth sailing”

Mickey has passed multiple dates the doctor has given him to live.

“He says that I'm surviving by force of will, and he may have a point, but I think it's something else," Weems said. "I'm also surviving because of the love of my friends.”

The love of friends and family is probably what most people would ask for in their final days. That’s what end-of-life doulas aim to accomplish, and the profession is rapidly growing.

According to the National End of Life Doula Alliance, there are nearly 1,300 death doulas across the country. There were only about two hundred in 2019.

“When I did my training in 2017, there were just a handful of training programs," Kaufman said. "This field seems to have kind of taken off and there are many training programs now.”

While death doulas aren’t currently covered by insurance, Kaufman says many have sliding pay scales so anyone who wants it, can have it.
 

CINCINNATI —

Jerry Mills is a die-hard Bengals fan.

Ed Fernandes cheers for the Raiders.

Before Saturday, the two were strangers. Now, they share a special bond.

"I believe God put me there for a reason so that man could have another day of living," Mills said.

Mills had just wrapped up an afternoon of tailgating.

He was on his way in to Paul Brown Stadium when he saw a Raiders fan on the ground. People in the crowd thought he was having a seizure.

"I look at him and, "I'm like, 'that doesn't look like a seizure activity.' I look for a pulse, he didn't have a pulse, and I was like, 'I'm going to start CPR right now,'" Mills said.

Mills, who is from Cincinnati and a former Covington firefighter, currently works as an emergency room nurse in Dallas.

"Being a nurse for the past three years, I've always told everybody I work with, 'Look, we're not losing nobody on my shift,'" Mills said.

That's how he felt outside PBS Saturday.

"I'm sitting there telling him, 'I'm not losing you today.' And so, the other nurse was helping and two minutes later, he got a pulse," Mills said.

But then Mills said he lost it again. Mills said the other nurse who jumped in to help also acted selflessly.

"She took the guy's shirt, put it across his face and started to breathe into his mouth," Mills said.

The two nurses continued to do what they had to to keep the Raiders fan alive until Cincinnati firefighters arrived.

On Tuesday, Mills learned the name of the man he saved, Ed Fernandes of Dayton, who had planned on attending the game with his grandson, Noah.

Noah told WLWT that his grandfather is still at UC Medical Center with blockages in his heart. He is scheduled to have surgery Thursday. Fernandes' family said they can't put into words how grateful they are for Mills.

A New Orleans family breathed a huge sigh of relief just one day after their patriarch Erroll Windon was released from a hospital in Baton Rouge, following a hard battle with COVID-19.

Windon is a COVID-19 breakthrough case. The 71-year-old is fully vaccinated and spent about 10 days inside of the hospital.

"We feel that the vaccine coupled with his faith, our faith, and prayer gave him a fighting chance," said Stacey Windon-Matthews, Erroll Windon's daughter.

Erroll explained his condition when first arriving at the hospital.

"When I first got here, the oxygen was not working. They had to move me to ICU," Erroll Windon said.

Members of Erroll's family said he has high blood pressure and is borderline diabetic.

"They said you will probably have to go on a ventilator. I said, 'No doc I want to talk to my wife.' He said, 'Call her right now,'" Erroll said.

For his entire family, along with his daughter Stacey and son-in-law Kenneth, the hope was always that he would pull through.

"When I heard, it made my heart drop. But deep in my heart, I felt this vaccine will give him a fighting chance," Stacey said.

Erroll's grandson, Kenneth Matthews III, had a message played to his grandfather while still in grave condition.

Stacey said, "He sent it to my dad. And four hours later, he got out of ICU."

The couple said it was the prayer of their son and prayers from hundreds of people around the country that helped Erroll recover. Another huge help was that Erroll was vaccinated.

In fact, Erroll said doctors told him it was the vaccine that kept him alive.

"He said, 'That vaccine kept you alive. It was fighting for you,'" Erroll said.

"If it were not for that vaccine, he would not have made it at the age of 71 with underlying health conditions," Stacey said.

After witnessing part of the horror of COVID-19, the family has a message for those still on the fence about taking the shot.

"People take the flu shot and all of these other shots. We do not know what is in them but they help. If you can get vaccinated, which is really easy now. Do it. It saved my father-in-law and I feel it gives me a sense of protection," said Kenneth Matthews Junior, Erroll's son-in-law.

Erroll and his family wanted to thank all of the health care heroes that helped him and continue to help him on his journey to full recovery, including his own son-in-law and daughter-in-law who is a nurse at the very overwhelmed hospital where he was admitted.

BEDFORD, Va. — Millions of people are scouring the internet every day, digging deep into genealogy and learning about the generations before them. One woman has found that behind every name lies an important story.

A cemetery might not be a place that comes to mind when thinking about healing.

But for Alicia Williams, that’s exactly what Bedford, Virginia’s Longwood Cemetery is. It’s her therapy.

“It’s just more of an underground community, I mean, who hangs out in cemeteries with dead people all day," Williams said.

She recently went through a tumultuous divorce and a battle for her children.

“I had not a soul in the world that made me feel like I was good enough to exist in the world," Williams said.

This place, filled with souls Williams can only feel, became her cleanse.

“Coming out here, it was like, this stone has 120 years of dirt on it and I made it clean, so why can’t I do the same thing for myself? For my soul?” Williams said.

For almost a year, she’s been cleaning gravestones to conserve what’s there and bring these stories back to life.

“Once I get their name out and see their dates, then I can start to research them and investigative them and some of them sadly, there is not much to find out," Williams said. “Which to me makes it even more important to clean that marker because, in a lot of instances, it’s the only record that that person existed at all.”

For many, there is much more to discover. It’s why the genealogy trend is picking up. For example, Ancestry had 15 million people in its DNA network in 2019, and in just two years, that number grew to over 20 million.

Joshua Taylor, the president of the New York Genealogical and Biological Society says the accessibility factor of records and information has changed the way people approach it.

“Those are individual stories, and they are also a collective community story," Taylor said. “Getting started is easier than ever before because you can access records at home, online, in 10 minutes that could take you ten months to find.”

It’s also why eyes are glued on Williams' work.

“We are in many ways, the current generation is the most documented generation ever. In photographs, in audio or video," Taylor said.

“We live in a time where people are very passionate about restoring the historical narrative and giving a voice to people that didn’t have a voice.”

Her cleaning methods and efforts to conserve have gone viral on TikTok.

“For the most part, the thing that surprises me and still to this day, it’s been nine months now, it’s been overwhelmingly positive," Williams said.

After cleaning, she researches and discovers stories buried beneath these graves. Decades later, Williams is resurfacing this history and trying to keep their legacies alive.

“If we don’t tell as many individual stories as possible, we’re never going to get an accurate picture," Williams said. “I feel like it’s giving me the courage to slowly start to tell more of my story.”

CHICAGO, Ill. – Shortages of ventilators and personal protective equipment mean many healthcare providers are going into battle unarmed. It’s sparked a heated debate behind closed doors about balancing efforts to save patients versus exposing doctors and nurses to the virus.

Who lives? Who dies? Who gets priority to a ventilator? All complex questions health providers are being confronted with.

“We've never had this situation before. This is unprecedented,” said Craig Klugman a professor of bioethics at DePaul University in Chicago.

Bioethicists say widespread infection, protective equipment and ventilator shortages are creating unique ethical dilemmas for healthcare workers.

“We will start to care for the person who is at risk of dying first,” explained Dr. Ricardo Gonzalez-Fisher, a surgical oncologist who teaches healthcare ethics at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “But if we have more people than resources that we have to. Try to save those that are savable.”

“The obligation for a healthcare provider to treat the patient doesn't necessarily have a limit,” said Klugman.

In Spain, some 13,000 medical workers have been infected. In Italy, more than 60 workers have died since the outbreak began.

“It's not just their life. They can assume this risk for themselves,” said Klugman. “If they don’t have the right equipment, they also have the risk of infecting other patients, other healthcare providers. Their family.”

Some health systems around the country are reportedly discussing unilateral do-not-resuscitate policies. It’s something that was debated during the Ebola outbreak in 2015.

Determining who gets treatment and who does not is something Klugman says is taken very seriously.

“We think about it very carefully and with great deliberation.”

In Italy, that meant denying some care to the elderly in favor of the young.

Klugman says in Illinois, a pandemic flu plan created a decade ago includes care procedures built around ethical frameworks and algorithms that help decide who should for example, get a ventilator.

“We have to consider things like what is our most important value. So, the value that we're considering is maximizing the number of years of life that we can save,” said Klugman.

Ultimately, a balance must be struck.

“You have to make sure that the benefit of the patient overrides the harm or the risk that you're getting in,” said Dr. Gonzalez-Fisher.

Otherwise, bioethicists say there may not be enough first responders to treat the infected.

“When you call 9-1-1 because your loved one can't breathe, there will be nobody coming. That's the worst-case scenario,” said Klugman.