Tending to Endings (eighteen)
A friend recently sent me a link to an end-of-life planning guide, a checklist her daughter had passed along to her. It came to her the way these things often do—because her daughter had lost someone and then had to try to retrieve all of the necessary information to take care of loose ends which involved figuring out accounts and passwords and estate paperwork and utility providers. It is often a daunting project full of frustration.
It made me think of that question asked on medical dramas: Are your affairs in order? To which even after all my talking and writing about tending to endings, I can still only answer, some of them.
I was grateful for the list. A stay-at-home order during a global pandemic seemed a very good time for end-of-life planning. I didn’t want our kids to have to wade through everything or guess at what we would want.
Then, I opened up the webpage and saw twenty-six different templates, most requiring me to gather information from various locations. I looked at the cabinets in my office and thought of the information stored on various bank and institutional websites or in boxes in the garage. I looked at the blinking curser on the fillable form and then I closed the file.
This isn’t the first time I’ve begun this project. In fact, last year when my mom was sick it started to seem rather important. None of it more so than my will, which I had not revised since I was a single parent 18 years ago, which means I’ve blown past at least five of the suggested times experts say you revise your will.
I had coffee with a friend who is a lawyer, “Do John and I need a lawyer, or can we just write out what we want?” I asked. “We don’t have much.”
“Have you and John adopted each other’s kids?” she asked.
“In our hearts, we have.” Which is pretty much how I like to do things, with all of my heart and saving the pesky legal details for last. John and I didn’t even wed until five years together. By then our lives and families were very much married in by practicalities and commitment and love.
“You need a will,” she said. And then she described a scenario that involved a car accident in which one of us dies and the other is in a coma and then dies a week or two later. The point being, without a good will, we run the risk of inadvertently disinheriting one set of kids.
That seemed pretty important. I went home and told John, and we talked about it and agreed we needed to get on it. Then another year passed.
There is something about having to distill life’s most emotional transitions into legal language that stumps me. These feel like sacred decisions that for the sake of legal clarity have to be worded as though we are in a courtroom.
And some of my trouble has to do with how I work and think. When writing, for example, I lean towards what some would call an organic process. Others might call it a mess.
There are writers who start with structure and then flesh out their ideas. They find outlines helpful. They think the academic five-paragraph-essay demystifies the writing process. They understand and actually use bullet journals. My journal, by comparison, is a combination of a computer file in Scrivener, a soft leather-bound book on my shelf, a spiral that also contains to-do lists, and index cards I carry when walking then fold and toss in a box (with thanks Anne Lamott).
I begin every project with far too much material and I have to write and write before I even know what I really want to say. Only then can I pare away what doesn’t belong and then rebuild again.
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. –William Stafford, A Way of Writing
And so a fillable form with its blinking boxes doesn’t really work as a starting point for me. Not for something important like a will or a death planning guide.
Instead, on the second week of our stay-home order during the coronavirus pandemic, I sat down with John to talk about what we wanted to happen to our estate if something happened to one of us. He is 64. I am 55. We have five grown children between us. The conversation was long overdue.
photo credit: Marcy Midnight
Each of us and all of our kids are are generous. We share well and we all prioritize many things above finances. John and I love and admire and respect the kids we brought into the world and the ones who became family later. We wanted things to be equal. Still, the more we talked the more we saw that even a goal of being fair isn’t always simple. Not from every angle or given every variable.
Our family lacks the symmetry of the Brady Bunch. My sons were six when John and I first got together, and John has helped to raise them. John’s daughters were adults and living very independently when John and I met. Karris, Amy, and Marcy are my family, but I didn’t parent them. Our kids love and admire and enjoy each other, but they were not all raised as siblings in the same home.
John and I talked through things and then drafted a letter that included not only information about property, but the basics of our advanced directives and who our executor would be and where we would keep more specific instructions. We created an In-Case-of-Death (ICOD) folder that is still in progress and that we will continue to add to. We included a section in the letter about how each of us felt about death. And life, too. It included quite a bit about how we felt about them.
We invited discussion. At first I worried. What if we explained something poorly, what if we offended someone, what if we had missed something, what if what we thought was fair seemed unfair to one or all of them? What if they thought we were weird for sending such a personal letter? What if it caused discord?
And then, of course, it came to me that any of those things would be fine. They would be fine because we are still here and we could listen and talk them through, which is so much better than having that response after one or both of us are gone.
Our plans are imperfect, and we are far from done. But I feel much, much better for having started the conversation and the paperwork. And really, can something called affairs, ever truly be in order? We call them that because they are in flux and hard to pin down with a better, more specific word. Our affairs don’t just mean the numbers, but the tasks undone and promises made and amends still owed and the details of our life which is still in progress.
At first what received back from our kids was crickets. At least for a couple days. Then, eventually, from each, sometimes with a bit of prodding, acknowledgement and appreciation for taking the time and being clear. And kindness.
When I talked to one of my sons, Dylan, he said, “Yes it all seems fine. It’s hard to think about, it seems a bit morbid. Maybe that’s not the right word.”
“I think of death as natural, though. It will happen to all of us.”
“Yes, I know. But just because it happens to everyone doesn’t mean it’s not serious.”
And I knew what he meant, and I was grateful even that he saw it that way. It is serious, maybe even sacred.
Sometimes I wonder if we avoid conversations about dying as much out of fear of intimacy as fear of death. Our wishes surrounding death and our anxieties, too, speak to what we hold most dear, what we don’t want to lose, what part of our heart we hope will continue to live.
More Resources:
If you are interested in the list of tools my friend sent to help organize end-of-life documents you can find them on the at livingsmartguides.
If you would like a more organic method of thinking through end-of-life matters, I found these questions helpful in getting started:
- Who do I want to make decisions if I can’t make medical decisions for myself and what information do they need?
- Do I have any unfinished relationship work? What to I want people to know?
- Who will take responsibility of pets, children or other dependents.
- What happens to the property when I die?
- What happens to my body when I die?
- Where is everything and how do people access it?
- What spiritual practices or end-of-life services do I want?
- Do I want a legacy project or memorial fund?
A book I’ve mentioned before that has helped me a great deal and that includes a planning guide is Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying, by Sallie Tisdale.
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