That Conversation

[scarlettina]

It's been a helluva year. With death and serious illness in my social circle, and my striking a half century in age, it seemed like it was time for me to do something enormously adult and, frankly, quite sobering: get my affairs in order. That's the euphemism many of us use for writing a will and thinking about The End. I was scheduled to have a

Comments

[livingdeadpan]

Yeah, we did all that while Ellen was cooking. Her brother is our executor, being the only sibling among us, but ... the idea of not asking your executor first seems amazingly rude.

[scarlettina]

I think that, in my mother's case, it wasn't rudeness but rather a fear of confrontation (with my aunt, with whom these conversations were always a confrontation, never a collaboration), and a fear of mortality. My father died only 13 years into their marriage, a relatively young man. By the time my mother had the emotional werewithal to think about these things, I suspect she was already no longer healthy and scared to pieces about what was yet to come. I think she did the best she could under the circumstances, but obviously, it would have been better if she'd asked first.

My issue, frankly, is my aunt laying the guilt on me about it. I was 19, a freshly-minted orphan; I had no idea there even was a will, and I had no idea what was to come next. No one talked to me about anything. If my mother didn't handle her will well, my aunt handled her relationship with me (in this as in many other ways) much, much more poorly.

[shelly_rae]

Good work. Making a will may be hard but dealing with all that without a will is much more complicated. Which reminds me.....
Anon

[holyoutlaw]

Thanks for the links re further information.

[mabfan]

This is an excellent post. As you know, I've been dealing with the same thoughts in a matter-of-fact way since my father died when I was 20. And we have our plans set to take care of the children when the time comes.

As this is a public post, may I share it with others?

[scarlettina]

Absolutely. That was part of the point. People need to know and think about this stuff.

[mabfan]

I have shared it on FB. Thank you.

[joycemocha]

We wrote wills a long time ago, when our son was very young. After dealing with both sets of parents dying and seeing the differing reactions of our families, we wanted to make sure that our wishes about how he was to be reared, who would have custody of our son should both of us die, and what was to be done with our estate would be handled in a sane manner (IOW, there were people in our families we wanted nowhere near our son or our money). Doesn't hurt that I spent several years working as a paralegal and had taken some classes about family issues, probate, and estate planning.

In the same tone, once he became an adult, we then revised said wills. The other piece of maintaining a will is that you need to update them as circumstances change. The frequency of review will be affected by individual circumstances.

[scarlettina]

My current plan is that, absent any major life changes, I'm going to review mine once every five years. Sometimes things change without one's realizing it, so I figure a regular review is a good idea if, for no other reason than to ensure your personal views haven't changed while you weren't looking.