June 3, 2013--Affairs In Order
We've been busy putting our affairs in order.
One usually does this when told, "You have three months to live and so I suggest you put your affairs in order."
I'm not sure what else this imperative involves, but to me it has always primarily been to think about what to do with my money after I, well, "pass."
I know these plans should also include saying goodbye to those you love and mending fences where long-standing disputes and hurts, when faced with imminent mortality, seem as trivial as they, in truth, always were.
For us this is far from the first time we have thought about what to do after our end. But, even though as far as we or anyone can know, we do not have just months to live, putting our affairs in order has meant figuring out, agonizing about what to do with our assets.
Neither of us have children or grandchildren--those to whom one traditionally passes along money and other assets and valuables--and so we are left to think about more complicated forms of distribution.
Easiest is to think in categories--siblings, nieces and nephews, cousins, and friends. And to think in percentages--each cousin, for example--all, in DNA terms equal, should get equal shares. But then there are cousins with whom we have lost touch and others who are as close as siblings.
This seems to make sense, but not all are the same age (should we in general "privilege" youth over age or the reverse?) and not all are in similar economic circumstances. We are, after all, talking ultimately about money, and so shouldn't we take need into consideration?
But then what will they think--those who receive less, even though they are as familiarly close to us as the other first cousins who we think are less well off--what will be their memories of us when they learn about our dispositions? Won't some, not understanding our thinking and perhaps, then focused on themselves, feel we literally shortchanged them?
Of course there are others, closer in the family tree than cousin, who present similar complications. And friends as well.
In the face of this struggle, Rona says, "We did the best we could and we were as honest about our feelings as we were able to be; and since we'll be gone, again how to put this, who cares?"
Well, we do care.
This process may be about assets and cash but it also about our legacy--how we will be regarded when we have departed. We have tried to live well and at the same time be "good people," attempting to act in ways that avoid making these contradictions in terms; but we also care what people think about us now and when we are in the great hereafter.
Again Rona says, "Look how many people we know who years after a sister or uncle or parent died still nurture hurts and resentments about the departed's bequests. Don't we know someone, a cousin, who 30 years after the fact is still grumbling about a little table that an aunt 'promised' her but somehow wound up in either someone else's hands or at the Salvation Army? And don't we also know someone who thought a bank account had been set aside for her but never materialized?"
So we have been struggling with this; and though we have completed the latest iteration or our wills, neither of us is sleeping well. We wake up in sweats, fretting about how much is enough, what might be too much (if there is such a thing), and what will Cousin X feel about what we plan to do in regard to Cousin Z.
As complicated and difficult as all of this is is the upsetting bottom-line feeling--that what we are doing is about what will become of our assets after we both are dead. Be it tomorrow, later today, or decades from now.
Still, there is no denying that this process, the thoughts that are consuming us, are much more than about what will happen or about what people will think of us after we have left life behind--
This putting-our-affairs-in-order is chipping away at the emotional protection provided by our (and everyone's) ability to deny death. As psychologist and philosopher Ernest Becker some years ago wrote, the ability to deny death is what makes living, even civilization possible.
And this wills-and-estates business is making it harder to cling to the ability to do the denying that is essential to the living.
One usually does this when told, "You have three months to live and so I suggest you put your affairs in order."
I'm not sure what else this imperative involves, but to me it has always primarily been to think about what to do with my money after I, well, "pass."
I know these plans should also include saying goodbye to those you love and mending fences where long-standing disputes and hurts, when faced with imminent mortality, seem as trivial as they, in truth, always were.
For us this is far from the first time we have thought about what to do after our end. But, even though as far as we or anyone can know, we do not have just months to live, putting our affairs in order has meant figuring out, agonizing about what to do with our assets.
Neither of us have children or grandchildren--those to whom one traditionally passes along money and other assets and valuables--and so we are left to think about more complicated forms of distribution.
Easiest is to think in categories--siblings, nieces and nephews, cousins, and friends. And to think in percentages--each cousin, for example--all, in DNA terms equal, should get equal shares. But then there are cousins with whom we have lost touch and others who are as close as siblings.
This seems to make sense, but not all are the same age (should we in general "privilege" youth over age or the reverse?) and not all are in similar economic circumstances. We are, after all, talking ultimately about money, and so shouldn't we take need into consideration?
But then what will they think--those who receive less, even though they are as familiarly close to us as the other first cousins who we think are less well off--what will be their memories of us when they learn about our dispositions? Won't some, not understanding our thinking and perhaps, then focused on themselves, feel we literally shortchanged them?
Of course there are others, closer in the family tree than cousin, who present similar complications. And friends as well.
In the face of this struggle, Rona says, "We did the best we could and we were as honest about our feelings as we were able to be; and since we'll be gone, again how to put this, who cares?"
Well, we do care.
This process may be about assets and cash but it also about our legacy--how we will be regarded when we have departed. We have tried to live well and at the same time be "good people," attempting to act in ways that avoid making these contradictions in terms; but we also care what people think about us now and when we are in the great hereafter.
Again Rona says, "Look how many people we know who years after a sister or uncle or parent died still nurture hurts and resentments about the departed's bequests. Don't we know someone, a cousin, who 30 years after the fact is still grumbling about a little table that an aunt 'promised' her but somehow wound up in either someone else's hands or at the Salvation Army? And don't we also know someone who thought a bank account had been set aside for her but never materialized?"
So we have been struggling with this; and though we have completed the latest iteration or our wills, neither of us is sleeping well. We wake up in sweats, fretting about how much is enough, what might be too much (if there is such a thing), and what will Cousin X feel about what we plan to do in regard to Cousin Z.
As complicated and difficult as all of this is is the upsetting bottom-line feeling--that what we are doing is about what will become of our assets after we both are dead. Be it tomorrow, later today, or decades from now.
Still, there is no denying that this process, the thoughts that are consuming us, are much more than about what will happen or about what people will think of us after we have left life behind--
This putting-our-affairs-in-order is chipping away at the emotional protection provided by our (and everyone's) ability to deny death. As psychologist and philosopher Ernest Becker some years ago wrote, the ability to deny death is what makes living, even civilization possible.
And this wills-and-estates business is making it harder to cling to the ability to do the denying that is essential to the living.
Labels: Bequests, Death, Dying, Wills and Estates
posted by Steven Zwerling at
6:00 AM
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