Do you have an advance directive? A traditional will? Your POAs named and briefed?
People who have provided care to the dying are well positioned to understand how vital these documents are. Are they any more likely to have them? I’m not so sure.
I keep hearing that people are afraid of death and that’s why our documents are a mess. We’re so petrified of death that we can’t acknowledge it’ll come for us one day. We act as if avoiding the paperwork will delay the inevitable. If you don’t look it’s not there.
Suuuuure. I have to take a break from pop psych.
I suspect they vastly underestimate the hassle of keeping up with paperwork. Is there a correlation between psychologists who believe in the universality of the fear of death and people who have personal assistants?
I don’t put off simple tasks because of overwhelming anxiety about my mortality. I put them off because it’s a game of whack a mole. Supposedly this task will take an hour, yet I keep spending an hour and ending up behind where I thought I was when I started.
Articles online suggest I will unleash doom if I don’t hire an expert. Not just any expert, the right expert. I leave a few voicemails and give up for another day.
People respond as soon as I reply to an email, giving me some new task. Ignoring it for a week gets me a week of peace.
Trying to complete some bureaucratic errand will only result in being sent on a wild goose chase by a clerk who is trying to get rid of the line as quickly as possible so they have good productivity numbers and can keep their job.
Trying to fix a simple clerical error will probably result in me being on hold for 90 minutes, only to repeat my information six times and then have the call drop.
Because I know any task that requires a fax machine is a lost cause.
I can think of plenty of reasons to procrastinate that don’t require a fear of death.
Like doing your taxes, typing the information into the boxes of a template is easy peasy. You can get a free template online or paper templates at the library. There are lots of organizations out there trying to make this easy for us.
It’s figuring out what to type in the boxes that’s the real work. At what point is it ‘your time’? How do you want your assets divided up? Do you know your favorite cousin’s social security number or their date and location of birth without stopping and calling them and then talking for an hour?
Perhaps you haven’t bothered to put together a will because you don’t have a lot to leave behind. Anyone who has had a family member die without a will can tell you it’s still important. The fewer assets you have, the easier it is to make a will right now.
You can probably write your will on that crumpled receipt in your pocket and it’ll do. If no one is going to contest your advance directives or who gets your Precious Moments figurines, you just need to let the right people know what you want.
Occasionally I find myself imagining I care what happens to my assets when I die. Most of the time I imagine death as being the ultimate cancellation of my need to give a damn about anything. My to do list is null and void the moment I’m dead.
The reason to make a will isn’t necessarily to make sure my collection of dictionaries goes somewhere in particular. It’s to reduce the amount of hassles I’m leaving in my wake. I want to minimize how much of my to do list is going to get dumped on someone else.
If you ask estate planners, the goal of estate planning is to avoid taxes.
If you ask people who have been executors for a family member or friend, the goal of estate planning is to avoid probate. There are a few easy ways to pass things onto people directly, rather than waiting for court approval.
You can set a beneficiary on your bank and investment accounts. You can name beneficiaries for your life insurance, if you have it. You can even add someone to the deed of your home with survivorship rights, meaning it will pass to them without going through probate.
Your digital accounts don’t go to the court (probably), but it’s still helpful for people to be able to access them if you can’t. Some email accounts and password managers allow you to set someone to get access when the time comes.
It’s one thing to have a vague idea of what you want done with your body, it’s another to formalize the details. It’s the difference between saying you want a modern kitchen and actually picking out a model of refrigerator and a slab of granite.
Unfortunately for me, it’s not currently legal to have my body dumped in a mossy forest, so I have to figure out the next best thing. Donating my body to science requires I predict where I’m going to die and make an agreement with a specific institution, something I’m not yet prepared to do. My heirs might have to wing it, knowing I’d prefer being eaten by crows to any sort of pomp and glitz.
Quite a few people plan every detail of their funeral in advance. Pre-paying for a funeral is a legal way to spend down your assets so you can qualify for Medicaid. Not everyone shares my great relief of not being responsible for anything that happens once I’m dead. Those people have a good incentive to write things down and take care of things ahead of time.
Choosing a new medical POA after my divorce was difficult. I have exploited my parents avoidance of making contentious decisions plenty of times. Even though I know they are capable of making tough decisions if they absolutely have to, I have no interest in putting them in the position to have to decide anything so traumatizing.
Not only did I need to think of someone who would be willing to decline treatment on my behalf if ever given the opportunity, I would need someone who could keep track of the original legal document and be ready to enforce it when necessary. There’s also the matter of choosing someone who my family and friends would acquiesce to. I have no interest in being the next Terri Schiavo.
Once I picked the perfect candidate, I needed to get him to agree to take on this responsibility and let him know my wishes for a wide variety of hypothetical scenarios. Then I guessed where I’d be most likely to be rendered unable to express my own wishes, figure out the legal requirements for those jurisdictions, and write up a document that would be recognized in all of them. This sounds more complicated than it really was. It mostly came down to the fact that some places require a witness or a notary, while others don’t.
Then I got anyone who could conceivably challenge the document (ie. my parents) to sign it with a witness who could be tracked down if need be. I then provided originals to my new medical POA, both of my parents, and a close friend who actually lives near me. I gave them all access to a folder in Google Drive with scans of relevant documents.
What goes in the death file I keep in Google Drive?
Living will (aka end-of-life instructions or advance directive)
Financial & medical POA
Health insurance information and medical history
Will
Bank accounts, investment accounts, etc.
Birth certificate, marriage certificate, divorce certificate
Deeds and other important documents
I’m very comfortable talking about death and dying, but let’s acknowledge what an incredibly time consuming hassle that was. Also, my will is already out of date.
But, thanks to COVID, all of my IDs are expired. I didn’t bother to change the legal name on my IDs in the window of time between when my divorce was finalized and when the pandemic shut down all government offices, so it’s time to take care of that. These tedious tasks feel more pressing than updating my will. I don’t own much, I don’t really care what happens to it, and the default is fine with me.
Preparing the documents for my death file isn’t the sort of thing I can do once and be done with. It’s disappointing that you can’t just get a DNR tattooed on your chest and leave it at that. They require occasional maintenance, like a drivers license. And there’s always something equally tedious and more pressing to do. It’s easy enough to update now that I have all the files. I can make sure it’s all up to date when I get back from Service Ontario.
I’m sure someone out there is struggling with paperwork because they’re afraid of dying. There’s thanatophobia and necrophobia, with accompanying literature and treatment protocols.
Maybe I’m an outlier. I suppose I haven’t shaken off the serenity bestowed upon me by my evangelical childhood — that feeling of ‘my time’ being an invitation to the culmination of things.
I went from believing in heaven to not believing in the afterlife at all. There was never anything for me to be afraid of.
To trot out this cliche that it all boils down to a fear of death is a great way to dismiss the reality of being a person in this bureaucratic world. You don’t need to be afraid of death or think you’re invincible to not want to deal with legal documents. There’s always going to be a more urgent task. Even emptying the dishwasher feels more important than preparing for the theoretical. Until one day it’s not theoretical anymore.
If you’ve also been putting off getting your documents in order, today can be the day.
If you’re in the US, DoYourOwnWill.com has free templates for a will, POA, and living will. It’s easy to search for document templates for your state or province.
You may not even need a template. In many jurisdictions a will can be valid if it’s written by hand, clearly intended to serve as a will, dated, and signed. In one memorable case a man scratched his will on the side of his tractor, which had rolled over and crushed him. He left everything to his wife, which I guess is a final love note of sorts.
If you already have your documents in order, what motivated you to do it? Are there any suggestions you have for me?
Or maybe there is a universal fear of death? I’d love to hear about it. People don’t explain things they assume are universal.
CityLab has an article on how we’ve mapped the experience of love. It made me think of our various attempts to map the caregiving journey, both academically and artistically.
The traveler to the country of Tenderness is not presented with one specific itinerary, but rather a range of possibilities. In what some might consider the best-case scenario, these wanderers end up in the larger cities with positive names, like “Tendre sur Estime” (“Tenderness upon Esteem,” Esteem being one of the rivers of this imaginary country), or “Tendre sur Reconnaissance” (“Tenderness upon Gratefulness,” another river of the imaginary landscape.) However, the traveler can get lost and drift towards the “Lake of Indifference” or the “Sea of Enmity” instead. All can quickly turn sour by passing through the small towns of “Negligence” or “Complacency,” or bumping into the rocks of “Pride.”
The ArtSci Salon’s Who Cares speaker series starts today and runs into April. Check out the schedule and sign up for this free online discussion series.
Awful working conditions, uncompensated labor, untenable schedules, no health insurance or retirement benefits, and low pay aren’t just issues faced by professional care workers. Truckers are dealing with similar issues. When is the US government going to stop allowing workers to be exploited like this by misclassifying them as independent contractors? Even when people are actually independent contractors, they need to be treated fairly. Access to medical care, disability insurance, and retirement planning aren’t perks, they’re necessities. The lack of enforcement of existing worker protection laws and the delay of regulation of the gig economy is hurting everyone who relies on these exploited workers…which is all of us.
CBC Alberta is publishing a series of articles on family care work.
Feylyn Lewis has an article in TeenVogue on how BIPOC youth are especially likely to serve as caregivers.
Meg Conley has an article in Harpers Bazaar on the cause of the caregiver labor shortage.
Norma B. Coe and Rachel M. Werner published a study showing what many of you know through lived experience: LTC facilities rely on the unpaid labor of visitors.
So funny you should mention this now - my husband and I have just gone through the arduous process of updating our wills and POAs. It was no small feat because it involves complicated trust arrangements for our son who has disabilities. We sign everything at the lawyer's next week. I've been researching 'green' burials but unfortunately they are only available in the Toronto area and I live in Ottawa. I'm a registered organ donor but I was hoping for an eco friendly disposal of my body. Maybe that option will be available where I live by the time I die, I hope so! I don't have any trouble thinking about and planning for my demise. In a way it's kind of fun.
It might be best to approach this subject from a positive angle, even if you feel that the general public is negative about it. Many of us have treated death and dying in a positive way, and I feel that Hospice does a great job of encouraging that.