Making A Hot Goodbye Bearable
Make-A-Will Month is coming again this August. August is the hottest month of the year in America, according to the thermostat and in the world of estate planning. It makes some sense. When a loved one dies, it can feel like being dumped into scalding water that takes months to cool down.
Scorching Emotion
I’ve personally experienced a dozen deaths of direct family members, grandparents, parents, cousins and a sibling while observing more. All were emotional, some wildly traumatic. This experience makes it clear why estate planning is hard: estates involve facing death.
The single most emotional moment in my life was triggered by the words, “He is gone.” They were said about my forty-two-year-old brother. Two hours earlier he had been randomly murdered at gunpoint — on the morning of his seven-year-old’s birthday.
Estates represent everything left behind by a loved one. Estates are challenging because we have to simultaneously process grief while transitioning responsibilities and care. All for a person who hours ago was living but now is not.
The procedures tailored for this task are ancient, and they are many. Details from more than half the classes studied in law school are required: civil procedure, contracts, property, business organization, commerce, taxation, family, intellectual property, wills, trusts, and estates.
Given this breadth, it’s no surprise that estate planning terrifies with its vastness and its cold truths. Like with anything, though, there are better and worse ways to go about it.
Universals
These three features deeply impact the difficulty of any estate.
Relationships
Maintaining decent, open relationships and inspiring the same among loved ones makes for the easiest estate because those left behind are more likely to try to get along.
Planning
Engaging with our loved ones — agreeing on how we want to be cared for later in life, deciding who will represent us, chronicling along the way, gifting early — helps us avoid the worst of probate and those sad, tortured estates.
Death Order
Death order is surprisingly impactful. Children dying before parents is emotionally brutal. On the other side of the ledger, the estate of the first married partner to die, though mournful, is usually easily managed, especially when couples respect one another. The most seismic thrums are reserved for the second partner and the last member of a generation to pass.
Cooling the Burn
Death order is beyond our ken. Fortunately, we possess just enough control to make some difference.
The relationships we foster with children, among children, and across the depths of cousins, friends and community make a difference. People working with one another to process grief — and an estate — are world’s different from people fighting against one another.
A little planning and preparation can generate a small miracle.
Few of us — only about 7,000 US families — have the luxury of family offices that keep our estate up-to-date. Nonetheless, the rest of us, the 99%, can cull our stuff, document our accounts and passwords, keep files of our retirement plans and bank accounts, add beneficiaries (so easy… so powerful), update our deeds, and produce a simple Living Will, Power-of-Attorney, and Will even if a formal estate plan is too daunting and too expensive and frankly unnecessary.
Thinking about estate planning from the perspective of those left behind can inspire us. It’s our loved ones who most suffer the heat of our passage. Even if there remains only a single friend: man, woman, cat, dog, or bird.
Healthy relationships and a little preparation can cool the burn, making life a little easier, not vastly harder. Because estates are about far more than the money.
In honor of Make-a-Will Month, the eBook of J. Andrew Shelley’s novel, Estate, will be made available August 1st on Amazon. The paperback and audiobook are scheduled for regular release in September.
© J. Andrew Shelley