At the end of last year, the Husband and I finally decided to make an official, witnessed, notarized will, and do all the other notarized paperwork that goes along with that sort of thing.
Basically, it’s a paper that says who gets to decide when to pull the plug; who has to pay the bills with our piddling savings if we can’t physically or mentally do it ourselves; who’s in charge of getting rid of our stuff; and what happens to the house (if we still own it when we meet our demise).
It was a total buzzkill.
We’d made a will decades ago when we were young and carefree, and even got our friendly out-back naybahs to witness it for us. That was as far as we went. Well, honestly, that long ago I don’t think there was such a thing as a living will or powers of attorney for this and that – not that regular people would have had anyway.
In that long-ago will, we left all our stuff to our friends, who were as poor and living-on-the-edge as we were.
In our imaginations, all our rent-strapped friends would decide to move into our house, maybe build on to it or erect straw-bale houses or four-season cabins on our 7 acres.
We, of course, wouldn’t be there because we would have either a) decided to move anonymously and permanently to Canada after having searched out my Scottish and French-Canadian roots or b) gone on to the next existence after dying in an impressive crash on our way home from a late-day run to Montreal for supper.
Yes, there was a time when a late-day run to Montreal wasn’t something we thought twice about doing.
That old will got tossed into a fireproof box, and we assumed that if we did indeed expire in an impressive crash, someone would find it and all would be well. Truth be told, I knew better. I’d been a paralegal in a previous life and knew that we needed to get it notarized for it to be legal, but money was tight and we didn’t really believe it would ever be needed.
Fast forward four decades. Last spring I realized that the need for extensive raised-bed gardens wasn’t going to go away in our older age, but for me to be able to continue to effectively work them in my seventh decade and beyond, I was going to have to do something now to make them less work intensive.
So I started paving paths and eliminating the need to weed so much and doing some other labor-eliminating things, and that got me thinking about what it meant to get older with creakish knees and sore back muscles and joints, and a memory that records something I’ve only thought about doing on the “Done” list instead of the “To Do” list.
So I started to make an actual list: put up hand rails on the stairs in the house, replace that ancient furnace, put heat into the chapel so we won’t have to burn wood if our bodies don’t want to haul it, rebuild the back wart, and so on. Phase one of buzzkill.
Then I remembered that besides never having actually gotten that old will notarized, some of the beneficiaries were now either dead or a lot richer than they’d been, and than we are, and that they wouldn’t need the benefit of our miniscule largess. And worse, if I were to die in a car crash late at night on the way home from work, and the Husband died intestate sometime later, his much older adopted sisters in Ohio or their children – who would have no interest in or need for our stuff – would inherit everything. That would be a major irritation for them and a bummer for my niece and her kids.
Thus, phase two of buzzkill: the wills.
And that started a new and strange mental exercise. Now that I’d written everything out, maybe I should myself take care of some of that stuff that would need to be dealt with after our dramatic demises, or at least make it easier for the person who has to do it eventually.
So this is phase three of buzzkill.
There’re a few rules that native New Englanders are born with tattooed inside their eyelids and carved on their bones. One is that you never, ever throw out something that might be useful later, because you never know when you’ll want or need it. Another is that there is stuff that’s too good to use. A third is that if it belonged to a relative who’s now dead, it’s both too good to use and too precious to get rid of.
I’ve been breaking those three rules lately, with interesting results.
I’ve begun to wear the handmade moccasins I bought for much more money than I could afford to spend when I was in my thirties and have stored since then in my closet: Too good to use. Turns out they’re wicked comfortable.
I’ve given away a couple of items of clothing that are almost new, worn only once or twice but never again (some for several decades) because they didn’t fit quite right or are otherwise impractical. With those clothes are going some books I know in my heart that I’ll never read again.
And those things that I’ve had forever but never really liked but belonged to some dear dead relative? They’re headed to the younger generation now, to use or save or toss. And some stuff is just going gone. Who needs a chipped china teacup, no matter that it belonged once to dear departed Great Aunt Honey?
Phase three of buzzkill turns out to be amazingly satisfying. I like it. It means sorting through a lot of stuff, organizing, eliminating and marking things off my lists. Less to dust, less to bump into, less to clutter my mind – and unexpected goodies for some folks who’ve benefited from my clearing-out activity.
Anyone need eight complete but unbound copies of a text I wrote for a class I haven’t taught for five years?
(Deb Marshall lives in Wilmot. She blogs at herondragonwrites@blogspot.com.)