Weekend Plans : The Last Will And Testament

Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill

When I was a kid, like in 3rd grade, there were periodic flashes that took over the classroom. One of the ones I remember is the one where everybody had to make a last will and testament.

Given that most of us had very little property worth mentioning, these last wills and testaments were kind of silly. To Eddie: I leave my Activision Dragonfire Atari Cartridge. To Lynn: I leave my three Teddy Bears: Blue Bear, Ferdinand, and Rusty.

Well, it’s about 40 years later and, wouldn’t you know it, the last will and testiment in which Jeff got my Star Wars action figures was the last one that I had written up. Well, one of our job benefits is to get 5 hours a year of legal time from a lawyer. We dug into what getting the lawyer would entail, made a few phone calls, got sent a bunch of forms, and today we sat in an office and signed/initialed about half as many times as we did when we bought a house.

Eddie, Lynn, and Jeff did not appear in this particular last will and testament.

I suppose that this is something I should have done decades ago (at least when I first got married) or when the first of the nephews was born or… you know… some point *BEFORE* today. But, better late than never, and we made the calls and signed the papers until our hands cramped and we forgot what our names in cursive even looked like.

The highlights: They don’t really care about stuff like Dad’s Cufflinks or Mom’s Costume Jewelry or, god forbid, your various video game collections. They give you a blank piece of paper and ask you to fill it out. Or, really, to make several copies of it and fill it out and update it as appropriate. The hard part is figuring out which nephew gets the pinky ring and which gets the wedding ring. Ah, well. Maybe we don’t need to make that choice yet.

The will mostly covers stuff like: the 401k, the Roth, the house, and, apparently, now there’s an entire section for the living will that is now standard. So we had to run through a handful of scenarios and cover whether we’d want to focus on resuscitation or pain management (like, to the point where it might shut other stuff down).

And then, of course, what we want done with our remains.

“I’d like to be dropped out of a helicopter into Coors Field during a Rockies game. Preferably one being televised.”

“After you’ve been cremated?”

“No.”

They don’t really need you to mention your car. Like, if you’ve got a car *COLLECTION*, you should mention your car collection, but if you only drive a Yaris, you don’t need to put that in there. Odds are, you’ll be getting another car in a year or three or five and you won’t want to have to go in and wait for an hour at the DMV. Make your executor put up with that.

But do you want a trust for the cats? Um… yes.

Okay, let’s go through all of the scenarios of who gets what percentage of what if you both die at the same time. Now let’s ask what if Person A is dead, who gets the stuff? Okay, What if Person B dies? What if Person A *AND* Person B dies? Now let’s go through Persons C through F and come up with combos. No? We’ll just put a “or their issue” after that then.

And then, at the end of it all, you have about 140 pieces of paper in a folder. This is it. Memento Mori.

One of the main events of the weekend proper will be waving Maribou goodbye as she goes off on her vacation to visit her dearest friends. A week and a half! Batchin’ it! So, this weekend is the weekend that is the two or three “fun” days of batchin’ it. I’ll probably get a pizza. I’ll probably go out to Costco. It’s another gaming night on Saturday and I’ll want to be there for that and the nephew has a High School Graduation Open House and I’ll want to go to that and meet his girlfriend and eat a burger off the grill (which I am told will be going strong all day).

And contemplating mortality.

So… what’s on your docket?