I brought the proposed estate documents my lawyer prepared to Arizona this past winter. With lots of free time, I planned to use some of it to review and revise.
Now, it’s springtime. I’m back home. The trees and shrubs are sprouting leaves and flowers. The first annuals have pushed up through the soil; the grass is bright green. Squirrels and other small critters stir in earnest, and the bird chatter gets louder each day. It is the season of renewal.
Meanwhile, I am no closer to finalizing the details of my estate plan than I was when I departed home last January. I recognize my inertia. At least for this putative testator, it is taking real energy to finalize my plans for the inevitable day when my once bright future officially becomes my history.
Indeed, since I have neither children nor these days even a spouse, you might well ask what’s the rush? Fair enough. I have no satisfactory answer, however, only a creeping sense that I need to get the job done ASAP.
***
When Lee was alive, our estate plan was simple, straight forward. Everything goes to her, of course (with a contingency plan for the unlikely event that we both passed simultaneously). Pretty standard stuff, all in all. I was perfectly content knowing that Lee would be financially set in my absence.
But then Lee died, and I was alone, which messed up my good intentions and greatly complicated my simple plan.
***
Nowadays, the obvious beneficiaries are my deceased sister’s two sons and Lee’s two nephews. But we’re talking about four grown men, gainfully employed, who hold down good jobs and stand to inherit from their parents. For them, any real estate or money that might be left over once I’m gone amounts to nothing more than a windfall. On the surface, giving away real estate and money should be easy. And I am not going to spend much time and effort to calculate how to beat the tax man. As for the personal property, well, you can’t take it with you.
Despite all this, with Lee gone and my sister now gone, and both of our folks also gone, I am the last man standing. It thus falls to me to honor and preserve their memories. By elimination, I am both a family historian and curator. For example, unless the nephews learn it from me, who will know that the pencil drawing in a frame hanging among the other artwork on a wall in my home was a piece that Lee created as a young woman? Likewise, it’s left to me to pass along the ring with a small, nearly flawless diamond that was Lee’s wedding ring, and explain that its diamond originally belonged to my mother, who had offered it to Lee because she sensed that Lee was the one?
As I look around me, I notice numerous objects with historic value to the surviving members of our extended families. For one instant I recall the final image in the great film, “Citizen Kane.” The image is of a child’s sled –“Rosebud”– going up in flames, intentionally tossed aside as junk while inadvertently destroying the one clue that might have informed the mystery of Kane’s dying words.
Dripping irony works best as art, I think. My only interest here is to preserve the memories and legacies without mystery.
