Hey! What happened to 2018? I don't wanna talk about it, but between personal and professional setbacks, we've ignored it. Call it suppression. I dunno.
So, last week a cousin of mine died at the age of 40. For all we knew, he was in good health. I'm not gonna rehash what I've said in memorial to him on Facebook, but I still feel like there's something I've got to talk about. What, I'm not sure. But I know I want to blather a bit about the subject of death.
I don't want to double down on the importance of telling loved ones you love them. It's something I've been working on doing, and it's not where my mind is wandering right now either. But yes, tell your loved ones you love them. Actually use the "L" word, folks.
As I type this, I've just finished talking to my parents. I try to talk to them every week, usually on Sunday. With the cousin's passing this past week, at such a young age, it prompted my parents to talk to me about the importance of making a will, naming a power of attorney, having enough life insurance. My sister has also in the past posted adamantly about having life insurance to not burden loved ones financially. I have nothing to say against that, so I really don't want to dwell on that.
The subject of a will though. that's an interesting thought. My cousin didn't have one that we know of, and now the handling of his estate is rather kittywhompus, to say the least. His parents are divorced, so that makes things even more fun. My parents asked me if I've put any thought into making one. Thought? Yes. Commitment to it? Eh. I once wrote some thoughts down once on some paper. I had this eerie feeling once, and I wrote something down, but in the days afterward, that feeling passed, and I chucked that scratch paper. Wouldn't have been legally binding anyway. I told my parents, as I looked around my room, that I didn't think I had much that anyone would want anyway. My dad liked that I had that attitude. He volunteers for a secondhand store similar to Goodwill, and told me that so much of what comes in is stuff that none of the surviving family members wanted, and just wanted to unload, so that store gets them. So to realize that so much of what I have is pretty worthless to most people is a healthy way to think about it. I know that I kinda wanna bequeath some of my CD's to particular co-workers, as gag gifts from beyond the grave, so they always think of me, but would I really do that? I dunno. It makes me smirk to think about it though.
But the thing about the will that really sticks in my brain right now is that it really serves to illustrate how disconnected I am to the area I live in and to the people. Over the holidays, I got called in to report for jury duty. I was dismissed from the trial, but that's the closest I've been to making connections to anyone in the legal field, in this area. I also haven't really found a financial adviser about handling my stock portfolio (pithy as it is), and even getting a local insurance agent was a mad scramble because my previous company didn't provide coverage in Washington state, for whatever reason. So shopping for agents of this nature is outside of both my ken and my comfort zone. I don't know any lawyers out here, and I don't even know how to go about shopping for a lawyer. What kinds of things should we agree on that will tell me this is the person I want to handle my legal matters, should my time come sooner rather than later? Same thing for financial advisers! What should I be looking for? I have no clue where to even start.
And that brings me to power of attorney, executor, and things of that nature. Those, at least intuitively, are things I think should be granted to someone whose perspectives and beliefs are at least somewhat similar to mine. And holy cow, does THAT rule out a lot of my friends, possibly the majority. Most of my strongest friendships have arisen out of my latent journeys in life to love and try to at least understand people with wildly different points-of-view than mine. I'm not saying I couldn't trust my atheist friends to arrange a Christian funeral for me, but it would be a greater comfort for me to have that mantle placed on someone who thought like me more often than not, and would know exactly what I would want for myself if I didn't make it abundantly clear beforehand. That's especially true when it comes to power of attorney. If I'm in a persistent vegetative state, I want to be kept alive until even the most expert of medical skills surrender to the will of the Almighty Father, but who reading this would have known that if I didn't say it just now? Or that I wish to be buried and NOT cremated? I love my friends dearly, and I trust them to have their hearts in the right place to do what I would want, but in this instance, I think it's better to have someone whose thought patterns align more closely with mine.
So between my cousin's death, and my finally achieving full-time employment (oh yeah, that happened, hurray!), I've got a lot of decisions to make soon regarding things that are HIGHLY specialized and that I'm not smart or trained enough to navigate alone. When I first felt compelled to type about all this, I never figured that by the time I got to this paragraph that the big takeaway life lesson here is how much more I need to plug in to the immediate world around me. I have no idea how to even go about doing THAT, but it'll come, I hope. So much that needs to be done within the next three weeks just regarding my health insurance (full-time employment being a major life change, after all), and so much more to think about. And not just think, do something about.
Oh, and P.S., just so it's out there too, if Mickey survives me, I want him to see my cadaver. He's a smart cat, and being a hunter himself, he's got a pretty good understanding of the balance of life and death, at least I think so. I want him to see my corpse so he understands that I'm not abandoning him, and that I really did love him up until the end. And then have him go to my current landlords, Obaid and Freba. They love him too, and he's quite friendly with them. I know they'll continue to give him a loving home. And maybe put a burr in their saddle to stop renting out their upstairs on Airbnb and move back in.
