A Little More Story to Tell

I know I said yesterday that today I’d dig into the details of my death book. But we’re not quite there yet. There’s still one more story to tell.

After I’d finished sorting through the life of my father, I began talking more about the whole process with my mother. They hadn’t been together in quite a long time, so she wasn’t there for the actual clearing out and sorting part. But I would occasionally vent to her about how difficult some aspects of it were, namely the parts related to tying up all his loose ends. Or even finding out where all the loose ends were. Closing bank accounts. Finding titles for vehicles. Finding what keys went to what. All the little things that we know about our own lives, that we just never think to share with anyone else because we can never imagine why they would need to know. (Fun side story: my father had a desk drawer that was filled with keys. There must have been at least 75-100 keys in there. I never figured out what any of them went to, because I found all the keys I needed elsewhere. I still wonder if maybe he just liked to collect them.)

Seeing how hard it had been for me going through all that without a map to guide me, my mother promised to do better with her own affairs. And she absolutely did. For one, she lived a much simpler life than my father. That definitely helped. She also lived in a small apartment, only a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and dining room, and a couple hall closets. And she kept it comfy, but never cluttered. She also took note of my biggest struggles with things like the banks. She made it a point to have me listed as a beneficiary on her bank accounts. This way, I wouldn’t have to deal with a probate lawyer, which was what I’d had to do when my father died.

She also started telling me things. She started keeping a drawer, she said. And she was going to put things in that drawer than would be important whenever her time came. It was a good idea, and I was proud of her for thinking of it.

But that had been a few years ago. And time puts demands on us every day. So what was once a “when I die, check this drawer” drawer eventually became an other things drawer as well. As drawers so often do. They collect things. And things get moved. And life goes on. Until it doesn’t.

This year time caught up with my mother as well. There was more time to prepare, at least. Cancer can sometimes give you that, if it’s feeling generous. But not so much time. I remember her specifically complaining about this. She’d had a diagnosis, and had just finished a chemo treatment. Things were looking good enough. Maybe even promising. But then everything went in another direction, and I got the call from the hospital that she had between hours and days left. When I got in to see her the following day, she was somewhere between angry and surprised.

“Days,” she said. “They’re telling me days! What happened to ‘you’ve got six months left to live’? They just skipped right past it!” She wasn’t wrong, but even knowing you have time at all is its own gift.

She ended up stretching her days into a couple more weeks. They weren’t the best weeks, but there were some good moments in there. And I’m grateful to have had the time with her in the end. But there was no time to do all the things she wanted to do. She wanted to get her affairs in order. She thought she would have had more time. She thought there would’ve been more warning. She’d been waiting for someone to tell her she had a few months left, not a few days.

I tried to help her. She wanted to write down instructions on who to give her furniture to, who to give her books to, who to get in touch with at the bank, who to give her cat to. I got her a notebook, but her fine motor skills had already deteriorated and she couldn’t hold the pencil. I tried to take notes for her, but the hospice meds had her slipping in and out of consciousness so frequently that she struggled to string two thoughts together.

So I put the notebook away. The moment of preparing had passed. We just accepted it, and settled into the moment we were in. The moment of saying our goodbyes. I’m glad we got to have that.

It only took me a week to settle my mother’s affairs. Her apartment was small and easy to sort through. She didn’t have a car to sell. The bank had me listed on her account, as she’d said, and so no lawyer was needed to close it out. She’d even made her own funeral arrangements, which was a huge burden off my shoulders. She’d been listening, and she did a great job of making it easier for me.

In the days and weeks that followed, family members would ask how I was doing. Aunts and uncles. Around the same age as my parents. They would ask questions that I knew they wanted their own kids to have the answers to. “So what kinds of things did you have to deal with?”…“Did you have to hire a lawyer?”…“Did they have wills?” It was good that they were asking these questions. I knew that my cousins would at some point have to go through the same moments that I’d been going through, and I was happy to see that their parents were trying to learn some kind of lesson here. And I found myself in a position to help them.

So I started telling them what lesson I’d learned. I told them that I’d started keeping a death book of my own. I’d kept notes of all the questions I had to find answers to when I was dealing with the deaths of my parents. All the things I needed to locate. Paperwork that needed to be tracked down. Wishes that needed to be fulfilled. And I took those notes and turned them to my own use. I started answering those questions for myself. And I started writing down my answers in a book.

This idea caught on within my family, and they started following up with me. They wanted to know what exactly needed to go in a death book. What kinds of questions needed answers? What kind of notebook? What else should go in it? They wanted a guidebook. A map. And I totally understood where they were coming from.

Tomorrow, we’ll dive into exactly that. I’ll go through what steps I took to build my book, what went into it and what it can ultimately do. It won’t be a definitive or exhaustive list. But it’ll be a place to start. A guide. A map.