Over My Dead Body
(Or when Hell freezes over)
RECRUDESCENCE
When authorities spatulated Trump’s treasonous batter off the Capitol’s nooks and crannies four years ago and restored the natural order to a pouty “peaceful transfer of power” there was a great feeling of relief, of Never Again. Surely that man and his minions would never get their dirty paws anywhere near that Resolute desk again; he would go to jail and/or evaporate with a satisfying sizzle like a witch on water. I couldn’t handle it if he returned for act two: I would die, or have to emigrate to Canada.
And here we are, not dead, not fleeing, but forced to find whatever coping mechanisms we can to endure this again. Back to shared moral outrage, as exhibited via a fast flurry of memes:
The word of the week is “recrudescence” (17th century): the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.
Yet this time there isn’t the same fever pitch of fight-fight-fight, no pink pussy hats, but rather, more frightening: despair, exhaustion, and resignation, swallowing this crude pill. Might we just breathe our way through this, carry on with our diurnal distractions, manage. We learned that if we look too much—all the benumbing doom scrolling—we will only ruin ourselves personally, but also that the risk of not watching is to give this red regime a pass to do what they will with us. And they will. (When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything). We put our hands over our eyes with some slits between our fingers to let a hint of the horror in; the white (man) noise-cancelling headphones allow in just enough of his awful voice so we’ll know what rock is being thrown that we might have to duck. Wait, he said a bishop preaching mercy is a nasty woman now too? Indeed he did. But it’s just too cold to march.
On this terrible Inauguration Day, my girls and I talked about the oratory powers instead of MLK, Jr. This is what true leadership sounds like. This is what we honor in a life, a legacy worth celebrating. We woke up to a world frozen over, encrusted with crystalline snow. We went to the banks of the Hudson River, the water whipped into meringue peaks of ice from passing tugs, for a walk that lasted hours as we fell to the ground to make snow angels in our rustling snow pants or fashion the tiniest snowman with dead grass tufts inserted for hair we knew would collapse soon in this arctic vortex. And then, finally home hugging a mug of hot cocoa, with the swearing-in ceremony footage only relegated to a small, low-volume window in the background of my second computer monitor (to confirm that this was in fact really happening), I got to work at my living room desk on my day off. I did not bake bread or clean closets or shop online as many might to stay busy on this frigid Monday in the Northeast, but rather I felt compelled to draft a copy of my Last Will and Testament.
Morbid? No, this isn’t an essay about how we die under Trump 2.0, but how we might plan to die in order to more freely live. I always have no problem peering deep into the abyss (and on this platform have happily explored last words, darkness, the rings of hell, among others). I’ve dedicated many hours over the years to considering what I want my own end to look like should I have the luxury to plan it, and I consider this solid dinner conversation for family and first dates alike. Massive organization projects are my jam. Having watched my dad kick the can, very clumsily and woefully unprepared, I vowed I would not be leaving any of my kin with such a mess to clean in my wake.
There’s a woman, in her late 80s, who regularly stops by my government day-job office with her bag of paperwork as she frets over the disrepair of the home she owns. She comes to me for help printing copies for the sake of all the applications for aid and legal action, or to communicate with whichever town or county department on her behalf. She’s shivering and tired. There’s a sinkhole in her yard; the foundation is cracking; she had a tenant in her basement who bailed and owes her $5,000 in back rent; the plumbing leaks so she didn’t pay the contractor and now he’s put a lien on her house; she’s still running on a buried oil tank connected to her furnace via tube over her yard, through her open garage, and along all her floors; entire rooms are off-limits because of her admitted hoard of a lifetime of clothes. Maybe it’s not my business to preach, but since she absorbs many hours of my worklife with her ever-growing list of broken things, yesterday I didn’t mince words. I told her, kindly, it’s time to sell your house now, as-is. The proceeds will enable you to live very well for however long you have left, not worrying about furnaces and pipes (not to mention the property taxes), but enjoying a simple, clean apartment with a nice couch to sit on with a friend to watch the birds out the window. You can focus on baking cornbread for your nephew in a contemporary, functional kitchen. She said, you’re right, but then she said, “I like to play my music really loud.” How loud? I wondered. What kind of music? But still I said, sure, you can do that there. You have to move on, focus on the future not the past. Do you want this pile of papers to be the finale of your mortal coil, this toil? She left with her cane and clipboard saying she would think about it.
As a counterpoint, there is Diane, the woman who sold me this sweet little house I live in, an instant home that would be just as hard for me to leave someday. It was heartbreaking for Diane to leave, I’m sure, her marital home, where she raised her kids, steeped in memories but refreshingly not stuff. She was in her 70s and seemed young and spry to me, a twinkle in her eyes, but she admitted on our first meeting that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. This launched her mission to reduce her material world to the smallest one-bedroom suite at an assisted living facility, something that she clearly didn’t need yet, probably not for many years, but she didn’t want to be any burden to her kids. Leave no trace. She held no such attachment to her possessions beyond the hope they would end up in the right hands. When we hugged, I knew that we would be living here, loving this place, as long as she had, our “forever” home, for now. We honor her in our family photo wall like our patron saint.
PREPPER
I’m on quite a death-bender this long uncomfortable week, plowing a relentless path through the frozen ice I can trace to the LA fires and witnessing how at any moment you might have to flee with a go-bag. What would those items be? I pictured myself in a panic, not knowing what’s most important. There’s a few sentimental things I’m sure it would be hard to choose from (my dad’s ashes? the soft chunks of amber the sailor taught me to find on the Danish beach?), or locate, and then there’s the items you can’t function without (passports, licenses, etc.) that most folks likely do not have all assembled or scanned. I found a prep list circulating, and altered it to my liking. I made a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet spawned spreadsheets, so there are tabs: the docs list below that I will refresh every year or so with any needed updates, the foremost passwords that unlock other passwords, the essential phone numbers, and a list of the other tangible items to grab should I need to run: an external harddrive, wallet, keys, laptop, cords. Save for the sentimental stuff, there’s redundancy required. A folder on the external harddrive called “Emergency” with a scanned copy of everything. A folder on my Google drive with the same. And then a printed version that will live in a new fireproof lockbox I will buy that is big enough to throw some other things in, but not so big I can’t carry it easily. A few keys to this, and a list of where they are. I scanned, gathered and created:
Birth certificates
Passports
Home insurance
Car insurance
Car registration
Health insurance
Medical cards
Medical records
Eyeglass prescriptions
Tax returns (last 3 years)
Drivers licenses
Social security cards
Life insurance
Backup IDs (student, work)
Credit cards
Power of Attorney
Last Wills
Passwords
Important phone numbers
Titles
Deeds
Statement from all financial accounts with bank contact info
Thumb drive with video of house and contents (drawers open, all rooms, all closets, basement, attic, garage, art work)
Letter of instruction
List of items to gather for go-bag
There were some gaps on the list it was time to finally finalize. I’d had an old unsigned version of a Last Will since my first daughter was born but predating the second when I had a pocket of time with an infant in an apartment and similar motivation to sort my life. Having a kid, and of course getting married, suddenly compels you to think about your morbidity and map it out, instead of continuing in denial that nothing matters and you’ll go on indefinitely without a hitch like a single person. In 2008 I started to explore options for what I wanted to happen with my body after I die, and I remember hitting a roadblock fast since throwing myself in a burlap sack in order to feed a future tree wasn’t legal.
I had read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach (2003) and somehow that field where med students were monitoring the rotting stages of donated bodies didn’t scare me off from the concept of giving my corpse to science. It was then, and remains now, the backup plan should 1) they not want to harvest my organs and 2) it’s still not possible to grow into a tree.
Down this rabbit hole of documenting a family’s life (and my death), I find a hack: sign up for a free trial week of a site like LawDepot.com, customize and then download all their editable templates in the estate planning arena, complete with the requirements for your particular state, which you can use forever (and just cancel that trial week on time or suffer the fees). No lawyer required as long as all is properly signed, witnessed, and notarized.
I drafted a:
Last Will and Testament - wishes for what happens to you and your estate when you die
Durable Power of Attorney - appoint a person who might deal with all your secretarial work should you become incapable
Living Will - wishes for your end-of-life care; pull the plug or no
Health Care Proxy - who’s in charge of medical decisions when you can’t make them
HIPAA Authorization - releasing medical info to whomever as needed
Then I gathered registration forms to send to specific colleges for my anatomical donation, one local to my daily home and one local to my weekend place in the Catskills, assuming I croak in or near one of the two. They pick you up within a 100 mile radius at no charge, do what they will with you, and then return your cremains to your designated person in about two years. (And not to worry, they don’t all just come snatching your body away when you die, yanking competitively at each arm; someone still has to actually summon them).
A real difficulty in our age of isolation is choosing (or having!) the right people, any people, for this—not only the Executor of the Will, but who the heck to dub the “Durable” power of attorney and medical-decision-maker. And then, the agony of having to find not one but two witnesses who can sit there while I initial all these pages of requests and bequests, in the presence of a notary. Does anyone even have two portable friends who can change locations on demand like that and both appear in the same place at the same time? Might I hire the notary to come out to the bar for drinks, because it’s been rough this week huddling on the edge of the tundra, warming my hands over only computer screen heat, and I could use a stiff one, like rigor mortis stiff.
I pushed through it. I amassed all the docs, “emergency” files, plan A, B, C, and even footnotes for the death like a magnum opus, which will always be edited since none of this is permanently etched, but a draft to be revisited every handful of years as things change which they always will. It all ends with a more casual note that I will compose ongoing in my free moments. A letter to my daughters to further explain the subjects we’ve already been talking about this week. While they struggled with midterm exam studying and I skidded on the roads to work in an old EV that feels a bit bargey and intractable when it’s not preheated, we persisted and endured. At home in the chilly evenings, with death on my brain, we considered big questions over the space heater in our electric blankets and hats. What would you want to keep of mine? Which house would you prefer, mine or your dad’s? Catskills or no Catskills? Burned or buried? How do you want to die and be remembered, but more importantly, how do you want to live, under what set of principles? It’s best not think of this as abstract and distant, because no one knows anything, but also: there’s no reason to be afraid. This is all an exercise in exerting control when we feel otherwise powerless. Of giving meaning to things that only matter because we decide they do. Ideally, my dear daughters, you may get nothing because your mother has lived so well and so long, it’s all gone. And for that we’ll be grateful.
Discussing death strategies on a first date. Heh. I’ll bet you like Harold and Maude, too.
"To live, I will die." - Gustav Mahler