The "Are you ready to die?" checklist

Let's take a break from the roller coaster of my emotions and talk about practical matters, shall we? I was saving this topic for a time when I'm less volatile, but recent circumstances (LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD GOING BATSHIT CRAZY AND FIGHTING OVER TOILET PAPER) have made it clear that it needed to be bumped up in the list of priorities.

I'm not going to weigh in on SARS-CoV-2 beyond saying that, if you genuinely think that the governments of dozens of countries have all hyped this up for the sole purposes of hurting the current POTUS, well... might I suggest that use your new-found self-distancing free time to read a science book or twenty? I can make some excellent recommendations on reading materials about infectious disease. Moving on...

Whatever your thoughts on the provenance of SARS-CoV-2, it's killing people. And if we don't get a handle on the exponential infection rate, it's going to kill a lot more people - and other diseases will kill more people too due to unavailable healthcare resources because of the rapidly-increasing population of SARS-CoV-2 victims.

In other words, it's the perfect time to talk about death

We knew that Doug's surgery was a Big Deal, and we knew that it was risky. Silly me, I thought the surgery would be the the long pole, and getting through that would mean a full recovery. HAH! Nevertheless, we knew there was a possibility that Doug might not come home.

Now, Doug didn't like to talk about death. I knew this because, for the past three years, I kept telling him that he needed to go through all his stuff and get rid of things that he knew no one would want (he never did). I told him - long before we even knew something was wrong - that it was cruel to leave an entire storage unit (PLUS dozens of boxes of stuff and papers in our garage) for his family to deal with after his death. I told him that he needed to have life insurance, because we shared expenses and it would be a big impact for him to leave me without some insurance to help pick up the slack.

Did he listen to me? Nope.

So here I am, devastated and barely able to function AT ALL, and I'm left to pick up all the pieces (with the help of his daughter, who is my hero - she could easily have shrugged her shoulders and said it's my problem alone, but she hasn't done that). I'm now down to one income, and I have to hire a probate attorney. I have repairs I need to make around the house. I have to get my taxes and his done, but his paperwork... look, I love the man, but I'm not gonna pretend he was perfect. He was not organized, and he was not a planner (financial or otherwise - sometime I'll tell you about the "planning" he did for our weddingmoon🤦‍♀️). I managed to get him to update his will and name me and his daughter as his healthcare POA, but that's it. Everything else is a big old mess.

"But, I'm young and healthy," I hear you cry.

Oh, zip it. I don't care how young and healthy you are. You're not impervious to death. No one is, so stop pretending, get your head out of your ass and do some planning. I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it a million more times: 

It would be more reasonable to ask me (a fat, 54-year-old woman who smokes - yeah, I was planning to quit when Doug came home, but not really motivated to extend my life these days AND I CAN'T IMAGINE WHY) to climb Mt. Everest than to ask me to live without Doug.

DO NOT MAKE IT WORSE ON YOUR LOVED ONES
THAN IT'S ALREADY GOING TO BE.

Your basic "Oh, shit! I'm going to die!" checklist

This is just off the top of my head, so I may add to it and make it a page of its own down the road, but here are the things that immediately come to mind:

• Life insurance: GET SOME. Ideally, make sure that it's enough to cover your income for the remainder of your life expectancy. Don't leave your family in a financial hole when they're already going to be living in an abyss of grief.
• Long-term care insurance: Get that too. Yeah, you think you'll never need it. And I hope you're right. But some conditions are too difficult for family members to deal with on their own. Do you want to be put in the cheapest nursing home they can find if you develop Alzheimer's? I didn't think so. But that's exactly what's going to happen if you become unable to care for yourself and there are no family members who can be your 24/7 caregiver.
• Draw up a will: find a lawyer and just do it. Yes, it requires thinking about your death. Newsflash: you're gonna die whether you think about it or not. Again - do you want to make your death even harder on your loved ones than it's already going to be? Don't be that thoughtless. 
• Healthcare Power of Attorney: You need someone you can trust to see that YOUR wishes are done when it comes to your healthcare in the event that you become incapacitated. You don't want to be on a respirator? WRITE THAT SHIT DOWN in legal form, and make sure your Healthcare POA understands that you will never forgive them if they don't follow your instructions.
• Accounts and passwords: for the love of God, don't be stupid and leave it just anywhere, but please: write down your accounts and passwords, keep it updated, and have it somewhere secure. Bonus points if you have some sort of written budget or list of routine bills that you pay.
• Your stuff: Marie Kondo that shit. I know you still have every picture that your sex trophies made for you from pre-school on. I get it. But I promise you: you have more stuff than you need. You have more stuff than your family will ever want. So take the time now, while you're healthy, to divvy that shit up. Go through those boxes of childhood art projects; give some to your kids, keep a couple to hang up on the walls, and then DUMP the rest of it. Do the same thing with your knick-knacks, and your books, and your college textbooks, and your jewelry, and your furniture. We are so connected to our stuff, and dealing with all that stuff after someone dies? It's horrible. Don't do that to your family.
• End-of life decisions: Do you want to be buried? Cremated? Burial at sea? Funeral pyre? Make a decision, and make sure your family members know. Fortunately, that was one of the things I was able to get Doug to talk about, so we were able to give his remains (and his spirit) the send-off he wanted with a direct cremation and the best "cast party" ever.

Look, I know that thinking about your end is uncomfortable, especially when it seems like it's probably decades away. Hell, I thought I was gonna get 20 years with Doug. And I'm going to be bitter about not getting those 20 years for however long I'm stuck on this shit hole plane of existence. But none of us knows when our time will be up. For the sake of the people who love you: do the thinking. Do the planning. DO the purging of stuff. 

If you can do all that, then your loved ones will still have to deal with the pain of grieving their loss, but they won't also have to deal with the anxiety of all the end-of-life planning you didn't do on top of that grief.