Thursday, December 21, 2006

Wills

We've been working on our wills for the last few months.

Wills are one of those weird grown-up things that make me very uncomfortable. Maybe it's that in making plans in the event of your death, you feel like you're encouraging your death.

Or maybe I'm just a dumbass. Occam would be betting heavily on that choice.

So we made some final changes and sent them to our attorney. He had been recommended by my boss, so we didn't actually know him very well, but we'd had a couple of meetings together to discuss various things and he seemed like a nice guy.

I sent the changes to him via e-mail on a Friday in early November and told him I hoped we could finish everything by Thanksgiving.

Then he dropped dead.

He didn't drop, actually. But that Friday night, he had a massive heart attack and died in his sleep. He was 52.

When you're 30, someone dying of a heart attack at 52 seems entirely reasonable and perfectly remote. At 45, like I am, it seems totally ridiculous--how could anyone who's only 7 years older than I am have something like that happen to them?

I was told that his cholestorol and blood pressure were both through the roof. Even if that's true, it's hard to translate numbers from a test into just not being here anymore.

We finally signed the final copies of our wills today--his partner helped us finish everything. Then I went to swim and had the worst case of the ghoulies I've ever had--just a mile in the water and nothing to do but think about how suddenly life can stop being certain, and how that could affect the people you care about.

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