I’ve been thinking about my own death a fair bit more than usual lately, and it’s a great feeling. I’m not enjoying imagining the actual dying, but rather the aftermath, in particular how impressed everyone is going to be about my organization and forethought. This is similar to how I soothe myself on a plane taxiing toward the runway, i.e., by imagining how nice my eulogy might sound.
Specifically, Amy and I are finally getting our wills done, which—as everyone knows—you really must do immediately upon becoming parents within no more than ten years after becoming parents, so we’re right on time.
The other day we went to our attorney’s office to look at the drafts she’d produced. As we arrived, I noticed that the office’s sign featured an image of Blind Justice, and then I was chuckling to myself as a picture flashed into my mind of our attorney’s face superimposed onto the image, like something Saul Goodman would do. How I would respect an attorney who did that, and look for chances to retain her.
The plan had been that we would get there early, review the drafts, have any corrections made, and then sign them with the attorney looking on. As we arrived, we learned that the attorney was delayed by an “emergency hearing” at the courthouse but should be arriving soon, so we got down to reviewing on our own in the firm’s small conference room.
It felt good to be so close to signing these documents, on their heavy bond paper, that would formalize our wishes. There was also the aesthetic pleasure of legal language, full of extremely particular wordings necessary for precision and the avoidance of ambiguity, for example the repetition of “children” in the phrase “appoint as Guardians of my children who at the time of my death are minor children.” Yes, it’s clunky, but try to think of another way to nail down the intended meaning.
I particularly enjoyed the section covering the various possible sequences of Amy’s and my deaths. Obviously, if, as is most likely, we die separately and spaced out in time, the relevant will goes into effect. But the boilerplate language suggested and covered other possibilities, namely that we might “die simultaneously”—okay, as the result of “a common accident”—and, still more intriguingly, “under such circumstances as to render it impossible to determine who predeceased whom.”
I imagined the aftermath of some Mexican standoff from a Quentin Tarantino movie, Amy and I discovered lying toe to toe in some bullet-riddled motel room, both of us still gripping a 1911 in each hand. Or our skeletons, uncovered on some desert island, decades after our hitherto unexplained disappearances…
We marked up the documents with all of the typos we found, checked with the receptionist. No updates from the attorney, presumably still held up in court.
We scheduled another meeting and left for home.