Who has to do what

About this Video:

For a couple of years, I’ve been telling myself that when I’m gone, my kids should get to decide what happens to the house, the belongings, and the service. I thought I was being generous. I thought I was giving them freedom.

I’ve changed my mind.

The more I’ve read about what families go through after someone dies, the more I’ve realized that “you decide” can be another way of handing your children a job they never asked for.

Somebody has to empty the house, deal with the furniture, sort through the belongings, and decide what happens to everything. The legal paperwork might cover the house and the accounts, but it doesn’t tell anyone who has to do the work.

One story really got to me: a family rented a storage unit after their grandmother died, filled it with her belongings, and paid for it for two years before finally sorting through everything. As the woman telling the story put it, they weren’t storing furniture. They were storing delayed decisions.

Then there’s the question of my photographs. I’ve got more than twenty thousand on my computer. Suzanne and I love sitting together and watching them on the television. But I’ve never asked my kids whether they want them, or what they’d like to keep.

That got me thinking about the difference between leaving things accessible and making sure they’re actually wanted.

I’m seventy-three. I don’t know how much time I’ve got, and neither does anyone else. Sorting through a lifetime of possessions takes energy, and I don’t want to pretend that time and effort are free.

I’ve spent too much time asking what I want to leave my kids. I’m starting to think the better question is what they actually want.

And I’ve never asked them.

That’s the next conversation I need to have.


Transcript:

Here’s what I found. I found I’ve been calling something generous that really just me leaving the room. For a couple years now, I’ve been telling myself the same thing. When I’m gone, my kids should get to decide the service, the house, all the stuff. I thought that was a gift. I thought it was being pretty clever about it.

You know, I’ve spent the last week reading what people write about this at 2:00 in the morning, and I’ve changed my mind completely. I wasn’t being clever. I was being thoughtless. If I’m honest, I was being a little bit mean. Here’s why you decide sounds like freedom. It isn’t actually what I handed my children was an unassigned job.

Somebody has to empty a house in Vermont. Somebody has to decide if it goes on the market. Somebody has to deal with the bikes and the skis and the televisions. None of that is my trust. My trust is clear about the house and the accounts. It says nothing about who drives the truck. That’s the distinction I can’t get past.

Everybody talks about who gets what. Almost nobody talks about who has to do what. So let me tell you the one that stuck. A woman described what her family did after her grandmother died. They needed the house emptied, so they rented a storage unit and filled it up. Climate-controlled, a hundred and forty-one dollars a month, and life got busy.

They paid it for two years, then went through it and kept one bedroom set. And here’s the part that got me. She said the unit wasn’t storing furniture, it was storing their delayed decisions. Twenty-four months of rent to avoid a conversation nobody had while the grandmother was alive. That’s the actual bill for you to decide, and somebody in my family would be paying it.

Now, here’s the one I can’t solve with paperwork. There are more than twenty thousand photographs on my computer. When our TV isn’t playing anything, the screensaver runs them. Suzanne and I sit and watch them. It’s the best thing in the house. The access is all handled. Nothing’s locked. Anybody can walk in and open them.

That turns out to be the harder problem because nobody has ever told me they want them. That’s not a complaint about my kids. I’ve never asked. Those photographs aren’t really mine anywhere. That’s their childhood in there, and an unopened file isn’t so different from a locked one.

Then I went looking for people to agree with me, and I got told off.

There’s a thread of old people answering a younger man who wanted to know why so many of them leave a mess behind. He called it selfish. He had to come back and edit his own post ‘cause the room came at him. The one that stopped me was a seventy-five-year-old woman. She cleaned out her own father’s house, so she knew exactly what she’d be handing over.

She said, “You have so much less energy as time goes on. Our date of death is nowhere posted. Will I die in five years or twenty? I cleaned out my father’s house.” You’re young with all that energy. Grab a pitchfork and start shoveling. I’ve read that a dozen times, and I can’t beat it. Sorting isn’t free. It gets paid for out of whatever time you’ve got left, and nobody tells you how much time that is.

I have a preference. I don’t have a principle, so here’s what I’ve landed, and it’s not where I started. I’ve been asking what I want to leave my kids. That’s the wrong question. The right one is what they’d want, and I’ve never asked them once. That’s next.

Hey, this is Josh. You’re at The Long Strange Trip. I’m glad you’re here. I hope to see you back here next week.