Considering The Inevitable Future

With the baby on the way and everything else that has been going on my wife and I have been thinking about preparing for the future. While there have been many happy moments and times of celebration, there are a few realities that we must address in order for us to not have to think about certain things and unpleasant possibilities. It is with this in mind that we have started discussing putting a will together.

This is a conversation that we had when we first got married and we simply put it aside for a number of years. It wasn’t something that we would think about on a regular basis so it was simply forgotten about. Lately, it has been a thought permeating our minds and we have had to give serious consideration to many of the details.

There is nothing that has officially be done at this point… it has merely been discussion and the floating of ideas and scenarios. And while we don’t have much it would be nice to get some of the broad strokes out of the way before this important project is put off again. While I don’t see us forgetting about it like we previously did, we would both rather have it done now while we are motivated to do so and while we have a small measure of time to commit to this undertaking.

We have both seen and read a few wills in our lives but we never sat down to write one ourselves. But it is not just about us anymore, we want to make sure that our son (and any future children) are not left with a cluster when we are no longer around whether that is five or fifty years from now. It is also an opportunity to decide what will happen if we were to become ill toward the end and what needs to be done while we are still ‘alive’.

How will the minimalistic ‘estate’ be handled? Who would care for our kid(s) if it, G-d forbid, happens sooner rather than later? What happens to all of our crap? What are our last wishes? What life saving measures, if any, should be taken? Where will we be planted?

Those are just some of the basic questions that we have been asking ourselves and while we don’t have any definitive answers we are working things through and doing our best to write them down. While this attempt will be a broad one at best (we are doing this ourselves) it will be the basis for when we sit down with a lawyer in the future and pull everything together as it should be. We are going to take care of the basics now and work out many of the details over time. But, it is nice to know that something is getting recorded and that things will, for the most part, be taken care of and we generally know what will happen when that day comes.