my will

‘We don’t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already.’

Adam Phillips, On Getting Better

I thought that revising my Will would be simple. At least, I thought it would be easier than the admin I’ve done recently when, by some divine fiat, so many of the things that hold my life together have needed renewing or changing: computer, phone, bank, husband, passport, insurance, utilities. You name it, I’ve made a phone call, had an appointment, sent an email or chased paperwork for it.

Initially, I treated revising my Will as one more item on my to-do list, as one more thing to avoid. But I was wrong. Revising my Will was on another level from renewing my driving licence. Which is why, for months, the paperwork I brought home after my appointment with the lawyer sat in a folder in my study, awaiting the right moment I had a hunch would never come. Now and then, I entertained the task ahead of me. I knew the fairies wouldn’t come and do it for me. I was conscious that I had to ask someone to be my executor, and that I had to sign off on my kids, acting on my behalf, putting me in a facility should the day come that I lose my wits.

Three months of sitting on my hands passed by. Then two things happened. A close friend’s long-lost adopted sister took my friend to court to contest their parents’ Will – an amazingly painful experience for my friend. And I picked up a book called Legacy in the library, written by an estate lawyer, which set out the complications that can befall a family when a loved one’s Will isn’t clear and binding.

Twelve years ago, when we moved as a family to Hobart and bought the house that I now live in, I revised my Will. It was an ‘if-I-die-everything-goes-to-my-husband-and-children’ sort of Will. There was no mention of pets, assets or computer passwords. This time round, the form I was asked to fill for my executor was 8-pages long and included utility accounts, email addresses of anyone with a key to my house, car details, internet and social media passwords, policy numbers, direct debits, plus resuscitation and funeral wishes.

Two hours before my appointment with the lawyer to sign my new Will, I took the 8-page form to my local café and treated filling it in like an exam. With less than two hours before my appointment, there was no escape. I emailed my cousin and sister, asking them to have Power of Attorney. I texted a dog trainer I know, to ask her how I might leave things for our dog. I rushed back home to ransack my files. And I racked my brain recalling passwords that my superego admonished me for not having written down in one place.

I failed the exam. When I got to the lawyer’s office, a few minutes late, some of the spaces on the executor’s form were still blank. All the same, most of the squares were filled with my messy handwriting – especially messy, for some reason, were the numbers 4 and 5 which I had to correct repeatedly with black pen.

A month ago, I assumed that the half of adult Australians who haven’t signed a Will were irresponsible. Now I know better than to think that. Because if my fellow countrymen and women feel only some of the resistance that I felt toward being frozen in time, and having to account for myself as ‘what I am already’, and no more, it’s surprising that any Wills get signed at all.

I’m not going to say that I feel better for having faced my mortality. Because I don’t. But I do feel different. I feel locked into my life in a way that two weeks ago I didn’t. It’s as if I’ve lost my innocence. I’ve crossed the Rubicon. I don’t know how others will think of me when I’m not here anymore; this isn’t for me to know. However, signing this Will has made me realise, in a way that has sunk in, that one day I’ll be a memory. Perhaps this will fade and I’ll feel immortal again by next weekend; but right now it feels peculiar.

When I arrived at the lawyer’s office, after waiting in a stately reception area, I was ushered into a cubicle similar to the ones used to interrogate at the police station. What might have been intended as an open-plan office had been cut into oddly-shaped windowless rooms lit by strip fluorescent lighting.

Even though the act of signing my Will took all of five minutes, the whole process exhausted my stores of maturity. In the days after, I avoided my study so as not to have to think about the papers piled high on my desk. Until, last Sunday, faced with a choice between painting the basement or clearing my desk, I got a second wind. I turned on the printer, got out a second pile of papers that I’d failed to file since I switched to direct debits, and started sorting.

I didn’t tell myself what I was doing, which would have scared me off. In no time at all, the desk was sprayed with papers. This meant that the only place left for me to open my files, bar the floor, was the seat of the chair. So, no sitting down. Then, surreptitiously and in parallel, I started on a task I’d been planning for months. Into the clear plastic sleeves of a black folder, bought for this purpose, I slipped copies or originals of all my important documents: family birth certificates, citizenship papers, house utilities, insurance policies, copies of passports and, of course, my Will.

Mind you, this process took the rest of the afternoon, during which my dog looked on, moon-faced, from his chair in my study. Standing at my desk, I let unwanted papers fall to the floor like autumn leaves. I called up my car breakdown insurer to check I was still a member. I pulled out my driving licence renewal and made a list of other ‘must-dos’. And throughout all this I felt so focused, so quietly stressed, that answering my phone and eating lunch didn’t occur to me.

Filling a rubbish bag with redundant papers was satisfying. But even more satisfying was tying a red ribbon to the outside of the black folder, now swollen with documents, and pointing it out to my son when he came in from sailing. Tick.

plan b

Mary Oliver once asked a question that, when I read it, I immediately wrote down. When we reach our last days on earth, she asked, and look back over our life, what will we wish we had done on this day that we are now living?

I often think on this question when I have what I call a plan b moment, which is the gap of time that opens up when my plan a, for whatever reason, falls through. Whenever I have a plan b moment, there’s no warning. Last Friday, it went like this. I was going about my morning, getting meat out of the fridge to bring it to room temperature so that, after returning from writing in a local cafe, I could brown it for the slow cooker (my answer to just about everything culinary). An hour later, when I got back to my car, after writing and shopping, and looked at my phone, I saw that one of the friends I’d invited for dinner night had left a message explaining that she was exhausted from work and was heading home up the coast. She would, she said, be a terrible guest and may even fall asleep at the table. I texted back that she wasn’t to fall asleep at the wheel and that I didn’t mind a bit, which I didn’t. Then I texted my second dinner guest, telling her what had happened. Within the hour, Di replied that she was taking her brother home after a cancer surgery and may need to stay at his place that night. ‘Of course’, I texted back, adding how lucky her brother was to have her as a sister.

In my current unmarried life, one of these plan b moments happens two or three times a week. My kids promise that they’ll be home for dinner, and then go sailing. I’ll arrange for someone to help me in the garden, and they don’t appear. An event I’d been looking forward to is canceled. Experiences like these happened when I was married and had kids at home. But somehow, with more holding me in place, I didn’t notice them so much. To the extent that I did, I was glad of them. They were a windfall, a rush of grace. When a plan of mine was aborted, I was thrilled; suddenly I had an unclaimed pocket of time that five minutes before I hadn’t. However, now I really notice it when my plans change, because now there are more windy spaces in my day. I have just as many balls in the air, possibly more. Yet somehow they don’t have the same weight as the old ones. Nowadays it feels confronting, a bit embarrassing, to realise – in the wake of a plan b moment – that I need others more than they need me. It’s not that other people don’t care about me; I know that they do. It’s just that when I was married and had kids at home there was always someone in the wings to fall back on – to go for a walk with, to cook dinner for. My son still lives at home; I’m not living alone yet. However, he’s busy with his life and I make it clear that I don’t count on him being around, though am happy when he is – an arrangement which makes cooking dinner interesting.

Lately, when a plan b moment arises, and I’m at home, I’ll sit down at the piano and centre myself that way. Or I’ll take my dog for a favourite walk, and relish the cooking that I suddenly don’t have to do. Or I’ll make dandelion coffee and break off dark chocolate and sit on the back doorstep, as I decide which renovating task to invest my newfound time in.

I never see a plan b moment coming. It’s always a surprise. Still, I’m getting better at keeping a mental list of what these moments give me the opportunity to do. I’m getting better at bringing Mary Oliver’s question to mind, and at seeing the silver lining which is on the flip side of not being needed by my family. Yes, it’s sad not being on call to my family 24/7; but it’s also revelatory. It feels miraculous to have fate tap me on the shoulder, after 25 years of being ‘it’ for the four of us, and for her to say to me, ‘and by the way you don’t have to cook tonight’.

As with other deep experiences, my plan b moments are ‘both/and’. They’re exhilarating and mortifying. It’s exhilarating to be off the hook, in terms of endless domestic demands; but it’s also chastening to realise that I don’t matter to others quite as much as I did before. Now and then, one of these plan b moments will catch me so completely that, for a few seconds, I’ll feel vertigo. How, I ask myself, as I stop in my tracks, can this have come about?

There are evenings when I take my dog to the beach and find myself glancing enviously at couples holding hands while, in the next breath, reveling in not having to be at home supervising school homework. ‘How did that happen?’ I’ll ask in wonder. ‘This thing called separation is really happening’, I’ll think to myself, as I head back up the beach. ‘And it’s happening to me’.

This is not a ‘woe is me’ experience. I do know how deeply lucky I’ve been in my life so far. I mean something more existential. It’s as if, for a second or two, I can feel my life changing direction. And then I fall back into annoyance with my dog who, for the umpteenth time, has fallen behind on the beach to sniff something.

I don’t always make the best use of my plan b moments. Last night, when my son went off to have dinner with my ex without warning, I was quick to respond to my plan b moment. ‘Here it comes again’, I told myself, as I sat down at the piano and forced myself to play the notes in front of me. Then I ate enough dinner for two at the kitchen table and proceeded to read The Guardian Weekly from cover to cover – which given the tenor of world events was riveting and disheartening.

So I guess that, before long, I’ll be an old hand at responding to sudden changes of plan.