In her recent book Later Is Too Late: Hard Conversations That Can’t Wait, Susan Covell Alpert tells what she learned after the death of her husband and also from observing the deaths for other couples. This is a difficult topic to address but a very important one.
I found the book title itself to be provocative. What is absolutely essential to have in place?
The essential items are insurance or legal documents. After all, you have to purchase fire insurance before your house is on fire or life insurance before you are on your death bed. You can create or change legal documents only when you are “of sound mind.” Since you do not know when a fire will happen or your life or the integrity of your mind will end, it is critical to take care of these issues before it is too late. So although these issues may not seem to be urgent, they are. Timing is important.
There are quite a number of very, very helpful things to do, in order to prepare for the unbearable grief from a major loss. Death generates a huge amount of paperwork, emails, and telephone calls. At a time when you need to make many decisions, your grief makes it difficult to think straight.
The norm is to have a mix of emotions including stress, fear, anxiety, and exhaustion. These can lead to personal neglect. To cope with the extremely stressful situation Alpert offers the following recommendations:
- Have a support network of professionals, friends, and family you can lean on—people you know well and who know you. They can help you think straight. Without this close network, you will be relying on strangers.
- Ask for and accept their help. This may not be easy to do but is critical.
- Take care of yourself. Otherwise nothing else will work.
It’s not really possible to be fully prepared to handle the emotional parts of your loss. Even so, there are many things you can do to lessen the stress and burden in the aftermath. It will be helpful:
- to know what financial assets you own, where they are, and how they work
- to know your passwords
- to have made funeral plans ahead of time
Putting these off will lead to larger problems later. Having your support network available ahead of time will be enormously helpful.
Many couples divide household responsibilities so that each does more of what they enjoy and are good at. When there is only one of you, you have to take over the responsibilities of the other person. This can be easy or difficult depending on how much training each of you does of the other one ahead of time.
My wife and I have specialties – she does the cooking and I do the financials. So we have plans to do some teaching of each other. She has offered to give me cooking lessons, and I will teach her the basics about tax preparation. Sooner will be better.