09 Jun Rest.

I started this website over a year ago. For years working in death law, estate planning and probate, I’ve come to hate how we look at it. Documents and taxes and one-size fits all and and people not knowing whether or not they were “good”.

It all boils down to a deeper problem. We are horrible at acknowledging death. We don’t care to think about what will happen when we die. We think that if we think it through when we’re young, we’re just being morbid. Or that if we’re thinking about it when we’re older, we’re admitting we’re giving up somehow. So, we say, we’ll think about it when our health starts to fail…. assuming you’ll get some kind of countdown that allows you time to organize your affairs that won’t crowd out the grieving and the health battle. And hope we can get it all together while our wits are about us. And I can tell you that it doesn’t play out that way for many, many people.

And we end up making our legacy merely about money and the difficulty and controversy of getting to it, when legacy should be so much bigger than that. Legacy should be what we’re doing everyday. To help those around us. To raise our children into adults who may one day raise their own kids. To acknowledge and pass on where we’ve come from.

So, I started this website because for years, I envisioned creating a place that would attempt to cut through the dysfunction of what we’ve made of “estate planning”. To show that it’s not one-size fits all. To give, in normal terms, the basic information it takes to be organized about this. That estate planning should be part of our general home organization and that it’s not just about having certain documents done. It’s about understanding our stuff and the system well enough to understand what problems will come up when you will die and, as part of your normal organization, set up things happen as efficiently as possible.

Over the course of this year, in my spare time between my day job as a lawyer and a mother to four kids, I’ve become a hobbyist website creator, podcaster, writer and speaker. Why? Because death pisses me off. Because we are so dysfunctional about this. Because what normally happens is that we fail to face it for ourselves and when we don’t address our legal and other end-of-life issues it means that grieving people will have to deal with it… on top of that grieving.

Normally I write a few times a month. But this month has been a month of busyness. The end of school. Kids at soccer. A baptism and hosting family. Stepping back from this hobby… for a moment.

It  has been really good to take this time to think about where to continue. Things like, what the next season of the podcast should cover and expanding into new platforms, dipping into YouTube (I’m really excited to partner with Death Deck on something I’ll drag my husband into), expanding my speaking topics to touch on areas of legacy that isn’t just taxes and wills, and daydreaming about writing a book.

So, stay tuned for more ways to organize your (after)life.