Many years ago — I think I was around 25 and, if we disregard my idiotic Marlboro pack-a-day smoking habit, very healthy — my mother shocked me with a single question:
“How do you want to be buried?”
I remember looking at her, slack-jawed. In the first place, I thought this hardly the question for her to be asking me. In the second, how could I possibly know the answer at that tender age? I uttered only the second question.
“Well you should come to some conclusion,” my mother said. “Consider the options.”
And for years, I did not do any such thing. Sure, every once in a while I’d get some unsolicited call from a cheerful hawker of burial plots, but I really had no interest in that kind of real estate. (I still don’t).
But I did come to one conclusion. My mother was right. We should all consider the options now, while we have all our marbles and a certain amount of distance from the final event. These options concern a lot more than burial sites. They include how we want to die, in what circumstances we might desire (or decline) extreme measures (also known as a “Living Will” or an “Advance Medical Directive”), and who we wish to make critical decisions for us in the event of becoming incapacitated.
Whatever conclusions you come to, get a lawyer to make sure these wishes are set in stone. And above all, communicate your wishes to those who might survive you. By “communicate,” by the way, I do not mean you should try my husband’s most recent stab at drafting the future: ie. send your spouse an email outlining your wish to donate your remains to some unspecified medical university. That kind of directive is not legally binding, and anyone can feel free to disregard it — at the exact moment where you’re in no condition to do battle. Do you really want to spend your last days clarifying your intentions to strangers? Or your in-laws?
Whatever person you choose should be given the original copy of your Advance Medical Directive and also a document known as a Durable Power of Attorney. Do not let the person designated put these documents in a bank’s safety deposit box (everyone loses the keys to a safety deposit box). You keep the copies. At home. In an easily accessible file. Every few years review those documents and update them with a lawyer’s help.
As for what to do about your remains: that’s a topic for another day. And I am definitely going to deal with it. My close friend Margo Howard, the advice columnist who is the daughter of the late Ann Landers, has resolved the issue of burial versus cremation by telling her family, “I have absolutely no opinion at all. Surprise me!”
You might think this is just a sneaky way of passing the buck. You might be right. But right now, while she’s in excellent health, she simply wanted to tell her family that she trusts them, once she no longer can, to do the choosing. And — most important of all — they agreed.
