PUTTING "THINGS" IN ORDER

I hang with an older crowd. (Then again, I AM old.) We often sit around sipping our Scotch and swapping sagas of aching knees/backs/shoulders/hips/arthritic fingers/bulging bunions/disappearing hairlines/escalating blood pressure/receding gums, et alia. Many of us are also starting to think about  … the inevitable.

This past week, close friends selected granite headstones for their …inevitable. When I asked what their tombstones looked like, I was told, “No roses or flowers, nothing fancy, just our family name. After all, we won’t see them.”

As for me, I attended a Zoom class sponsored by the South Coast Senior College of Maine that was titled “Creating a Great End of Life Plan.” Having already completed significant estate planning with Mr. Wonderful, and updating our wills, DNRs, and all that, I assumed my only remaining task was selecting which outfit I’d wear for my cremation and the appropriate time to blast my favorite song, “OKLAHOMA!” During the hour and a half tutorial, I learned that I have a humongous pile of other personal, financial and medical information to locate, plus a list of key contacts, all of which should be “kept in a safe place.”

Right now, my survivors would not be ecstatic about my filing system. Take our car title (if you can find it). I think it’s on my office book shelf with our insurance info. But it could also be in my son-in-law’s safe. 

My tech-savvy kids would cringe if they saw the four-page typed list of “important passwords” I refer to near hourly. Being a true 20th Century gal, I prefer lists written on actual paper, not a file somewhere deep in the Cloud, wherever that is. 

So I’m working on this. 

I also realized that I have way too much stuff — plates, vases, mugs, Christmas ornaments and never-lit candles shaped like turkeys. None of them have seen the light of day for years and my kids won’t want them. A friend recommended I try selling on FaceBook Marketplace. (I became interested when she confided she’d made “a ton of money” getting rid of her junk.)

So far I haven’t needed the service of a Brinks truck to deliver all my crumbled-up George Washingtons to my Kennebunk Savings Bank account. There’s gotta be an easier way to make money! Take the $39 cat bed I bought on Amazon for our little Sunshine. She took one look at the fort-like contraption and scooted under the couch. She’s never put one paw into the damn thing. So I decided to sell it.

After photographing, describing and pricing the cat bed at $3 (a steal!), it then appeared among 12 million other items on The Marketplace as I waited breathlessly for my Messenger phone app to ding. A potential customer finally got in touch, asking, “What’s your lowest price?” 

Even worse, Mr. Wonderful is getting involved. He can miss spotting an overflowing waste basket or empty wine glass left in the sunroom for three days, but suddenly he’s inspecting every brown paper bag I place on my front porch. He asks in astonishment, “How can you sell this? I love this thing.” 

Planning for the inevitable is time consuming but important. As the instructor said at the end of the class, “Care enough about your survivors to make it easier on them. Losing you will be hard enough.” 

I just hope I have another decade to find the car title.