I have some mixed emotions about celebrating Valentine’s Day. I understand the giddiness of young love, the comfort of old love, and the need to celebrate it, but does it have to come at the price of a kidney? I made the mistake of popping into a flower wholesaler yesterday, and nearly fell over when I saw that a dozen red roses were priced at R850,00. And don’t think that the other types of flowers didn’t jump on that bandwagon! The price of every type of flower that even resembled something that could be remotely classified as being red or pink or white literally tripled overnight. Since I am a regular customer, I felt betrayed and, well, exploited.
So, with my R100 bunch of Baby’s Breath in hand, I started wondering about more pragmatic ways of expressing and demonstrating love than buying flowers and chocolates and white teddy bears clutching red hearts proclaiming “I will luv you foreva”. There’s an endless list of these acts of love that are not limited by a particular day of the year, but I want to focus on one:
Get your last will and testament in place.
It’s one of those things we keep putting on a back burner. Over time, I’ve come to realise that a very big reason for that is by putting in writing what happens to our things, our children, our pets and our remains after we die, we are confronting our mortality. Intellectually we know we will not live forever, but formalising what happens afterwards takes it to a whole new reality.
But it is a reality that death could come knocking at any time.
When my father passed away in 2012 after an eight month battle with cancer, I knew exactly where his will was, where his paperwork was filed, and who to call about various things. He had account numbers and references, contact persons and passwords listed. I thanked him every day for making the administration of his estate something that did not add to my grief.
In 2016, my aunt lost her battle with cancer. She was a widow and had no children, and so it fell to my sister and me to wrap up her affairs. Since my sister was heavily pregnant with her twin girls at the time, I gathered my troops (my husband and two small children) and off we went to pack up my aunt’s duplex in Durban. Now, my aunt was OCD to new levels. We found piles of YOU magazines arranged chronologically since 1992, files of old Nedbank cheques she’d written since 1984, every piece of correspondence she’d exchanged with anyone who had ever written to her (both friendly and downright hostile), but I could not find her will – not even in her file labelled “Testament”.
As much as I loved my aunt, I knew that if I did not deal with her remains in the way she wished me to, she would haunt me from the afterlife, and so left with no directions from her, I did what I thought and hoped she would have wanted (THAT is a topic for another day). She hasn’t appeared in flowing white robes making wailing sounds yet, so I think I got it right, but the point is, it caused me so much angst that mourning her loss and her memory became entangled with my frustrations, and I lost something of her in the process.
Don’t do that to your peeps. Making a will is not something that happens in 5 minutes – a lot of thought, planning and consideration goes into it, but start today. It is the last act of love you will ever show your loved ones.
Natalie Lubbe
Director
082 920 9628
natalie@NLAteam.com
