My Father's Last Gift to His Daughters

My Father’s Last Gift to His Daughters My father was a very detail oriented person. When my parents moved to California from Tennessee, he built a scale model of the apartment they were going to have, then scale models of their furniture to determine what would fit so he didn’t ship furniture across the country that he couldn’t use once he got there. He was also someone who went out of his way to make sure that his daughters were well taken care of. When my oldest son was born, I was living at Blytheville Air Force Base in Arkansas, while my husband was stationed on the West Coast. One evening I called my father and told him I thought my car had a problem. I asked if I should get it seen before I drove home to St Louis in a few days or if I should wait and let him look at it when I got home first. The next day, my father went to work like normal, then after work drove to where I was living (a 4 hour drive when you were healthy, a 6 hour drive when one was heavily pregnant or traveling with an infant). He proceeded to fix my car, than drive the 4 hours back to St Louis so he could go to work the next day. No way was he going to trust his daughter and grandson in a car that wasn’t in excellent condition, nor was he going to trust any old mechanic to fix his daughter’s car. Now my father, in the 70’s, when his daughters had all left home, sent each of us a copy of his “if something happens to me” letter. It was very detailed. 4 pages of being very detailed. He listed (with contact information and any information that would be needed by that entity) all his financial accounts, his savings bonds, his insurance policies, the real estate my parents owned at the time and what mortgages were on them, items of significant value – you name it, it was there. In addition, he listed everyone who should be notified if he died from the US Air Force and Veterans Administration and his insurance brokers to his siblings. In his cover letter, he told us that Mom and he were going to start traveling again, now that they were unencumbered by children, and in case anything happened to him, we should just follow his list. Over the years, he would update the list and send out a new one. Towards the end of his life, as he was beset by health problems and starting to have memory issues, the list didn’t get updated very often, but by then my sister was handling most of his affairs and had the information in her files. The last update was in 1999, 14 years before his death in 2013. My parents were living in California, with two of my sisters living nearby, when my father died. My sisters had their hands full taking care of my mother who had dementia issues, dealing with having my father’s body transported to the funeral home, dealing with the facility they were living in, dealing with returning medical equipment, planning the funeral and so much more. From St Louis, there wasn’t much that I could do to help them, other than offer support over the phone. But the one thing I could do, was to pick up the letter Dad had sent us in 1999 and start going through it. I spent a week sitting at my kitchen table, following my father’s instructions. While most of the information was still valid, there were a few points where a company or phone number or representative’s information was no longer valid. When that occurred, I was able to follow the breadcrumbs through Google searches to find the right person to contact. By the end of the week, before I left for the funeral in California, I had notified everyone, created a list of who was sending my sister (the executor of the will) documents that would need to be filled out and returned, who needed copies of the death certificate and all the information that I had accumulated over the week. I had also arranged for his remains to be placed in a columbarium at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. In doing so, I was able to reduce the stress and burdens that my older sister (my parents’ primary caregiver as they aged) faced and help to “move along” things that she wouldn’t have been able to get to until after the funeral. Several years later, when my mother died, I was able to use my father’s 1999 letter to make the notifications of her death and again relieve my sisters of that burden. When my father-in-law died, my mother-in-law took care of settling his affairs just as she had taken care of settling her parents affairs and none of us thought twice about it. But when she died, we discovered that had been a mistake. As executor of the estate, my husband had her will along with a note his mother had written years before stating which of her 7 children got what of the “personal belongings” based on things they had asked for years earlier – One brother got the dining room furniture, another got his grandfather’s dresser, her daughter got her hope chest, etc. The problem was that they were supposed to get the furniture and everything in it – yet we knew for certain that the items that were in the furniture when the list was written weren’t the items that were still in those pieces of furniture and we had NO idea what items she had originally expected to be there. She specified the dress she wanted to be buried in, but there was no dress left in any of her closets that even remotely matched that description. She did have a prepaid funeral plan, but it had been sold to her by a company that had later been indicted for defrauding consumers. My husband managed to get things taken care of, but it took several years to get everything handled, even though he had been handling her finances for several years before she died. After going through all this, I tried to make a “When we die or become incapacitated” list and send it to my son, but I got the standard words of youth: “Mom, you aren’t going to die anytime soon. I don’t want to hear it.” A few years after that, one of his best friend’s mother died. Brigham stood by his friend supporting him, as his friend discovered that he knew nothing about what he should do, who he should contact or what his mother wanted in the way of a funeral service. At that point, Brigham sent us an email and told us he wanted us to get our affairs in order and give him a list of everything from what we wanted to be buried in and what hymns to play at the service to who he should notify and what financial accounts he should know about. The letter my father wrote his daughters in the 70’s ended up being one of the most valuable things he ever gave us. By providing us with his final guidance and directions, we were able to ensure his wishes were followed, my mother was provided for and we could all spend time grieving, rather than dealing with the stress of having to handle his estate with no idea of what we needed to do. His letter to us, was like a warm blanket cuddling us while my father held us in his arms, reassuring us and letting us know how much he loved us and cared for us My wish for you, is that you take some time to write out your “if something happens to me” letter for your loved ones. While, like my son, they may not want to have it now, some day in the far future, it will be there for them when they need it.