Even after I die, it's still my stuff

Recently I sat down with my wife and a lawyer to do something that we should have done a long time ago. We drafted a will. And yes, it was incredibly irresponsible to not have done this earlier in our lives, but it just never came up or when it did, we always put it on the back burner as something we would get to at some point in the near future. Needless-to-say, that near future took almost seventeen years. But writing a will is not really the topic of today’s blog, instead I want to discuss the odd and somewhat objectionable notion of a will in general.

To write a will is both to legally admit that you will die someday and perhaps contradictorily to admit that you want to have a say in what happens to your stuff when you are gone. Of course it’s all about stuff—material, transient—stuff. The lawyer 

assured me that I could not designate who I would leave whatever sense of happiness I have at the end to my son, nor am I allowed to leave a passion for literature to my daughter. I am only legally allowed to say who gets my stuff. Yet we eventually learn that stuff does not make us happy. Many wealthy people are incredibly unhappy and some poor people actually laugh every once in a while. Indeed, happiness comes from within. We bring it to stuff, stuff does not bring it to us. Yet, a will is a document that is designed to make me feel as if I will be offering my children and perhaps grandchildren, a sense of happiness by designating who gets my stuff. 

Now I know things are much more complicated than this. A will is often just a part of a trust which is in some respects a way to keep your stuff in your family and assure that the youth of the family are not ruined by some lump sum of money when they are unable to make good decisions about how to respond to that lump sum of money. Yet this in itself seems a bit arrogant, but it also seems wise. Most eighteen year olds would not handle a million dollar

inheritance the way most thirty year olds would. From the older generation’s perspective, the eighteen year old is likely to blow it, lose the money, and ruin himself. So a trust allows the dead person to say you can have my stuff, but only a little at a time and only at certain times in your life. Although all this is very logical and rational, something about it bugs me. Maybe it’s the certainty of it all. The arrogant assurance that I know better than you. And perhaps the deceased do know better, perhaps living eighty or ninety or a hundred years teaches us some valuable lessons or at least some perspective. I mean right now my twelve year old son would probably give most of an inheritance for some cool Legos and 

the assurance that he will make the middle school soccer team. Most fifty year olds have the perspective to recognize that toys usually are not a source of lasting happiness and that making the middle school sports team is rather inconsequential in the scope of things. 

So maybe today’s blog is just a rambling commentary about the whole idea that I need to draft a legal document to control what happens to my stuff and that that bugs me a bit.