My Last Will and Testament…and Seth’s Not Mentioned
Today I sat down to write my last will and testament and I did not list my only child as my beneficiary.
For just about everyone the task of writing a will is laden with the frightening realization of inevitable death. One’s own mortality. The end is potentially near. Not comforting thoughts. Definitely not comfortable thoughts. A crappy way to spend a day already filled with dark threatening storm clouds and a cold sustained wind pointing icy accusatory fingers at every breach in the doors and windows of the place I live.
As I looked around my truly humble ranch style house I saw clearly that the items I’ve filled it with, the things that I’ve placed carefully and lovingly on shelves, in book cases, hung on walls…they are quite probably of no monetary value at all. Certainly not at any great estate auction. Probably, not even at a yard sale. They are mine, and without them, I’d lose all sense of calm and home. However, to anyone else they are knick-knacks, tchatzkahs, old dusty books, art of questionable aesthetic significance. If one were to, upon my demise, attempt to asses the value of the contents they’d quickly find that the beautiful lamps are fake tiffany, the old distinguished looking books are third edition at best. Then there are the framed photos — on every flat horizontal surface, in every one of my seven rooms. The personal memories caught on film that fill my space with a light much brighter than the southern exposure windows my husband so dearly desired.
If there was a flood, a fire, a need to suddenly flee my home, it is these pictures I’d spend those last frantic moments gathering. The framed ones, the carefully arranged albums, and the cartons of not quite ready to be displayed snapshots filled with open mouths, squinty eyes, and heads inadvertently cut off. I’d start again with a new wardrobe, a new television, new computer, jewelry…but the photos are the only valuables that simply can’t be replaced. And those I’ll have with me till the day I die. Which brings me back to today. The will.
My son is gone, far too soon, and without any sense of fairness. He’s gone. It is my son, and only my son, that would have known the importance of the stained glass butterfly, the 1890 third edition copy of Little Women, the replica Biloxi Lighthouse, the piece of driftwood collected after Hurricane Gloria kept us locked in our Virginia Beach bedroom closet, the heart shaped stone found on a stretch of deserted Montauk sand. And the photos. Only a child wants to someday inherit the photos of a family that has lost one other. Only a child who expects to someday show his own children and grandchildren the photos of his mother and her family would see a value in those smiling faces preserved in frames of different shapes and sizes.
I have no child and I have no reason to believe that the precious-to-me contents of my home or the memories caught on film will survive my death.
Even when Seth was alive, it was never the promise of great wealth that I hoped to pass on to him. It was a wealth of memories that I’d planned to share with him as he got older. His mom led a quirky life, filled with odd run-ins with a short list of once notables. Lunch with the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, eating frozen grapes with John McEnroe in front of his home, a birthday kiss from a bonafide Billboard top 40 pop star accompanied by a sweeping dip that left me breathless, doing crossword puzzles nightly with Ivan Lendl before he called his daughters to wish them a good night, discussing soap operas at a Manhattan eatery with Wayne Gretzky….hundreds of odd and interesting moments. Moments that I’d planned to regale my son with to ward off any notion that his suburban mom had always been boring. Moments that, with my son’s artful and loving retelling, would somehow have kept me with him and alive.
But, today as I wrote my last and will and testament, I began to wonder if without that someone to pass the moments and treasures of my life on to…am I really even alive. We all struggle with purpose. Today I struggle with meaning. And reality.
When I die, the written words of my last wishes will assure only that the real estate in which I house the material contents of my modest life will be sold and divided amongst those that outlive me. But the only real parts of my life worth anything, the photographic proof of happy and meaningful times and the memories that I’m hoping I’m lucky enough to hold onto into what I optimistically expect will be an old age…those will be forgotten with my last breath.
What a depressing way to spend a day.
