So my life competence note to spouses and others who are part of a team with divided areas of responsibility is this: Long before you feel that dropping dead in your living room is even a remote possibility, take the time to make an “In the event of my demise” document (or video) for your loved one, domestic partner, business associate, or whoever it is who is dependent on you. Explain what you have been handling and will be able to handle no longer. List the whereabouts of safety deposit boxes, safes, filing cabinets, important documents, monthly deadlines, passwords and lingering problems your successors may not be aware of. And keep it up to date.
Before either of you bites the Big One first, have a conversation in which you go over everything that should be on the list. Grace used to say, “If I was bopped by a trolley tomorrow, you would have no idea how to do X.” But she never took the necessary next step of explaining how to do X because she didn’t want to think about that trolley, and I never pressed her to, because I didn’t want to do X, and I didn’t want to think about her being bopped by a trolley either.
So I am still in hell, after (let’s see..) 17 months, and it’s my own fault.
As an aside, this is one of those times I don’t miss a departed regular commenter. The one I’m thinking of never missed an opportunity to pounce on a “gotcha” opportunity and write some version of “you’re the asshole here, and you’re trying to get sympathy and blame someone else” as a comment. I know I’m ultimately responsible, that I enabled my wife and was willfully blind. Nobody has to tell me that. This post is genuinely intended as a cautionary one I am writing in the throes of disgust and panic so that others can benefit from my stupidity.
Being incompetent at what my father called “the vicissitudes of life” is a breach of ethics, because it causes harm that could have been avoided with sufficient attention and diligence. That commenter exited EA a few months ago when I concluded a response to his criticism with the sign-off, “Bite me!”
That’s something I don’t regret.
Ethics Alarms 
This is something many surviving spouses deal with, unfortunately, My late grandmother was left alone suddenly after my grandfather collapsed of a heart attack in the kitchen a few hours after a doctor’s appointment. She knew next to nothing about finances and the insurance issues were tangled up so badly my aunt went into debt to pay for the funeral.
She’d modeled briefly in the ’40s. Not professionally. She would model dresses in a department store so that people could see how the clothes fit without trying them on themselves. That was the only job she’d ever had and it did not continue into marriage. Yet, she found herself cleaning tables at McDonald’s a year after becoming a widow. It didn’t last long. She was too ornery for that job. But it really did send us a message about preparing for the long haul. I wish she’d learned the lesson, though. When she passed away a few years ago, there were insurance policies decades old that still listed my grandfather as the beneficiary.
Thanks for the reminder. I know this is a painful time for you.
Mrs. OB has compiled a folder with everything in it., but praise Allah that I go first.
Love the cartoon. Whatever happened to the world that cartoon came from and depicted?
A while back I noticed a book on someone’s shelf called I’m Dead, Now What? I assumed it was a fictional story about someone experiencing an afterlife, until I looked it up online and saw it was a contingency book for a person to write down all the things that other people would need to know in the event of their death.
I should probably get it for myself, not just for the contingency but because it would help me better organize the information and documents that I may need to make use of even while alive. The authors have probably thought of details that never occurred to me.
A very important topic, as my wife’s sister in law had to deal with a bit of a mess, and they knew things were ending for her brother.
My dad did a good job of it, and it was still quite trying for my mom.
Never mind the entrusting emotional aspect of having to be without the person who was such a big support.
God bless you, Jack, and thanks for posting. Pretty important.
I would absolutely second these sentiments.
In my work, I periodically see clients whose spouse has recently passed away. Sometimes they are able to cope with the new tasks all right, but some are simply lost at things they may have never handled in 50 years of marriage.
This happens up and down the age brackets, but more so amongst my and my parent’s generations, I think, because the gender roles tended to be more rigid.
There is a flip side that I get glimpses of where the spouses seem to never really merge their financial lives, maintaining their own separate finances. That seems to work, but it can create the same issues of having no idea what your spouse has in terms of finances and banks accounts.
For me, this is another pointed reminder to get my own house in order, both for myself and my sisters. Inevitably one or two of us will need to know how to wind up the other’s affairs, and we are probably not really prepared.