The Power
My lovely wife and I are going out of the country in a couple of weeks, so in addition to buying some new underwear, a fresh roll of dental floss and a new eye mask for sleeping on the plane (those don’t go together), we decided it was time to revisit our wills.
The last time we updated our wills was when our children were little.
They are little no more.
So, if the Russians mistake our American Airlines 777 for a hostile intrusion into their airspace and we get shot down over France, we want to make sure a few of the original provisions are up to date.
Like the part about our kids being adopted by my wife’s brother if something were to happen to us.
Considering our oldest is 33 and the twins are about to turn 30 (damn, I’m old), I doubt being forced to move into my brother in law’s basement and sleep in bunk beds for the rest of their lives might not be very appreciated.
And now that we actually own a few things, it was time to decide who gets my old recliner and collection of ‘root beer bottles from around the world.’
Those have to be worth something.
So, we sat down with our attorney to hammer it all out.
My wife wanted to give them everything. I wasn’t so sure.
How many times had I asked my sons to take out the trash and they just looked at me like they no longer spoke English?
And how many thousands of times had I told them not to take snacks upstairs as they walked right past me with a bag of potato chips in each hand.
And what about those times my daughter… well, she did bad stuff but I just can’t think of anything right now.
During the years they lived in my house, I worried, I lost sleep, I developed these bags under my eyes. I purchased 6,000 gallons of milk, and I spent at least two hundred thousand dollars on Hot Pockets.
Why should I just hand over the family fortune to them?
That’s what I thought to myself.
But of course, when the attorney asked me who I wanted to be the beneficiaries of my estate, I didn’t mention the frown lines they caused me to have or the fact that if it wasn’t for them, I could be retired and living on a yacht somewhere the Caribbean by now.
I just smiled and said, “ISIS!”
My attorney looked at me in shock, “What?”
“Sorry… I meant to say my children.”
Apparently, upon passing the bar exam, an attorney is required to have an operation to remove their sense of humor.
Once our wills were signed in triplicate, witnessed and notarized and my wife and I cut our palms and rubbed the bloody cuts together, it was time to move on to fun part.
The durable power of attorney.
I’m not sure why it’s called durable. Is it possible write up a power of attorneys that’s just delicate? Or hasty?
Anyway, this was something that we have long needed in case one of us is unable to make our own medical decisions.
In other words, it I fall and scrape my knee or get a real bad mosquito bite, my wife needs to be able to tell the doctor to pull the plug.
I could tell that my attorney loved this part. There is nothing like pitting husband and wife against each other to see which one will say uncle and yank out the life support tubes first.
To determine which of us was the most cold-hearted, he had a whole litany of questions that each of us had to answer.
Like if I am in a coma, did I want the people at the hospital to keep feeding me through a tube or have them pull it out and let me starve.
Naturally, I wrote down that I preferred to be given a diet of grass-fed ribeye steak but that wasn’t one of the choices.
Pull the plug.
And then there was the section about if I should be given any pain medication to ease my suffering.
Just the mention of the word suffering calls for some kind of action, don’t you think?
My wife didn’t seem to think so.
She grabbed a pen and checked the ‘no’ box faster than a sneeze through a screen door.
She must already have her second husband picked out.
Apparently the durable power of attorney law in Georgia gives a person the right to do virtually anything in the other person’s name, not just pull the plug.
Our attorney explained that once we signed it, our spouse could borrow money in our name, buy a car or take out a mortgage in our name even without our knowledge.
In other words, while I slept peacefully in my bed at night, my wife could sneak out and borrow a million dollars, empty my bank account and even sell my root beer bottle collection and there was nothing I can do to stop her.
My attorney asked us several times if we were sure we wanted to sign the document. Apparently, at some point in his career, this little document had caused a bit of a riff in an otherwise happy union and someone had either been murdered or sent to debtors prison.
I looked at her. She looked at me.
We both knew we would never unplug the other. Not unless it was really bad.
You know, like me being in a coma might cause her to miss the new season of Yellowstone.
Or if it meant she couldn’t bring her dogs to the ICU waiting room.
Things would have to that kind of bad for her to tell the doctors that it didn’t matter if I was sitting up talking, it was time for me to go home and be with Jesus.
So we signed.
As soon as we return from Italy, I will probably need to have surgery on my shoulder. Full anesthesia.
It will be the first test of our new durable power of attorney.
So, if you see my wife driving around in a new Range Rover, you’ll know it took me longer than ten minutes to wake up.
