Willing

I've been talking a lot lately about writing a will. It's one of those topics that used to seem off-limits in polite conversation. Why? Birds don't do it, bees don't do it, not even educated fleas do it, but the rest of us really should. 

Husband and I wrote wills many years ago in England when all we had inheritance-wise was debt, but the kids were small and what we cared deeply about was who would raise them in the tragic event of their being orphaned. Those wills were drenched in tears. 

Since then we've moved to Canada and acquired the odd asset or two to accompany the debt. We've been meaning to write new wills ever since our eldest child turned 18, and he celebrated his 26th birthday this year. In fact all the kids are now above the age of majority so we no longer need to describe in mournful detail where they should live and what schooling they ought to have. How hard could the rest be? Let's get on it, I urged husband. Sometime soon, he said. We engaged in procrastination and denial until we absolutely couldn't any more. Life is precious and precarious. We always knew it was so, but with age, experience, and various hard knocks of our own and of others, we began to believe it. Soon became now.

We already had a lawyer here in Toronto; he had done the legal stuff when we bought our house. We couldn't be sure, however, whether he also advised on wills. It's not a given. A character in my favourite radio soap opera, The Archers, is a solicitor named Usha who is forever telling prospective clients that whatever their problem, it's not her area of the law. Fortunately, our Toronto lawyer proved perfectly willing (sorry) to act for us in this matter. 

He asked to see our previous UK wills. Reasonable. The only thing was that we had no idea where we had put them (those tear-stained pages). Our email accounts from back then have expired or exploded or are otherwise inaccessible to us, so no electronic copies lurked in our inboxes. How to find them? I tried to think where Miss Marple would go to locate documents: perhaps the Prerogative Court of Canterbury or the Public Records Office in Chancery Lane? Would they be filed by date or alphabetized? I imagined riffling past the Magna Carta to reach Leslie Carlin. Surely there was a more modern way.

The lawyer in England ought still to have hold of them, we reasoned. But which lawyer might that be? I remembered the office being near the train station in Brighton, and conducted an online search for it. Too many possibles. Finally I asked the friend who had referred us there all those years ago if she recalled who it was. She hazarded a guess based on our description ("big windows looking onto Queens Road") and I sent off an enquiry by email: "To Whom It May Concern: Do you have our wills?" They replied promptly. Yes they did. Would they send them to us? Yes they would. Did they ask for any identification or have any security or confidentiality measures in place? No they did not. Here you go, have some wills. Maybe they're yours. And they were. Huzzah.

I'd like to say it was smooth sailing from there and that within days we had new documents signed and sealed. But no. We dithered, we dallied. Not until mere days before leaving for Cambridge in March did we get our ducks in a row and our derrières downtown to the lawyer's. And then, at last, it was done. We have written new wills and we know where they are. What a relief.

This Toronto lawyer is savvier than the Brighton one and has advised us in great detail about content and process, including--this time--keeping track of our work (and his). We've shared the existence and the location of the wills and the lawyer's contact info with our kids and our sisters. I may as well share further: he's called Harvey Mandel, 55 Queen St. E., Toronto. (Miss Marple, take note.)  

Go see him. Or go to the guy near the train station in Brighton. Or do it yourself online as our neighbor did. But do it.  

The PSA here endeth. Live long and prosper. Nanoo, nanoo.