Hoping for the best, planning for the worst

Meditations on loss and how to prepare for it

Fifteen years ago whilst freelancing, I was hired to do a maternity leave fill-in for an editor whose baby had arrived seven weeks early. After a short stay in the NICU, the baby (and mother) were fine, but the editor’s stories were in shambles. She hadn’t done anything to prepare for her leave, assuming she had more than a month left to get things in order. Picking up her responsibilities from an unorganized pile of papers and the managing editor’s vague idea of where projects stood (we didn’t even have access to the new mom’s email!) was one of the hardest temp assignments I ever had.

The experience made me prepare early when I was pregnant with my son. I was borderline obsessive about planning how things would run in my absence. Each night when I left the office, I tidied my desk and updated a document with the status of every one of my stories. I took things perhaps a bit too far, but I wanted to do the best for my colleagues when I would be gone. 

I was reminded of this last week when we lost my father-in-law.

ABOVE: Green-Wood Cemetery in bloom, captured by Art Presson, the cemetery’s vice-president of special projects.

We moved my husband’s dad up to New York City from Texas back in 2019 when he needed a new place to live. It has been four years since we found him a studio three blocks away from our own apartment, but in some ways it had felt like a temporary solution. I worried a lot about what we were going to do in his later years, especially as it became clear he might not be able to live independently much longer. It turned out my worrying was for naught. Now we’re faced with the business of closing up a life I’d expected to go on for many more years. 

I could write a whole book about my father-in-law. He was an interesting man with a complicated life story. If you’ve ever met him or heard me talk about him, you know that he was a big personality—a true original. He was kind and curious, full of love for his family, and deeply spiritual. We miss him so much already. 

At a later date, I’d like to write about the objects we leave behind when we die, and how they tie back to living small, but I need a little more time to process these thoughts. But I did want to share a few thoughts about preparing for death. It shouldn’t be any different from my getting ready to leave for my maternity leave: Something we plan for with care, to make someone else’s life easier. As a parent, I’m personally eight years overdue for a will.

Practically planning for the worst.

Fortunately for my family, my sister-in-law had recently asked my father-in-law about his wishes for the end of his life. (Thank you so much, A.) She had used Dave Ramsey’s methods to get her own finances organized and applied Ramsey’s wisdom to our aging father-in-law. Ramsey believes everyone should have a “Legacy Drawer,” which is essentially a central place with all the vital information about a person’s life: will and estate plans, funeral instructions, passwords, bank information. It was a little uncomfortable talking with him about his death (in fact, it really put a damper on a gorgeous spring weekend), but I’m so grateful that she had the foresight to gather all the information and ask him these difficult questions. Because of her work we know exactly what he wanted and have the necessary information to make it a reality. 

My own grandfather, an infinitely practical man, pre-planned his own cremation through an organization called the Neptune Society. When he passed all my mother had to do was call Neptune to alert them that he had passed, and all the rest was already taken care of. After experiencing the responsibility of a death first-hand, I can say that a pre-arranged cremation would be a godsend to the grieving—something I think more people might consider (morbid though it might seem).

Death and putting a home in order.

Planning for death also brings to mind the book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, which became a surprise best-seller when it came out in 2018. I struggled to read the book because I didn’t love the writing, but I appreciated its big idea: Downsizing and organizing at the end of your life as an act of kindness to your loved ones. The book has now been adapted as a TV show, which my friend Lindsay says is “just lovely to watch,” so maybe I’ll give that a try instead. 

My grandmother engaged in some accidental Swedish death cleaning near the end of her life when there was a fire at her house. Everything had to be moved out and many things were lost due to water damage and the fire itself. When she moved back in for the final years of her life it was to a house that was much lighter than it had been before–and therefore more manageable for my mom to clear out when my grandma passed. Earlier this year, I spent some time helping my father-in-law (who was not the tidiest person) get rid of things and organize his apartment. We weren’t engaged in intentional pre-death cleaning either, but I am so glad we’d done this work because it would be even harder to deal with his death if we were also trying to tackle a big mess at the same time.

I applaud Dwell for publishing this piece dealing with the mountain of stuff left behind after a death in the family (which includes some tips about pre-planning), but I think it barely scratches the surface of the process. And the idea of patiently researching animal shelters that might take the deceased’s old bedding while you are grieving seems a bit much to ask—even for the most sustainably minded of us. 

Of course losing someone you love gets you thinking about our own mortality: wills, life insurance, legacies, all that fun stuff. As you can imagine, I have no interest in being buried beneath a pesticide-soaked expanse of turf grass. I loved reading about how Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery is rethinking what the landscape of cemeteries can be in this piece titled ‘Let the Graveyard Grow’ from Landscape Architecture Magazine. There’s also a wave of the disruptors who want to make death greener by composting human remains¹. Death can be handled however you’d like, but you’ll need to make a plan for it. 

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Friends, thank you for reading to the end. So much for the fun season, eh?
This was, of course, not the content I had planned for this week. I have a wonderful post in the works based on a conversation I had with

The Analog Family

’s Katherine Martinko about her wonderful new book Childhood Unplugged. Look for it in your inbox next week.

1. Both these initiatives are fine examples of how any job–including cemetery caretaker and undertaker–can be a climate job, if you will it to be.