Organizing Paperwork: An Act of Love for My Son

Source: Caroline Leavitt

I didn't want to think about it, but I knew that Jeff, my husband, and I would have to organize our life now to make it easier for our grown son when we die.

When my mother hit her eighties, she began to vanish. She had always been vibrant and opinionated, loving, bossy, and outgoing, but she grew smaller. She began to dismantle. She wouldn’t hear of moving to a retirement community, but at every visit, there were blank squares on the wall where photographs of myself and my sister had been. Decorative beautiful objects began to disappear. My mother had been a total clotheshorse, with three closets full of coats and shoes and dresses, but those closets, too, began to be bare. The house I grew up in began to seem not like a house at all, and certainly not like the chaotic home I knew. “Why are you doing this?” I asked her, and she just shrugged. “I want things more simple now,” she said.

If at first, this dismantling was for her, it began to be for us. Whenever we visited, besides the shock of an emptier and emptier house, my mother always took me by the hand and insisted that I look at a box of folders in her desk. “Everything you will need!” she said, opening it up. She was healthy and vibrant and in no way near saying goodbye to the world, but still, she had carefully put everything we would need in the event of her death. Her social security numbers, her bank accounts, her investments, the deed to the house. Rows and rows of files. “Put it away!” my sister and I cried. “We know all about it!” But still, my mother insisted. She made my husband, and later, our son, look at the files, too.

It always made me feel so sad to see all those papers because I wanted her alive and thinking about life, and not about death.

When my mother hit her mid-nineties and needed to go into a retirement community near my older sister, all my mother had to take with her were four boxes, two suitcases, and the file folders. That was it. The house was completely empty, completely clean, without ghosts of the life she (and I) had lived with in there. That made me feel like crying, because didn’t she want the shoeboxes of letters that I had sent her when I was in college? The videos of her grandson? Didn’t she even want her own high school yearbook that she had been so proud of? My mother had an explanation. She had done it all for my sister and me. “I didn’t want the two of you trying to figure out what to do with everything.” But was that really it?

When we walked her to the car, she didn’t look back at her house. Not once.

My mother died at 101. Numb with grief, I finally made use of her file folders. It felt as if she were there, walking me through everything, almost by rote. Plus, it was like she was talking to me, telling me: first do this, honey, then do that.

It made me feel as if she was still parenting me, that we still had a connection, and that meant everything.

Our son is 26 now, supporting himself, smart, creative, and wildly funny, and though my husband Jeff and I are still working, traveling, and nowhere ready to leave the planet, suddenly, as if my mother’s genes are rising in me, I think about what we want to leave for our son. I try to do the same preparation I had mocked before: labeling files, getting paperwork together, even as it overwhelmed me because there was so much to do. And like me with my mother, when I told our son that I was doing this, he rolled his eyes and said, “Oh my God.” But when the time comes, I know he’ll be relieved to have it.

In a way, my mother’s paring down her life gave me another, different, gift I want to leave my son. Unlike my mother, who saved nothing, I’ve saved his writing from school, his drawings. I’ve saved my own letters. On my desktop are two letters, Dear Jeff, Dear Max, where I write to each of them. I’m bossier with my husband because I want him to not be alone if I go first, because what a waste of a smart, sexy, gorgeous, funny man. I tell my son how proud I am of him, what a magnificent human he turned out to be. I always mention love, and I update these letters every six months.

No one wants to think about any of this. Losing the one you love. Not me. Not my friends. But isn’t this also about your loved ones losing you? So I do the best I can. I want to make sure there are pieces of a future for him, investments, accounts, practical matters. But I want to make sure, too, that pieces of me, of his dad, photos, letters, videos, even the first two stuffed animals he ever had, that we’ve kept for years, are there too for him. Maybe he won’t want to do anything with what we’ve left him. Maybe he’ll grieve in his own way. But I know, truthfully, that we do this for ourselves as much as for him. To still feel like a parent, to ensure our bond to him. Because isn’t that what love is all about?