Reed Memorial Library

Getting your affairs in order, one unopened envelope at a time

After my brother died intestate with a storage unit and a shoebox of passwords, I came home and started on my own affairs the next week. That was two years ago. What I learned is that estate organization is a writing project wearing overalls, and writing projects are what the machine does best. It began with the inventory. I talked at the program for an hour, account by account, the utilities, the insurance policies, the cemetery plot deed I found in the cookie tin, and asked it to organize everything into a document my executor could follow, with a section for what needs a phone call, what needs a letter, and what just needs to be found. That document lives in a folder with the will now. The machine drafts the letters I kept meaning to write. The beneficiary change on the old policy. The letter to the bank about the safe deposit box. The note I owed my own executor explaining why the files are in the basement and not the attic. None of it is legal advice, and the lawyer reviewed the parts that touch the will, which took him twenty minutes because the drafting was done. But the mountain was never the law. The law was the easy part. The mountain was the sheer clerical weight of closing out a modern life, seventy years of paperwork and passwords, and the shame of not having faced it. A machine that organizes without judging, at eleven at night, for free, is the closest thing to a mountaineering sherpa this particular mountain has ever had. Start with one envelope.

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