Unwinding

I never saw it, but I seem to remember a few years back there was this movie about a woman  who gets terminal cancer and tries to find a replacement mother for her kids and spouse for her husband. Happily, I don't have that particular issue, but I can sort of understand the motivation. 

I've been thinking a lot recently about how one goes about unwinding a life. You spend 17,500 days (give or take a few hundred) building up all these structures that interconnect with and define your life, and then you've got to figure out how to (carefully) pull it all part -- or at least stick in some buttresses that will hold the important parts up when you're gone (e.g., finding a replacement mom for your kids) -- so that it all doesn't come crashing down when you're gone. Or worse, when you're otherwise occupied with being irredeemably sick.

By way of example, at this point my paycheck automatically goes into my bank account, and most of my bills automatically come out. Which means when I finally reach the point where there's no longer a paycheck going in, I've got to either a) stop the bills from coming out, b) make sure there's money from somewhere else to cover the expenses, or c) deal with the ramifications of a bunch of bills going unpaid. All that shit has to be unwound, which I'm finding a lot harder to do than it really ought to be. 

And let's not forget about our new electronic world. I'm not on Facebook, but I've got three email accounts, an account on LinkedIn (which I mostly ignore but is nevertheless out there), more retail accounts that I can keep track of, plus all the banking accounts (some of which aren't even mine anymore but still have my name on them), retirement accounts and all the rest. And like most normal computer users, my password management is a joke. At one point I had most of them written down, but since I didn't have the piece of paper the last time I accessed them I had to change them, and since I didn't have the piece of paper I didn't bother to write the new password down, so whomever gets the lucky task of trying to tie up all those loose ends is quickly going to get frustrated finding that basically none of my documented passwords work. 

How on earth do you pull all that apart so that you can keep living life while you're here, but not have a complete disaster when the chemo and/or cancer finally overwhelms the brains cells? (Partial answer: Kill the LinkedIn account; it's not like I'm going to be applying for any more jobs.)

And speaking of jobs, then there's the job. I've long been of the opinion that someone in a position like mine doesn't make themselves valuable by ensuring no one else can do what they do, but by making sure everything they do is well documented, replacements are trained, and there's infrastructure in place to keep things running. In short, you make yourself valuable by making yourself replaceable. It sounds good in theory, but I must actually suck at it because every time I come back from a leg of the GCW Tour I realize there's still more I haven't documented or trained someone else how to do. The place will certainly survive without me, but in a few areas it would be pretty painful if it happened right now. So I go, I come back, and I add more documentation projects to my list.

But wait. Don't order yet. There's still all the stuff that kinda sorta might take care of itself, at least if my will was well-written, but probably won't and so really ought to be taken care of now, but which, in the grand scheme of things, is hard to get worked up about enough to actually do anything about it. So, for example, years ago I co-authored a book. It was an academic book, which means it generates about twenty bucks a year in royalties, which are then split between me and my co-author. Now, it's not like anyone involved is going to be sweating their share of $20, and I doubt Jay is ever going to bother trying to update or otherwise do anything with the book such that he'll need clear access to the copyrights, but still it would probably be pretty useful for me to sign over my share of the copyrights before they become part of my "estate" and thus even more unmanageable than they already are. Yeah. Uh huh. I'll get right on that. 

Of course, I am ignoring the obvious alternative: just die and leave all this crap for someone else to sort out. 

Decisions, decisions...