Finishing Strong
I want to write about death. I want to write about it in a way that will really make you pay attention. Because people don’t pay attention.
Getting our clients to focus on what will happen to their money and their family (called estate planning) when they die is one of the hardest bits of what we do. Nobody wants to hear about it or think about it. Of course we don’t. We don’t think we are going to die.
If you could see what happens to the people you love – the most important people in the world to you – the people you would go to the ends of the earth to keep safe and protect – if you could see what you leave them with if you don’t prepare for death, I think you would pay attention.
Before I talk about death, I want to talk about life. Because you can’t really talk about one without the other. If we can truly understand what makes a good life, we can understand what makes a good death – then, perhaps, we can think about it and plan for it.
Recently I listened to a couple of podcasts that got me thinking.
The first conversation was between Tim Ferris and Greg McKeown. There was so much good stuff in this conversation, but here’s the bit that really got me. Towards the end, Tim and Greg talk about attachments and relationships. Greg explains that life isn’t really divided into 1x, 2x, 3x activities on an important scale – it’s divided into 1x, 10x, 1,000x activities. And the same holds for relationships. Some relationships are 1x and some are 1,000x. They are orders of magnitude apart in their importance.
Most of us would say our 1,000x relationships are with our partners and our kids. Greg explains that the most important relationship in his life is with his wife. And then he reads an excerpt from the Twitter feed of a man who had recently lost his young wife to cancer.
Word for word, this is it:
We had an epic love affair, and yet we reached a depth of intimacy while Aubrie was on her deathbed that we’d never had access to before. That depth of love wasn’t available to us any earlier for whatever reason, but it is available. I want to make it available to everyone by reminding you it exists. Aubrie shifted into a deeper love about six weeks before she died. During her time in the hospital, her one regret was that she hadn’t spent more time deepening relationships with the people she cared about.” She said, “The only thing that matters at all is the quality of the relationships with the people we love. Focus on that.”
He says, “I know it sounds trite in a tweet, but I can guarantee you with absolute certainty that when you are dying (and you will die), these are the only things you will care about. Aubrie realized this deeply in the most fundamental way because she was running out of time. So she put it into action. It was mostly instinct at first, but by the end, her deeper way of loving had become very conscious and intentional. Her change was palpable. She softened and opened. She began to be with those around her in a kind of total surrender. We all felt that she was experiencing us without a filter somehow. We were seen and loved. It was beautiful. It was overpowering. It was humbling beyond measure.”
“As she did all this, those around her began to learn how to do it as well. I learned. Being loved that completely is overwhelming in the best way. It’s probably all any of us ever crave. I’ve tried to carry that love forward ever since. Loving that deeply is a practice. It’s like anything, sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s very hard. But it’s always worthwhile. The key to this kind of love is necessarily different for everyone. I only know one way: complete surrender to the inevitable death of yourself and those you love. I’m not writing this to proselytize any given path. I simply want to say out loud that it is possible to love with a depth and breadth that I used to think was fiction. Progressively deepening love is the goal, an end in and of itself. If there is a point, it’s that.”
If there is a point, it’s that.
There are lots of things we might regret on our deathbed, but as Greg points out, you’re never going to regret figuring out your most important relationships, investing in them seriously, getting attached to them, struggling with them, and improving them. You are never going to say, damn, I wish I hadn’t done that…what I really wish I had done was work harder, made more money and bought more stuff.
In another conversation, the topic was similar. Peter Attia spoke with Walter Green. Walter started a movement called “Say It Now”, which is all about helping people express how they feel about the people they love, before it’s too late.
Walter tells a poignant story from an interview with a hospice nurse, Hadly Vlahos (author of In-Between). She said, “I was with these people for 6 months before they died, and their central words were, ‘I don’t matter to anybody.’”
But then, she would go to the funerals of these people and hear the tributes. Wonderful, moving tributes – full of love and loss. And she struggled to reconcile those tributes with the person who she had watched die feeling unloved, unappreciated and unacknowledged.
Peter quips, “we should absolutely let those people in hospice die thinking that they didn’t matter and wait until they die to tell a bunch of other people how important they were.”
I mean, it’s ridiculous really – why do we do this?
Walter’s mission is to change this. When he was 70 he said to his wife, “I have an idea for a gift for my 70th….I want to spend as much time as I need in the coming year to sit down with everybody who has been important in my life.”
This took him on a year-long adventure around the world. He visited the 44 most important people in his life. Before meeting with them he wrote the answer to the question, ‘what difference did this person make in my life?’. Then, he had an experience with each of them and he said to them, “this is for me to express to you how important you’ve been in my life, and I want to tell you why.”
Walter’s motto is - it doesn’t matter how, but it does matter now.
Those two conversations – Tim Ferris’ and Peter Attia’s (my two favourite podcasters) were so deep and moving. They served as another reminder that the only measure of success in life is the quality of our most important relationships. If we can get that right as we move through life, then I believe that thinking and preparing about death is easier.
Walter talked about how he prepares – he calls it ‘finishing strong’. He has been preparing for 35 years (he is in his 80s). His estates have been in order for a long time, he has had life insurance, he has ensured his family have the right homes for their comfort.
His recent preparations were a little grander because he was diagnosed with cancer and found himself facing it head-on (he is now in remission).
He revisited all the most important people in his life and is happy that he is ‘current’ with all his relationships.
His financial planning went further. He had seen too many people leaving their spouse ill-suited to cope with the chaos of their demise. He wanted to leave everything as easy as he could for his wife, so that she had as little as possible to think about.
Think about your relationship with your partner. Does one of you handle the finances? If you were gone tomorrow, would he or she be ill-suited to cope with the chaos?
If the answer to that is “yes, perhaps or maybe” (or any iteration of), then keep your financial life as simple as you possibly can. Take a look at your family balance sheet – how many line items are there? Every single one of those line items is something your partner is going to have to deal with when you are gone. Every line item is stress and frustration – it’s emails that need to be sent, documentation that needs to be completed, decisions that need to be made. Think really hard about leaving your 1,000x relationship with all of that.
Walter and his wife prepared by moving into a home that would provide the right lifestyle for her, when he is gone. He liquidated an investment that still required some work and that he didn’t want his wife to have to think about. He gave his wife a list of 15 things to do from a financial standpoint if something happens to him.*
He went one step further though, and this is the bit that really gets interesting. He accelerated his program of giving. He had practiced philanthropy for many years, but this time, he started giving not just to nonprofits, but to people who have been important to him but have not been as financially successful as him.
In my experience, people don’t do this very well or often. We tend to think only about giving to our children (which has its own difficulties, particularly when the sums are large). Why not look out into the world to all the people who have made a difference in your life? Why not give to them?
Peter asked Walter – are you worried about giving people money? His answer – a little, but I am more worried about not.
One person said they could not accept the money. Walter explained that by not accepting it, she was keeping him from the pleasure of giving a gift. After some thought, she accepted it.
The wife who was dying, who found a deeper way of loving, who opened to the people she loved; she almost left it too late but in the end she finished strong.
Walter has lived a long life; he has had time to prepare and is in the process of finishing strong. He has had time on his side.
We might be the wife, we might be Walter, or we might be somewhere in between. We don’t know when or where the finish line will fall.
Like Walter, we can prepare by reminding ourselves regularly of what and who matters in life and we can, step-by-step, make sure that our 1,000x relationships are not left dealing with chaos when we are gone.
At a minimum, we need a Will – a document that details who gets what after you die and ensures that the people who are dependent upon you (children, partner, elderly or sick parents, other family members) are looked after. The Cayman intestate laws may not distribute your assets in the way that you intend. Under Cayman law if you die without a Will and you are married with children, only half of your estate passes to your spouse or civil partner. The other half is held on trust for your children until they reach the age of 18. This is unlikely to be what you would want to happen – normally you would leave everything to your spouse. Not only do you run the risk of leaving your children large sums of money when they are 18 (a disaster for most) but you also run the risk of leaving your spouse without enough money to live on.
Which brings us to the next thing you probably need in place – life insurance.
You need life insurance to cover your debts – at a minimum. If you are the main breadwinner and your spouse or partner either earns less than you or does not work, you need to cover more than just your debt. I know it’s obvious, but no one ever thinks about this – when you die, you don’t earn an income anymore. If your family rely on your income and you have not yet built-up sufficient assets for them to live on (possibly for the rest of their lives), you need life insurance.
A will and life insurance – that’s the bare minimum (there is much more that we talk about with clients – if you want to start that conversation, click here).
If you have accepted everything I have written in this article, but dismiss this bit, there is a major disconnect. You are headed for the opposite of finishing strong.
I know you don’t want to think about it or deal with it, but you are going to die. We hope to live a wonderful, long life, and to be like Walter, but no day on this earth is guaranteed. The repercussions of not preparing and finishing strong for those you love are too big to bear.
“It’s either too late or it’s almost too late”
The message from Greg and Walter is; don’t leave it too late to finish strong. Don’t leave it too late to realise what is important, don’t leave it too late to invest in your 1,000x relationships, don’t leave it too late to tell people what they mean to you, don’t leave it too late to give, don’t leave it too late to protect the people you love.
*If you would like to have our checklist of the information to leave for your loved one, drop us a line.