Legacy MattersYou're the director of a non-profit that operates an alternative school and runs programs for people with developmental disabilities when you get a call from someone you never met who says he plans to leave your organization his entire estate. Of course, you'll meet with him and together you set a date.
But there's a death in your family and you have to leave town. You tried to cancel and reschedule but you couldn't reach him. The caller comes by anyway and leaves a large white envelope for you. Scrawled on the bank in large capital letters are the words:
WAIT UNTIL YOU HEAR FROM THE CORONER" (PLEASE DON'T CALL EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT).
When you get back, did you open the envelope?
Of course you do. Annie Green did.
Inside she found the last will and testament of John Francis Beech and yes, indeed Beech left Laradon Hall, the non-profit in question, all his estate. Beech also left the keys to his house, instructions and $100,000 check, post-dated for two weeks, for Laradon Hall.
John Beech and his mother
If you couldn't surmise from the writing outside the envelope that this man was contemplating suicide, surely you could by what was inside.
What would you do?
Annie Green put the check into a safe until she could deposit it.
Where would you take a $100,000 check that is also a suicide note - to the cops or the bank?
Beech had a mother, three sisters and a brother. The news of his death left them and other relatives reeling in shock and bewilderment. Jack, as he was known to his younger siblings, had always been the family's pillar of strength — the oldest, the most confident, the one who was the life of the party. He collected beautiful cars and performed magic tricks in bars; he had money, globe-trotting adventures and lots of girlfriends. He'd never shown signs of depression and, as far as they knew, had never been treated for mental illness. He'd never talked about suicide around them — except to express outrage when an old friend took his own life in 2007. Why, Jack had seethed, didn't the guy come to him for help? But Jack was also an extremely private person. He'd disappear for weeks on a trip or something, then abruptly resurface. The family knew there were parts of his life he simply didn't share with them, and maybe not with anyone. "If you needed help, he'd give you the shirt off his back," says his brother, David Beech, a news director for a television station in Reno, Nevada. "But if you tried to help him with anything, he'd refuse. He was like a father; he was our father.
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Now the family is suing on pubic policy grounds so that the non-profit can not benefit from its failure to take action to prevent the suicide.
But Malonson's attorney, Susan Harris, says the message Beech left for Green was unmistakable. "The only people he revealed his suicide plan to was Laradon Hall," she says. "There's no note that says, 'I'm going to commit suicide,' but there's a lot of indications. Who gives their house keys and financial information to a perfect stranger? He writes about the coroner, about where to find his car titles — and here's a postdated check for $100,000. One of the classic signs of impending suicide is the property giveaway.
"Laradon Hall deals with the mental-health issues of the clients it serves," Harris continues. "They have psychologists on board, all kinds of mental-health professionals. They do assessment; they do treatment. But they never tried to save him. They didn't contact him. They didn't call a hotline. They didn't talk to one of their own psychologists. They stuck the check in their safe."
A fascinating story by Allan Prendergast, you have to read.
If doctors and families don't talk about end-of-life care, the dying patient will endure more misery, physical distress and suffering as costs
mounts up.
At the end of life, denial comes at a price
A team of investigators, lead by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, interviewed 603 patients with advanced cancer. They asked the patients, who had about six months left to live, whether their doctors had discussed their wishes for end-of-life care. The majority — 69 percent — said those conversations had not taken place. And in their last weeks of life, those patients who had talked with their doctors wound up with medical bills that were on average 36 percent lower — $1,876 compared to $2,917 — than those of patients who did not have end-of-life conversations with their doctors.
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Why such a big difference? Dr. Holly Prigerson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, explained that the patients who never talked about their end-of-life wishes were more likely to be resuscitated, intubated or put in intensive care — or all of the above. Patients who had had those conversations generally opted for comfort, or palliative, care at home or in a hospice at much lower cost.
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Why should doctors be so reluctant to talk about dying when patients are terminally ill? Dr. Susan Dale Block, chair of the department of psychosocial oncology and palliative care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, noted that oncologists don’t want to appear to be giving up on patients by discussing plans for dying. At the same time, family members and loved ones worry that such conversations might upset an already vulnerable patient. And patients themselves often feel their role is to be heroic and to soldier on, against the odds, with yet another treatment or intervention.
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As this blog has noted, Compassion & Choices offers free consultations to families and patients through its End-of-Life Consultation Program (800-247-7421). The program’s counselors help patients make decisions about continuing treatment and provide advice on asking health care providers some of the tough questions. The counselors also offer tips on how to speak to providers if the patient’s needs and wishes are not being met.
A twenty-five-year battle over an estate ends.
The “conspiracy to deny us our inheritance destroyed my family, broke my heart and left me with scars that I have painfully struggled with and have not fully overcome even now, after all these years,” Diana, 68, said in a recent affidavit.
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Evelyn and Diana, who both live in New Rochelle, recall their father as a charming man who sang opera in their home, one of six adjoining houses he built in Pelham Parkway, a Bronx neighborhood of small brick houses and apartment buildings.
After their father died, their brother returned from the Army to help sort out his affairs. “We were told we were impoverished and my father died without a will,” Diana said. “I supported myself basically, from the time my father died.”
But, in fact, their father did write a single-page will leaving one-third of his estate to his wife, Rose, and equally dividing the remaining two-thirds among Walter, Evelyn and Diana. The will, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, instructed that a trust fund be established for his daughters until they turned 23. That never happened.
After discovering the will in 1983, Diana and Evelyn confronted their mother, who initially denied any knowledge of the will. But she later gave the girls the deed to her house and a 10 percent stake in Rose Gardens.
The sisters also went to Walter’s house in Kings Point to confront him. He called the police to have them removed, they said.
Michael Jackson plans to have his body 'plastinized' by Dr. Death
MICHAEL Jackson will achieve his dream of immortality by being stuffed with plastic by Dr Death.
The King Of Pop, who calls himself Peter Pan, has had a string of cosmetic surgery ops to try to defy the ageing process.
But he is now preparing to strike the ultimate blow against death and decay by having his whole body “plastinated” by controversial doctor Gunther von Hagens.
Jacko, who is a fan of the German anatomist, was said to be thrilled his Body Worlds exhibition would be on at the O2 Arena during his This Is It concerts, which start in July.
The exhibition showcases Von Hagens’ groundbreaking corpse preservation technique which earned him the nickname Dr Death.
Creepy as this is at least Jackson is giving his consent unlike the Chinese prisoners who were used for the first Body Worlds exhibition
Suit says Teen was 'killed' for organs
The parents of an 18-year-old who suffered a brain injury in a 2007 snowboarding accident say his doctors "intentionally killed" him to harvest his organs.
In the lawsuit filed this week in the U.S. District Court of Western Pennsylvania, Michael and Teresa Jacobs claim that doctors "hastened" their son Gregory Jacobs' death by delaying treatment and ultimately pulling his breathing tube, causing him to suffocate.
The couple said their son had not been formally declared brain dead when surgeons began the transplant procedure. They are seeking $5 million in damages.
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According to the plaintiffs, brain death was recorded the next day, "retroactively" as life support was being withdrawn in preparation for organ removal.
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In an interview with media in 2007, hospital officials acknowledged that the recorded time of death was a mistake.
There's nothing wrong with 84-year-old Ed Koch, so it's quite strange to hear he's erected an already engraved tombstone for himself in a Manhattan cemetery.
The unadorned tombstone, planted firmly on a hill at Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights, carries an inscription that hails his Jewish heritage, as well as his life in public service.
"He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York, and he fiercely loved its people," the headstone reads.
"Above all, he loved his country, the United States of America, in whose armed forces he served in World War II."
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Also carved into the stone is a common Jewish prayer as well as the last words of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by Muslim terrorists in 2002: "My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish."
Neighbors in the three-term mayor's apartment building in Greenwich Village said the move was just an example of Koch's out-sized personality.
"He's a bigger-than-life character and I guess he wants to be bigger than death," one female resident quipped.
Another tenant added: "He's accustomed to having the last word, so this doesn't surprise me."
It's rare to read in the news about a family that does the right thing and avoids all litigation
Heath Ledger's family give his millions to his two-year-old daughter
Every penny of Heath Ledger's fortune will go to his daughter, Matilda Rose, the dead star's father has revealed.
In Ledger's will, which has been probated behind closed doors at the Australian Supreme Court in Perth, the 28-year-old actor left everything to his parents and three sisters. But the will was signed by the actor on April 12, 2003 - two years before Matilda was born
It was expected that Ledger's former partner, Michelle Williams, would lodge a claim on the will on behalf of their daughter. But Ledger's father, Kim, instead told Australia's Herald Sun that the family had decided to give everything to Matilda.
THE day will come, or may have already, when your children think of your money as theirs.
Learning to Share
Putting off discussion and then springing an unwelcome surprise in a will can poison the reservoir of family joy that parents want to bequeath to the next generation, resurrecting or exacerbating sibling rivalries, especially in blended families created through divorce or remarriage after the death of a spouse.
Succession is a natural progression, as old as the concept of private property, yet many parents never bother to tell their children about plans for their estate.
David Cay Johnston in the New York Times lays out the costs of not telling your children about uneven shares in your will.
Mitchell Gans, a law professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., who has helped develop some of the most complex estate plans in the country, recommends that in such cases you should prepare the will and then notify “the kids that you are cutting out — or who are getting less than the others.”
“If you have the courage to do that,” Professor Gans said, “you cut down significantly the chance of litigation after death.”
He signed up as an organ donor when he was a cardinal.
Pope Benedict carries organ donor card as "an act of love'.
Pope Benedict XVI is a card-carrying organ donor, it emerged today. The disclosure that the pontiff is prepared to donate organs for transplants after his death follows a front page article in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, calling into question the concept of brain death as the end of life rather than cardio-circulatory arrest.
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The modern Catechism of the Catholic Church
"Donation of organs after death is a noble and meritorious act and is to be encouraged as a manifestation of generous solidarity. It is not morally acceptable if the donor or those who legitimately speak for him have not given their explicit consent."
Body shop founder Anita Roddick gave away her fortune to charity and the tax man and left nothing to her daughters.
She described leaving money to your family as "obscene" and cut her two daughters Sam and Justine out of her will in 2005 soon after making a fortune from the sale of The Body Shop.
French cosmetics firm L'Oreal paid £625million for the company, paying Dame Anita and her husband Gordon more than £100million for their 18 per cent share in the business.
Her half of the profit from the eco-friendly, ethical business which she and her husband built up from one shop was donated to the Roddick Foundation, which supports charity causes she espoused.
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Mr Roddick and his family were yesterday away on holiday but the couple's daughters have publicly supported their mother's decision to disinherit them.
Remember husband and father still has half the fortune.
In January Father Brian Gallagher was visiting the Kowalczyk family Arizona in January when he fell and broke his arm. What the doctors also found when they treated him was a stage IV brain tumor.
A so-called friend saw the opportunity for money to made if only she kept control of him.
Custody Battle Threatens Health and Life of Aging Priest
A terminally ill Roman Catholic priest is the center of a tempestuous legal battle between a court-appointed temporary guardian - who has demanded his return to an Arizona care center - and family and friends - who believe such a move could kill him.
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Documents obtained by LifeSiteNews.com show that Kowalczyk seized emergency legal guardianship of Fr. Gallagher shortly after learning that the priest, dissatisfied with her unwillingness to return him to California, relieved her of her power of attorney and reassigned any health-care directive and legal control over his finances to his cousin James Logsdon.
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The priest also expressed his wish to return to San Juan Capistrano or live in a religious institute, "so that I may be with the Blessed Sacrament daily as well as receive the sacraments daily till the end of my days."
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"When Fr. Gallagher was moved [from Arizona to California] he was very happy, smiling from ear to ear, saying 'I'm home now, even though I'm in the hospital, I'm in California now,'" said Denise Riggio, a long-time friend of Fr. Gallagher's who visited him earlier this week. "He is in a comfortable room, being monitored, has an IV, and is open to all visitors. The change was from bad to wonderful."
Know those organ stickers you put on your driver's license?
Now there's one for you can affix to the same license that expresses your desire to become an intellectual property donor.
Using such a sticker will not comply with the laws of any state, if any survivor wishes to challenge it, so I expect legal contests in the future.
via Kottke
Her obituary here
Her will here
Her bequest here
The four very big ones (nearly quadruple the giving of any other American last year) will go to the Leona M and Harry B Helmsley Charitable Trust.
Among good causes and works it supports are: Greenwich Hospital, the Helen Keller National Center for Deaf-Blind Youths and Adults, and the Alzheimer's Association. She also gave $5m to the families of New York firefighters in the wake of 9/11.
The year's other big givers are Baron Hilton of hotels fame – $1.2bn; George Soros, the financial wizard – $474.6m; and Michael Bloomberg, the media magnate and residing mayor of New York – $205m.
And so Leona will go down to posterity in rather better odour than she lived, ever demandingly, among us. She was hard, tyrannical to staff (she once made a waiter in one of her hotels beg on his knees for his job after serving a cup of tea with a smidgen of water in the saucer), and petulantly fired one man when she discovered he was gay. But, in the years to come, thousands of Americans will owe their lives to the medical facilities her billions will provide. Why, the woman's very nearly a saint.
When someone dies without leaving a will, their family can be split apart in acrimony. When a king doesn't leave a will, a country can.
When King Pakubuwono XII died four years ago, he left six mistresses with 35 children, but no wife, no heir and no instructions about the succession here in this city in central Java.
He might have guessed what would happen. Two half brothers each claimed the ancient crown, and the family split into two bitterly feuding factions.
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Shortly after their father died, on June 12, 2004, each contending brother had himself crowned King Pakubuwono XIII. One coronation was held inside the palace, one outside, at the mansion of a friend.
When the time came to commemorate their father’s death, palace insiders say, the princes carried out separate tomb-sealing rituals: two teams of masons, two teams mixing cement, two solemn ceremonies.
In a Sultanate Known as Solo, One Too Many Kings.
A doctor who works at Columbia Presbyterian scammed his 92-year-old mother out of nearly $1 million.
Minnie Motz, the mother who worked her whole life as a librarian never thought her Jewish doctor son would leave her virtually penniless and on the brink of eviction.
Son-Burned
Dr. Robin Motz, an internist took control of his mother's finances in 2003 because she was failing physically.
In 2004, when her husband, Lloyd Motz, died, Robin Motz moved his mother's investments from her Oppenheimer account to a Merrill Lynch account in his name, prosecutors said. He liquidated the investments, which had been in tax-free municipal bonds, and began writing checks to cover his credit-card bills, the Manhattan DA's Office charged.
He's now under indictment and faces 15 years in jail.
A woman with a West-Indian accent who picked up the phone at Minnie Motz's apartment would only say, "How would you feel? That's exactly how she feels!"
A longstanding convention has kept royal wills secret, but Queen Elizabeth codified that convention into law when she had the wills of Princess Margaret and her mother sealed in secret.
Only the appearance of Robert Brown who claims to be the illegitimate son of Princess Margaret and her one time lover Group Captain Peter Townsend brought the secret law to light.
Queen 'had her mother's will sealed in secret'
The 52-year-old accountant from Jersey was challenging the claim that "the privacy interests of the Royal family outweigh any public interest in unsealing royal wills," he said.
Mr Hinks said the executors of the royal wills were opposing the application because Mr Brown had no right to see them. "It is a fraudulent claim. It is a scandalous claim that he is the son of the sister of the sovereign without any factual basis," he said.
In England the plan is to take dead patients' organs without their consent to cover a shortfall in organ donations which leads to more than a 1000 people each year dying before they can receive life-saving transplants.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown supports a system of 'presumed consent' whereby a dead person's organs are automatically available unless they opted out earlier or family members object.
I predict it won't be long before there is similar pressure here for 'presumed consent.'
Details about the charges against Anthony Marshall, son of Brook Astor, are catnip for the tabloids.
DA's Kick in the Astor
He tried to appear stoic, but Brooke Astor's son had a difficult time keeping a stiff upper lip yesterday as he was arraigned on charges of swindling his Alzheimer's-stricken mother out of millions in cash, property and artwork.
Anthony Marshall had to wipe away tears when his wife, Charlene, ran into his arms in Manhattan Supreme Court, where he was about to be slammed with charges over his handling of his mother's affairs, including grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property and conspiracy.
If convicted at trial of the top count, Marshall, 83, would face up to 25 years in prison and would likely die behind bars.
Brooke Astor's son and one of her former lawyers have been indicted on criminal charges.
The charges stem from their stewardship of her financial affairs and the handling of her will.
Prosecutors were believed to be investigating millions of dollars in cash, property and stocks that Mr. Marshall obtained over the years in his role as steward of his mother’s finances.
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The district attorney’s office was also informed by Mrs. Astor’s court-appointed lawyer, who had retained a nationally known handwriting expert, that the signature on the third amendment, which was made in March 2004, was possibly forged
Over a year ago I wrote about Brooke Astor and Elder Abuse
It appears the brouhaha over the way she was treated and her money spent caught the attention not only of the press but also the prosecutor's office.
According to recent survey in England some of the most popular requests by people planning their funerals are
BURY me naked.
Put a mobile phone in the coffin.
Cremate me with my pet's ashes.
Bury me with my teeth in.
And do make sure I'm actually dead.
The most common request is to have a beloved pet cremated with them. Of course, the pet has to be dead before it can be cremated.
Seventeen years is too long to go without reviewing your will.
Siblings in noted Cape family clash over will.
When their mother made a will in 1990, no doubt she thought circumstances were quite different.
But in a painful split within the well-known clan, three of Thomas Cahir's sisters allege that the young man who followed faithfully in his father's political footsteps also deceived and improperly pressured his widowed mother, Edith, to write a will that left the family business, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, solely to him.
Said one lawyer disputes will continue to multiply as the assets held by older generations grow in value.
"It's unbelievably common. The ones that make it to court are just the tip of the iceberg."
Not all wills are dry, legal documents. Leona Helmsley solidified her reputation as the 'Queen of Mean' with hers.
With an estate valued at between 4 billion and 8 billion dollars, she left $12 million in trust for her dog, a white Maltese named Trouble, yet nothing to her 12 great grandchildren. To two of her grandsons, she left $5 million each and another $5 million in trust so long as they visited their father's grave once a year. To the other two of her grandchildren, she left nothing "for reasons that are known to them".
In her will, Leona asked her brother to care for the dog, but her brother doesn't want anything to do with the pooch who's more trouble than it's worth.
Other Wills of the Rich and Vengeful
Meanwhile, the reputed greatest American playwright of the 20th century, Arthur Miller whose most line "Attention must be paid" in Death of the Salesman pointed to the intrinsic value of every human life abandoned his own son at birth.
Daniel was born with Down's syndrome and was almost immediately institutionalized. It's speculated that such a son did not fit into the successful narrative Miller wanted for his life who never mentioned him again.
Daniel's mother, Inge Morath, visited him every Sunday. By all accounts, Daniel has overcome his challenges spectacularly, competing in the Special Olympics and now lives independently, much loved and admired by those who know him.
Miller's son-in-law Daniel Day-Lewis, the actor who played a disabled person in My Left Foot apparently was appalled at Miller's treatment of his son. Together with his wife Rebecca Miller, they must have had some influence. Six weeks before his death, Miller made a new will leaving his son Daniel a share in his estate equal to his siblings. Attention paid and redemption of a sort, Miller gained with his will.
The Son who didn't fit into the plot of Arthur Miller's life
According to the latest survey on estate planning by Martindale Hubbell, the percentage of people without a will remains the same, 55% while the number of Americans with living will or advance directives has increased to 41%
Among non-white adults, the lack of wills is even more pronounced. Only one in three African American adults (32 percent) and one in four Hispanic American adults (26 percent) have wills, compared to more than half (52 percent) of white American adults.
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Additionally, two in five (38 percent) American adults report assigning a power of attorney for healthcare purposes, compared to 27 percent in 2004. A power of attorney for healthcare legally delegates authority to another to make medical decisions for that individual, if he or she is incapacitated.
One in ten say they don't have any elements of an estate plan because they don't want to think about dying or becoming incapacitated.
Nearly one in ten say they don't know who to talk to about creating such documents.
And one in four say they don't have an estate plan because they have insufficient assets.
"When you die and you don't have any relatives, they just kick you to the side," Fouty said. "And now she's frozen. That just makes me cringe. That's not what she wanted at all. I'm just scared to death they're going to cremate her and stick her in a cemetery where she doesn't know anyone."
Deceased woman's last wish can't be granted.
Williams-Martin did not have the proper paperwork or the relatives to claim her, so her body could not be donated to science. Now, Fouty hopes her ashes can be placed on her father's grave, but first a relative must come forward.
People living alone need wills too.
Can you adopt someone older than you are? Olive Watson did.
A lesbian, she 'adopted' her partner Patricia Spado in Maine where they summered. Their 14 year relationship ended in 1992 but the adoption didn't.
At stake now is her share as a "grandchild" of Thomas Watson, who set up trusts for his grandchildren. He never knew of the adoption.
Also at issue is the validity of the adoption of a sexual partner.
Family of IBM Pioneer Seeks to Exclude Heir's Adopted Lesbian Lover from Inheritance.
The late philosopher Jacques Derrida was considered the father of deconstruction which, to greatly oversimplify, holds that the meaning of words depends on the assumptions of the people who wrote them. I find the theory impossible to understand, others have called it bewildering, but it has been exceptionally influential in this post-modern age because it questions the concept of universal truth and whether anyone can know anything for sure.
At the end of his career, Derrida was a professor at the University of California at Irvine, and signed an agreement in 1990 to donate his archives to them.
Shortly before his death, he threatened to pull the plug on his agreement because he didn't like the way the University was investigating a Russian studies professor who was accused of sexually harassing a graduate student. The professor was a vampire expert who taught a popular class on vampires and signed his e-mails with a colon to symbolize Dracula bite marks, used his position as the student's advisor to manipulate her into a series of sexual encounters...invited the woman to his apartment to view photos of Moscow.. plied the student with Transylvanian wine and opera music
So when Derrida's heirs didn't turn over the archives, the university sued his widow.
A Philosophical View of Sex from the LA Times is all about the contest between the widow and the university.
My second favorite line after "he signed his emails with a colon to symbolize Dracula bite marks" is a quotation from an unnamed blogger Given that Derrida's philosophical legacy is the notion that words have no meaning, shouldn't the bright minds at UC Irvine have realized that 'an agreement he signed' might not be worth much?"
I just googled the entire quote and found the John Miller, the national political reporter for the National Review said it. No wonder the LA Times didn't name him.
Donald Trump is eyeing N.J golf course for his grave site.
First though, he has to get approval to build a wedding chapel on the golf course he built on the former estate of the late automaker John DeLorean.
Then, he plans to convert it to a mausoleum for himself and his family.
I guess he plans to see his children married and hear wedding bells first.
Sadly, Anna Nicole Smith is not resting in peace.
There is a Tug of War over Anna's Body among her mother who wants to bury her, her putative husband Howard Stern and Larry Birkhead who per court order has a legal hold on her body until a DNA sample is forthcoming.
Not to mention the possibility that the father of her baby is her dead husband via his frozen sperm.
Or is it the bodyguard?
Here's a lovely reminiscence by Larry Miller
I liked her, and so did you, even if you didn't. No one in the public eye dies without making us stop and think. Shall we turn up our noses at her because she wasn't Katharine Hepburn? She did pretty well with what she was given, so let's not scoff because she wasn't a great poet or leader. Will I mourn more deeply, say, when the sad day comes and Jimmy Carter passes away? Less, I think.
Anna Nicole Smith, dead at 39 as reported by The New York Times
a former Playboy centerfold, actress and television personality who was famous, above all, for being famous, but also for being sporadically rich and chronically litigious, was found dead on Thursday in her suite at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla.
They also call her
obtrusively voluptuous and almost preternaturally blonde.
One of six children born to a single mother, Vickie Hogan dropped out of high school, married a chicken fry cook she met at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken in Mexia, Texas, gave birth to son Daniel and separated from his father, all before she was 20.
She left her son with her mother to seek her fortune as a topless dancer. With her extraordinary body and beauty, fortune she found.
She was on the cover of Playboy magazine as Playmate of the Year, took the name of Anne Nicole Smith when she signed a contract to model Guess Jeans. She became the most famous gold digger in America when married an 89-year-old oil tycoon J Howard Marshall. When her husband died 14 months later, her legal battles began.
J.Howard Marshall's estate was worth $1.4 billion.
There was no pre-nuptial agreement
Anna Nicole Smith battled Marshall's stepson Pierce for her share in the estate.
She filed for bankruptcy in 1999.
In 2000, she won a $474 million judgment in a California court that was thrown out by a Texas state court.
She appealed to a federal court, took her battle to the U.S. Supreme Court and won a unanimous decision that allowed her to continue her legal battle in federal court.
In 2006, Pierce Marshall died at 67. His widow continues the legal case in his place.
Anna Nicole gave birth in September, 2006 to a baby girl, and did not name the biological father.
Her son Daniel died 3 days later while visiting his mother and newborn sister in the hospital from a toxic combination of Zoloft, Lexapro and methadone.
Later that month, Anna Nicole and her lawyer Howard Stern exchanged commitment vows aboard a catamaran off the coast of the Bahamas. No marriage certificate was issued.
Howard Stern's name appears on the birth certificate issued in the Bahamas.
Her former boyfriend photojournalist Larry Birkhead claims he is the biological father and has filed suit to claim paternity.
Last Wednesday, a class action suit was filed against her and Trimspa for false and misleading marketing. She became the spokesman for the weight loss supplement after she lost 69 pounds.
The little baby, Dannielynn Hope Marshall Stern, is the sole heir-at-law.
Whoever is judged her father stands to control whatever the estate of Anna Nicole wins.
It will be a gargantuan battle of estate vs estate, that will take years to unravel. I expect it to be the mother of all estate battles saving Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce
Said Christopher Cline of the law firm Holland and Knight, who is an estate planning specialist,
he has never seen a case “with more moving parts.”
Outstanding questions include not only the paternity of her daughter, but if she died with a will and how her death will affect the lawsuit pending against the Marshall estate. It also wasn't clear where she legally lived when she died.
“It's a really large legal quagmire,” Cline said.
More in the you-can't-make-this-stuff-up department - her dead husband, over whose money everyone is fighting, was a former professor of trusts and estates at Yale Law School.
Update to more stuff you couldn't make up. The husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor said he had a 10 year long affair with Anna Nicole and could be the father of the baby girl. He with the title of Prince Frederick von Anhalt said Anna Nicole wanted to be a princess like Zsa Zsa. He offered to adopt her but Gabor wouldn't sign the papers!
Update 2 -comments from around the web.
many people were hard pressed to describe what exactly Anna Nicole Smith was. Actress? Model? Reality star? Rich widow? ''I don't know exactly what she did,'' said talk show host Joy Behar, hearing the news over the phone. And yet, trying to put her finger on why we watched this strange woman over the years, she came up with two things: Dysfunction. And beauty.
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''With Anna Nicole, she was pathetic but at the same time you thought, 'Gosh, if I could just scoop you up and fix things, it would be OK,''' said Jerry Herron, a professor of American culture at Wayne State University. ''You wouldn't want to scoop up Paris Hilton.'''
Ann Althouse
Ah, yes. The classic two types of hyper-sexualized women -- the kind you think you can help, who just really need you, and the ones who seem ready to crush you if you came anywhere near. Anna Nicole is to Paris Hilton as Marilyn Monroe is to Madonna.
Update 3
Her body will be preserved for 10 days ordered the judge in the hearing today on the request by putative dad Larry Birkhead for an emergency DNA Test "so no one could switch the baby."
If you don't have any family, you could do what Luis da Camera did and pick names from the phone book.
Portuguese man left money in his will to 70 strangers
Luis da Camara made his will at the age of 29 by picking names out of the Lisbon telephone directory.
He had no family, reports the Mirror.
Luis died earlier this month, aged just 42, leaving two houses, a car and £17,000 in cash.
The 70 strangers will each get around £6,000.
One beneficiary Helena Suares, 76, said: "At first I thought it was a hoax, but I need the money and I am very grateful to him."
Jack Kerouac lived and wrote before my time, still when I finally read Dharma Bums. I was as entranced with the sweetness of the man as I was with his zest for life and search for truth, not to mention his sheer good looks.
Dharma Bums is an autobiographical novel, set in California, following the publication and amazing success of On the Road of which he said, "I wrote the book because we're all going to die."
Here's a video of Jack reading from On the Road.
But the best place to see that sweetness is in Steve Allen's interview of Jack on YouTube
via Boing Boing
Some of my favorite Kerouac quotes.
“All of life is a foreign country.”
“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”
Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.
“Write in recollection and amazement for yourself”
His estate on his death in 1969 was worth $91. By 2004, it was worth an estimated $20 million.
Jack Boulware writes about the unbelievable complexities of his literary estate in The Kerouac Obssession
The legal situation surrounding the Kerouac estate is so mysterious and confusing as to be almost impenetrable. These, however, are the basic facts: When Jack Kerouac died, he left everything to his mother, Gabrielle. When she died, her will left her entire estate, including Jack Kerouac’s literary materials, to Stella Sampas, Jack’s third wife. In 1994, Kerouac’s only daughter, Jan, contended this will was a forgery, and filed an action in Florida, the state in which Gabrielle died, contesting the probate of her grandmother’s will. This is the action that Nicosia has championed, as an heir and literary representative of Jan Kerouac, even after her death.
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Jan met her father for the first time in 1962, when her mother’s efforts to gain child support finally forced Kerouac to take a paternity blood test. (The result was positive.) As a 9-year-old, she nervously accompanied him to the liquor store for a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream sherry, and saved the cork as a reminder that she did indeed have a father.
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Johnny Depp's purchase invoice of Kerouac memorabilia
The Kerouac raincoat, $15,000; suitcase, $10,000; travel bag, $5,000; sweat shirt, $2,000; rain hat, $3,000; tweed coat, $10,000; a letter to fellow road-tripper Neal Cassady, $5,000; and a canceled check to a liquor store, $350.
The total is $50,640, including tax.
A big problem with inherited 401(k)s has just been solved with legislation signed yesterday by President Bush.
Heirs who aren't spouses can now roll over retirement accounts into their IRAs.
Wall St Journal Tax Report
Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the change will save taxpayers about $291 million over the next decade alone. But be careful: The new law is effective only for distributions made after the end of this year.
"In my 20 years of practice, I have seen dozens of families and tax advisers who would have benefited" from the new provision, says Robert S. Keebler, a certified public accountant at Virchow Krause & Co. in Green Bay, Wis. In most of those cases, a parent died, leaving retirement-plan money to a child who was forced, under the plan's rules, to withdraw money from the plan within five years -- and, in some cases, immediately, Mr. Keebler says in a new book from CCH, a Riverwoods, Ill., publisher of tax information.
The minefields of dividing an estate among different siblings.
"If you're not careful, it can cause people to be bitter for decades, it can ruin relationships," says Chris Dardaman, chief executive officer of Brightworth LLC, a financial advisory firm in Atlanta.
Tips on Dividing an Estate Among Half Siblings by Bridget O'Brian in the Wall Stree Journal
• Sit down with the entire family to discuss the estate plans. Each family needs to determine how specific to get on the topic of numbers, but at the very least such a confab can eliminate negative surprises. "You want, to the extent you can, to remove the emotional powder kegs," says Mr. Dardaman.
• Consider providing for each of your children -- from all marriages -- in your will. Such a move could eliminate or reduce the chance that one or more of the children would contest your will, says Mr. Nass. It's also helpful to write a side letter, or a note to your children, explaining why you've structured things the way you have and, perhaps, to assuage bruised feelings.
• You don't want bitterness between the families to turn into the adult kids fighting the widowed spouse, says Ms. Vasileff. Be sure the second spouse understands and is supportive of your plans.
• Consider an irrevocable insurance trust, a move that can help to avoid probate altogether.
When times change, it's time to review your will unlike the Frenchman, Albert Le Roy, a hardline Marxist, who left his money to his small village council "to prepare for communism."
It's quite split the small village who don't know what to do.
Village red-faced at butcher's late call to revolution.
From Happy Catholic comes this weekend joke.
An elderly gentleman had serious hearing problems for a number of years.
He went to the doctor and the doctor was able to have him fitted for a set of hearing aids that allowed the gentleman to hear 100%.
The elderly gentleman went back in a month to the doctor and the doctor said, "Your hearing is perfect. Your family must be really pleased that you can hear again."
The gentleman replied, "Oh, I haven't told my family yet. I just sit around and listen to the conversations. I've changed my will three times!"
Funeria, an arts agency, is leading the emerging funerary arts movement.
Funeria offers a portfolio of some 70 designs, of hand-made, museum-quality, artist-made funerary vessels.
It's certainly time for more thought and beauty for the urns, vessels and reliquaries for cremated remains. As one wag said, "You've urned it!"
If you are an artist, you may be interested in their call for entries 2006 in the Ashes to Art collection.
The deadline is August 19, 2006. The Ashes to Art exhibition will be in Philadelphia in October.
Funeria, an arts agency, is leading the emerging funerary arts movement.
Funeria offers a portfolio of some 70 designs, of hand-made, museum-quality, artist-made funerary vessels.
It's certainly time for more thought and beauty for the urns, vessels and reliquaries for cremated remains. As one wag said, "You've urned it!"
If you are an artist, you may be interested in their call for entries 2006 in the Ashes to Art collection.
The deadline is August 19, 2006. The Ashes to Art exhibition will be in Philadelphia in October.
Leaving no written directions about how he wanted to be buried or who should have his ashes, Baseball Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett left plenty of work for the lawyers for his children and his fiancee.
Helen Baxter in North Scituate, R.I. makes coffins that are not only beautiful, but can be used as furniture until the last day comes.
Her creations make an eternal impression.
Baxter points to the eye-grabber in the store, a tall lavender bookshelf with a delicate design of lilacs painted behind the single shelf. Around the sides of the recently-finished piece are tiny green willow leaves, and the strong arms of an oak tree wrap around the outside frame, as though protecting it. The only giveaway that this is an antique-style coffin, standing upright, is its hexagonal shape. The coffin lid, which Baxter says is usually stowed away while the coffin is being used as furniture, has birch tree branches painted on it. The woman who commissioned the coffin, she explains, is a perfectly healthy 61-year-old nurse named Helen Busby. ''She said she liked birches, oaks, and willows," Baxter says. ''When she's laid out it will be really beautiful."
My coffins are handcrafted and handpainted. Many people order them early in life so that they may serve more than their final intended purpose. My coffins are designed to be practical and beautiful in a home for years in advance of need, serving as blanket chests, window seats, coffee tables and more.
When a tragic, horrific death becomes a battle over money.
The first time he ever saw his daughter, she was laid out in a coffin.
But now, the biological father of Nixzmary Brown wants control of her estate - which could reap millions from lawsuits against the city.
The NY Post calls him a Body $natcher
First year medical students paid homage to those who had donated their bodies to science and education. Students thank cadavers for 'gift'
During the brief memorial service, humble observations and boundless gratitude spilled from students who'd learned much about the human body through six months of dissection.
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Erica Moyer brushed away tears while she reflected on the sacrifice of the individual whose body was donated for her education.
"This was pretty intense for me. I'm pretty sensitive toward death anyway," the 24-year-old said. "I have a deep respect for these people that would do that."
Someone sent me this a while ago. With the Superbowl just over, it seems timely
Life Support
A man and his wife were sitting in the living room and he said to her,
"Just so you know, I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug."
His wife got up, turned off the football game, unplugged the TV and threw out all of his beer.
Charles Krauthammer pens a moving tribute to his brother in today's Washington Post.
Whenever I look at that picture, I know what we were thinking at the moment it was taken: It will forever be thus. Ever brothers. Ever young. Ever summer.
Sadly, it's never "forever thus" however timeless the moment.
What Ted Williams and Walt Disney have in common is the belief that they can be revived years after death when medicine has advanced sufficiently to cure whatever caused their deaths.
There are some 1000 people in the cryonics movement who have arranged to have their bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen until the time is right to thaw them out. Some 142 human bodies or heads are already so frozen.
I always thought it was nuts myself, but never more so than when I read in the Wall Street Journal that they are leaving their money to themselves! A Cold Calculus Leads Cryonauts to Put Assets on Ice.
With the help of an estate planner, Mr. Pizer has created legal arrangements for a financial trust that will manage his roughly $10 million in land and stock holdings until he is re-animated. Mr. Pizer says that with his money earning interest while he is frozen, he could wake up in 100 years the "richest man in the world."
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At least a dozen wealthy American and foreign businessmen are testing unfamiliar legal territory by creating so-called personal revival trusts designed to allow them to reclaim their riches hundreds, or even thousands, of years into the future.
Such financial arrangements, which tie up money that might otherwise go to heirs or charities, are "more widespread than I originally thought," says A. Christopher Sega, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University and a trusts and estates attorney at Venable LLP, in Washington. Mr. Sega says he's created three revival trusts in the last year.
On Personal Revival Trusts
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, leaving money to yourself is nothing but nuts.
A rose amidst the ashes. A beautiful story of the family of a 13 year old Palestinian boy who had been shot dead by IDF soldiers who mistook his toy gun for a real one.
The parents decided to donate the organs "for the sake of peace between the two people". Ariel Sharon invited the father to meet with him and accept his apology and his gratitude.
Ahmed's heart has been transplanted into the body of a 12 year old girl.
Ahmed's liver was donated to a six month old baby and a 66 year old woman.
Ahmed's lungs will be donated to a 14 year old Cystic Fibrosis patient.
Ahmed's kidneys will be donated to a 5 year old boy and 4 girl.
An exceptional deed indeed and a Great Legacy. Many people are blessing Ahmed and his family today. You too will be blessed if you ...Donate Life. Hat Tip, Charles Johnson at LGF
ABC News reports that Peter Jenning left an estate worth over $50 million.
The New York Daily News got the first look at Peter Jenning's will which was filed Wednesday in the New York's Surrogate Court in Manhattan.
Jennings, 67, left the bulk of his estate in trust for his two children, Elizabeth, 25, and Christopher, 23, from his marriage to writer Kati Marton, according to the will, filed Wednesday in Manhattan Surrogate's Court.
He left his Central Park West apartment to his widow, Kayce Freed, whom he wed in 1997, as well as a portion of his estate, as laid out in a prenuptial agreement the couple signed before their wedding.
Jennings, who died last month after battling lung cancer, reportedly earned as much as $10 million a year during part of his tenure at ABC. His will lists $50 million in personal property and $3.5 million in real property in New York.
Bob Dylan is looking to control his own legacy reports the Wall St. Journal. If Dylan's taking care to choose how he wants to be remembered, shouldn't you be thinking about the same thing?
With a torrent of new projects focusing on his most-revered period, from 1961 to 1966, the singer is pre-empting the posthumous image-massaging that has confronted many rock estates by dealing with his own legacy now, while the 64-year-old is still very much alive.
The DVD release today of the 3½-hour, Martin Scorsese-directed documentary "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" is part of a multipronged project in which Mr. Dylan has aggressively focused attention on his transformation from baby-faced folk singer to rock 'n' roll icon.
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In that way, Mr. Dylan is staking out unusual ground for a rock star. The process of picking through an artist's archives for clues about his or her creative evolution is often left to heirs and others after the musician's death. The estates of Jimi Hendrix, Mr. Cobain and Tupac Shakur all have made cottage industries of issuing rarities, album outtakes, obscure live recordings, and the like. But that process is often contentious, like the long legal battle among Mr. Hendrix's heirs, record labels and producers. The fights frequently lead to cheap repackagings of old material, designed more to make heirs a quick buck than to craft a lasting legacy.
Tom Peters reports in Nice! on an obituary he chanced upon in the Vineyard Gazette. The deceased was Stanley Murray and the guidance to mourners was as follows:
"In lieu of flowers, please buy some coffee for the person behind you in line at Dippin' Donuts or Espresso Love and tell them it's from Stan."
If you have a deep dark secret that implicates yourself or someone in your family as an accomplice in a murder, a secret that might solve a mystery that has puzzled the nation for years, then writing what you know down and sealing it in an envelope marked Do Not Open Until My Death is the way to go.
After 73 years, the mystery of what happened to Judge Crater, "the most missingest man in America" may be solved because one woman left such a letter in her safety deposit box.
From ABC News
On Aug. 6, 1930, Judge Joseph F. Crater stepped off a midtown Manhattan curb and into a cab after seeing a Broadway play with his showgirl girlfriend. He was never heard from again.
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The possible break in the case came after the death a little more than two months ago of an elderly woman, whose name is being withheld by detectives at this time.
The woman's death prompted her family to open a safe-deposit box where they discovered a letter labeled "Do Not Open Until My Death." In the letter, the woman recounted her own father's deathbed statements to her, statements which, if true, could bring to a close one of the oldest enduring mysteries in America. And so far, detectives say, everything the woman wrote has been corroborated.
The letter contained the names of cab driver Frank Burn, and his brother, a police officer named Charles. The letter claimed that Frank Burn had killed Crater and buried the body under the boardwalk at New York's Coney Island. Charles Burn was named as the killer in another notorious homicide.
In England, the terminally ill can be starved to death. So ruled an appeal court in the U.K.
No longer must doctors follow a patient's wishes, even if clearly stated by a mentally competent patient who is terminally ill.
Doctors get the final say once a patient can no longer communicate. They can withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) if they consider it 'overly burdensome'.
I find this a very troubling ruling because it seems to draw the line between those worth feeding and those you can starve solely on their ability to communicate.
It's not our ability to communicate that's distinguishes humans from other species, but our consciousness.
Those who are in a "locked in" state are alert and wakeful even if they are paralyzed and unable to speak. One of them, Jean-Dominque Bauby, even wrote a book about it .
"
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly : A Memoir of Life in Death"
A racehouse trainer, Neil Adam, won the Prix de l'Abbaye at Longchamp two years running. He built up a stud farm, Collin Stud, near Newmarket, which he left to his two daughters in 1997, one of whom is a qualified veterinarian.
By 2001, Neil Adam was paralysed with multiple sclerosis and could only communicate by nodding, winking and shaking his head. Still he made out a second will leaving the stud farm to its manager and head groom.
The two sisters succeeded in overturning their father's last will. The deputy High Court judge said,
"In my judgment, it is likely that there was a temporary poisoning of his natural affection for his daughters, or a perversion of his sense of right, the nature of which nobody can satisfactorily explain," said the judge.
He added that he realised his decision would be hard on Mr Sharp, 44, and Mr Bryson, 39, both of whom worked for Mr Adam since leaving school.
"There is every likelihood that the decision to benefit them resulted from rational thought, in which Mr Adam recognised his considerable debt of gratitude to them," said the judge.
"Nevertheless, I cannot conclude that the will as a whole was rationally made, or that Mr Adam's natural feelings for his daughters, or his sense of right, were unaffected by disorder of the mind."
The judge granted permission for the case to be appealed and said,
"I have been struck throughout the case by the great affection everyone had for Mr Adam and the extremely kind way in which everybody treated him. If that could result in some resolution of the issues between the parties, it might be a fitting tribute to him."
Good legal advice would have obviated this "awful business."
If you want your family to visit your grave, you have to pay them, or at least that's what Morris Gorski thought.
Gorski, a popular businessman who owned a number of properties, got permission before his death to have a cash machine installed in his tombstone at the Chester Jewish Cemetery.
Now when any one of his 25 heirs turn up at the gravestone, they can collect up to 750 pounds. No more than once a week though.
According to the Board of Guardians of British Jews, other people will be able to do the same if Gorski's incentive proves popular.
HT Hanan Levin
UPDATE: It took Richard, a commenter, to point out to me that the site I linked to is a "satire" site based on real life. Is my face ever red, taken in by a too-good-to-be true story.
His biographer Peter Manso said
I think the whole auction is creepy and I can tell you I'm not the only one who thinks so after spending two days with (Brando's son) Christian."
"The auction borders on complete tastelessness and Brando would never, ever, ever have wanted this," the author of "Brando: The Biography" told Reuters by telephone.
According to Manso, Brando left instructions that his bedroom be sealed with a padlock after his death.
"I can assure you Marlon is turning over in his grave to think that someone has his driver's license."
The sale of Brando's personal effects raised more than $2.4 million to be divided among his nine children.
In Australia, a widow can not impregnate herself with her dead husband's sperm without his written consent.
The 36-year-old woman had been married to her husband for more than eight years when he was killed in a car accident in July 1998.
Within 24 hours of his death, the woman, who can only be identified as AB, received permission from the Victorian Supreme Court - and the consent of the dead man's parents - to have his sperm taken and stored at a Melbourne hospital.
But yesterday, Justice Hargrave said the law did not allow the taking of sperm or ova from the dead for the purpose of reproduction if the person had not consented in writing to the procedure before their death.
In this case, the man, who was 29 when he died, had not given written consent for the posthumous removal and use of his sperm
Widow can't use husband's sperm
Yet another thing for young couples to think about before they visit their lawyer to make their wills. Probably a good idea for American couples as well.
A very even-handed fair look at the Case of Theresa Schiavo by Joan Didion, one of our greatest living writers, in the New York Review of Books.
HT Amy Welborn
In talking about end of life issues, there's one phrase you hear over and over, it's I don't want to be a burden.
Can someone who's a "burden" also serve, even give? Who measures the quality of life anyway? Mary Beth McCauley writes in the Christian Science Monitor on The issues beyond right-to-die.
This is surely the most loathed condition in our era of the fit, beautiful, and self-sufficient. Who could ever submit voluntarily to an existence that's all take and no give? And so it has evolved, almost without question, that we've embraced this "don't want to be a burden" idea as valid - that if you're potentially needy you want to make your exit posthaste.....
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But few who have gone the distance with serious illness would say that the experience didn't open them to a quality of relationship they never knew existed. Few haven't found themselves changed on the most basic level by the process, haven't become different - a better person, if you will - than they'd thought possible previously. And who, exactly, is the "giver" in such situations anyhow? Don't those who do the burdening themselves serve by allowing another the opportunity to give?
......
To expect anyone to embrace such a situation trivializes the excruciating pain that comes with lost dreams and intolerable demands. That said, people who've been there know well that the burdenhood model misrepresents a reality that often allows - if fleetingly - for physical and spiritual .
That debate shouldn't end privately, in the lawyer's office..... Do we continue in lock step behind the convenient premise that the sick are a burden?...
.... there is shortsightedness in expecting the healthcare industry to make end-of-life policy. Thus the need to press the debate. After all, most of us have seen too many modern-day Lazaruses, watched too many lives made great by impossible medical challenges, to believe that "protocol" should measure the quality of our lives, or, finally, dictate the number of our days
Because celebrity spokesmen often get into trouble, advertisers like dead people, especially the certainty they won't talk says Truman Taylor.
That's why Marilyn Monroe earned $7 million last year, Elvis earned $40 million. Even Einstein pulled in $1 million last year, appearing in ads for Apple computers, Fuji film and Chrysler cars.
Happy heirs.
People are finally coming to realize that they have "digital assets" and they are real assets, something of value and valuable for many reasons. So just what happens to your digital assets when you die or if you become incapacitated?
What do you want done with your blog?
Who knows how to get to your photos posted on the Kodak Gallery or Flickr?
Do you want your family to read your email?
Do you have address books that are only available online?
What are the usernames and passwords to your online accounts?
Do you have any files that exist only online with a third party?
Do you have work files on your computer that should be returned to your employer?
Who gets to go through your computer and clean out any files you don't want anyone to see like a porn collection?
Who gets your iPod and the music on it?
These issues are attracting increasing attention. The Christian Science Monitor asks Who Gets to see the email of the deceased? Darren Barefoot wonders if it isn't time for Digital Morticians . Joel Schoenmeyer, a Chicago area estate planning lawyer writes about the need for a Technology Inventory as does law professor Gerry Beyer. Darren Rowse in Problogger wonders what would happen to his blog which happens to be an income-producing asset in Blogging Fears - Death.
Just where should you put all those bits and pieces about your digital assets and your online life? Is it your will?
Your will is not the only way or the document with which you can direct how you want things to be done after your death. There are a lot of things that you want someone to know and a will is not necessarily the best place to tell him or her. After all, a will is a public document. And you certainly don't want to go to your attorney to add a new codicil every time you change a user name or password to an online account.
There is a vehicle, too little used, called “Letter to your Executor”. It's the ultimate in do-it-yourself. Since it is only a letter and not a will, it is not legally binding, but it is morally binding. And it’s just the place to leave directions of how you want certain things handled after your death. I call it the “Gift of Good Directions,” a fine complement to the Gift of Good Records, your master list of what and where everything is and who to contact.
A digression here, to talk about the third in this trio- the Gift of a Lifetime, your Personal Legacy Archives. Few of us will have biographers, all of us are archivists of our own lives. Lost among the ephemera, files and shoeboxes filled with photos we all have are the stories and the meaning. What were the top ten highlights of your life? What did you love and why? Where were the "choice-points" in your life, where you could have gone either way, but chose one? And how did it turn out? What do you regret? What are your proudest achievements? What's your favorite music, the moments you'll never forget? What do you want your children to know about you? What have you left unsaid that you want said?
While there are few Mount Rushmore lives, Joseph Cooper says, each of us carves out a bit of history that should be put down for our own edification and for our families and friends. For his son, he's set down his own Monuments to a Decent Life. Ronni Bennett calls them Stories for the Infinite Future. As one who spent much of her professional life with celebrities, she says with great authority, No Lives Are Ordinary.
Time was when people kept journals and wrote letters They were just like bloggers. Take Henry Thoreau. Or Samuel Pepys. Some, like Mark Twain, kept scrapbooks. Others were just ordinary people, like these emigrants and pioneers, or these diarists in Britain during World War II.
Ordinary letters to a new grandson written in 1918 are a precious family heirloom 90 years later. Such journals and letters preserve personal and family memories as well as the sense of times gone by by people long gone, but not forgotten. Some rise to become societal memories. We can understand better what things were like for the Jews during World War II because we've read the Diary of Anne Frank.
Human nature is constant, it doesn't change over time. We experience the same emotions love and fear, gratitude and shame, as people did a thousand years ago. It's only the people, the details and the stories that change. But those details and those stories are what we want to pass on into the future. It's what you want your loved ones to know. It's what they want to know. Only we no longer keep journals or write many letters.
That's why many of us write blogs - to keep a record of where we were and what we thought. The more we write, the more valuable the blog becomes and not just for its "long tail". Some bloggers show us the way of suffering with illness and facing death and they are Truly Noble and their work deserves to be preserved. For most of us, we'd like our families or friends to have our blog after we're gone; we don't want our blog to just disappear into the ether. The world will go on after you die, but not your blog unless someone pays the hosting fees. You are the one that can decide whether your blog will have an afterlife. Thinking ahead, Ronni Bennett has set aside money to pay for her blog host for at least a year and to download her blog to CDs for whoever wants a copy.
Details like what you want done about your blog and your other digital assets are the sort of directions you leave in your Letter to your Executor. With a Letter to your Executor, you can update it and revise it as often as you want. Just be sure to date it so it doesn't get confused with earlier letters. I recommend printing it out as well to file with your other important papers. Copies of all important papers should be kept in a steel box so that it can be grabbed in a moment if you must leave your house in an emergency. The steel should protect your files against fires and you may want to get one with a key so you can keep it locked and safe from prying eyes.
Because it's so easily revised and costs nothing to revise, your Letter to your Executor is also the ideal document for other directions that may change on a fairly frequent basis, like the music you want played at your funeral or what you want engraved on your tombstone, how to take care of your pets, or the small sentimental gifts you want distributed to friends.
Once you get into it, you realize there's a whole lot of context that doesn't and will never appear in the legal documents of your estate plan.
Everyone should have a will, a durable power of attorney, and a health care proxy or power of attorney first, but once that's done, spend some time to think about the context, those details that express who you are.
Once you've formalized who you want as guardians for your children, what do you want them to pay particular attention to. Helen Harcombe was dying of cancer, so she composed a detailed mommy manual to tell her husband things he wouldn't think about in raising their seven year old daughter alone. No will is ever going to contain the phrase, "Bath and hair every other night, AT LEAST. No child of mine to be smelly." For her husband, it was "great comfort." Her daughter Ffion said when she saw the manual, "That makes me feel a lot better, Daddy."
Any guardian, any child will be happier if they knew what you wanted them to do and pay special attention to. A letter to the guardians of your children will be invaluable guidance. Now this may seem a whole lot of trouble to write directions for something that will likely never happen. So think of it as an on-going letter about what you want for your children and what you think is important at different stages in their lives. It could be a letter you write each year on their birthdays or on Mother's Day. That way, you are creating something valuable for them after you're gone, something they'll treasure as part of your personal legacy, the gift of who you are. Such a letter becomes a chronological record of how you saw your children as they grew up. What grist for the mill when they start therapy or have children of their own!
Directions are important too for your health care agent. So write a letter to your health care agent describing how you would like to be taken care of should you fall ill and be unable to communicate.
(If you haven't executed a health care proxy, otherwise known as a power of attorney for health care, and of course you know you should, you haven't faced the grid many lawyers will present you of the almost limitless health care decisions your health care agent could be asked to make.)
A living will is almost useless because it can't anticipate the circumstances or the complicated decisions that will have to be made in your future. That's why choosing one person you trust to act in your stead is Better than a Living Will.
More important for your comfort and quality of life are the directions you leave for your health care agent. There's a lot of room between "doing everything" and "doing nothing."
What you consider a "quality of life" you want to hold on to is quite likely is not the same as someone else's. But if you don't give your health care agent a clue as to what you want or just how far you want to go, you are just making it harder for them. Again, you will never find such guidance in a legal document. Mystic Knight wrote his directions the night before he faced an operation. I've done mine in Living the Way Terri Was and my health care agent says she definitely wants my playlist. You will not find playlists in legal documents.
I expect to change my mind about these things almost as often as I redecorate, not a constant pre-occupation, but a periodic one. So will you. Think of your estate plan as the architecture. The furnishings, the little details you want to add or subtract or update will change periodically, but they don't require an architect or a builder - or a lawyer. They just require your keeping a Letter to Your Executor - changing it as often as you want - in a safe place.
Here's a wonderful example of how good directions can make a great legacy.
Even while she lay dying from breast cancer in Wales, Helen Harcombe left instructions to her husband from raising her seven year old daughter, Ffion.
Here's some of Helen's to do list for her husband.
• Uniform bought every September. Check hair for nits regularly.
• Bath and hair every other night, AT LEAST. No child of mine to be smelly.
• Make sure you serve food with veg/peas. Get fruit down her. Don't let her live out of cans, noodles and toast etc.
• At Christmas time don't forget the smaller things like stocking fillers to make it look more and fill up the stocking - chocolates, bobbles, clips, make up, fun stuff etc.
• Bedding should be changed once a fortnight, more if sweaty.
• Flowers to me at least Mothers' Day, my birthday, Ffion's birthday, our anniversary, Christmas etc (in between would be nice!)
• Keep in touch witFi's godparents and my friends and especially Mam and Dad or ... I'll haunt you!
"It did bring a smile to a lot of people's faces and the pointers I am sure will be with us forever probably."
Ms Raybould said it was also important to have left something for Ffion. "It does show that even though her mother was going through a difficult illness, that the focus was on the family and on her," she said.
Jill Templeman, a family support team leader for Marie Curie Cancer Care in Wales, said the list was "a lovely and invaluable thing. We do encourage and try to support families to be open and prepare for death in lots of different ways with memory boxes and photo projects."
Cancer specialist Baroness Ilora Finlay, professor of palliative medicine and vice dean in the School of Medicine at Cardiff University, said Mrs Harcombe had left "a tremendous legacy".
"Helen died tragically young, leaving a young daughter and I really hope for her daughter that that list and that letter will become indeed more treasured with time," she said.
We may be burying our best medical lessons by not doing enough autopsies writes David Dobbs in Buried Answers in the New York Times magazine.
Autopsy is the most powerful tool in medicine, responsible for most of our knowledge of anatomy and disease says Alan Schiller, chairman of pathology at Mt Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
Neglecting the autopsy is anathema to the whole practice of medicine.
In the 1960s, almost 50% of all deaths were autopsied, today the number is less than 5%. Dr. George Lundberg, a pathologist who edits the online medical journal Medscape says nothing can reveal error like an autopsy and by revealing mistakes, help doctors learn and advance the cause of medicine.
Only an autopsy can reveal whether a patient died of Alzheimer's, or multi-infarct dementia or encephalitis or even a variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob prion killing disease. What a patient really died of has enormous significance for their survivors. The real cause of death can reveal what the surviving family can take preventative action against. In many cases, an autopsy can provide the family with a "welcome sense of resolution.... ease anguish about things done or not done"
Reliance on diagnostic tools before death like CAT scans and MRI's instead of autopsies only buries the real answers.
One of my own family doctors told me that he rarely asks for an autopsy because ''with M.R.I.'s and CAT scans and everything else, we usually know why they died.''
This sense of omniscience, Lundberg says, is part of ''a vast cultural delusion.'' At his most incensed, Lundberg says he feels that his fellow doctors simply don't want to face their own fallibility. But Lundberg's indictment is even broader. The autopsy's decline reflects not just individual arrogance, but also the general state of health care: the increasing distance and unease between doctors and patients and their families, a pervasive fear of lawsuits, our denial of age and death and, especially, our credulous infatuation with technology. Our doctors' overconfidence, less bigheaded than blithe, is part of the medicine we've come to expect.
So there's one more thing you can do for your family - insist on an autopsy as part of your last wishes. You'll be advancing the cause of medicine at the same time.
Attorney Rita Marker clarifies many misconceptions about living wills and the traps for the unwary in Be Prepared.
The most protective and the most flexible type of advance directive is the "Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care." With this type of document you designate someone else to make health-care decisions on your behalf if you are ever temporarily or permanently unable to make those decisions for yourself. The person you name is usually called an agent, although some states call this individual a health-care proxy, health-care representative or health-care surrogate.
When you are able to make your own decisions, it is the responsibility of your health-care providers to let your know your diagnosis, to give you information about possible treatments, as well as the risks and benefits associated with those treatments. Then, it is up to you to give or withhold consent based on that information. If you have named an agent to make decisions for you that person stands in your shoes. The doctor gives your agent the same information that would have been given to you and then, based on prior discussions you and your agent have had and with the knowledge of your values, your agent gives or withholds consent for treatment.
You can, but need not, name a family member as your agent. In addition to selecting an agent who agrees with you, it is important that that person has the ability to be assertive when necessary. He should be a person who will be open to receiving necessary information and who will not be intimidated by a physician or ethics committee who may hold different views. .
Because the Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care is a legal document, it is important that you have one that is carefully drafted. It is not necessary, advisable, or even possible to write everything down about your wishes. There is no way you can envision every possible condition, treatment, or situation you could face at any time. The most important thing is to maintain communication with your agent about your wishes as they change from time to time. (Sometimes what we want now may be different than what we wanted five years ago.)
Joan Kennedy is not very pleased with her children who became her legal guardians last year to see that she received treatment for alcoholism and to take care of her financial affairs. In retaliation, she put up for sale her summer house on Squaw Island for $6.5 million. Her children object to the sale and it is unlikely the house will be sold given the cloud on the title.
The battle of children to retain control over one or another parent or elderly relative is on the rise with no end in sight. Half the guardianship cases heard in Barnstable Family and Probate Court were filed by family or friends seeking control over another adult's life according to the Cape Cod Times.
The most difficult cases where the prospective ward contests the proposed guardianship usually involve substance abuse - drugs or alcohol. I have nothing but sympathy for these families dealing with such difficult issues; however, I can not help but believe that advance planning in the form of a durable power of attorney would have saved these families a lot of grief.
Those of us who are worried about the rush to euthanize now have the case of Mae Magouirk to show us how right we were to worry.
Another woman, 81, lies in a hospice without food or water since March 28. Another family dispute - this time between Mae's granddaughter and Mae's brother and sister. Brother and sister want a temporary feeding tube inserted and Mae evaluated for treatment at the University of Alabama Medical Center. Granddaughter, Gaddy, has been appointed emergency guardian and has stated.
"Grandmama is old and I think it is time she went home to Jesus. She has glaucoma and now this heart problem, and who would want to live with disabilities like these?
At a follow-up hearing in Troup County Probate Court, a settlement has been reached that allows awards guardianship to the granddaughter Gaddy provided three cardiologists evaluate the patient who would receive whatever treatment two of the three recommended.
Mae has a living will that states nourishment is to be withheld only if she were in a coma or vegetative state with no hope of recovery. Apparently, she did not have a health care proxy
Is this woman is being denied food and water even as the evaluation is going on? I don't know. Her granddaughter testified according to the local paper linked above that she feeds her grandmother Jello and chips of ice.
Is this case part of the hurry up and die syndrome? I don't know but I will follow it. I'm afraid we'll see many more of these cases, some genuinely a dispute over what the patient wanted, others with far more base motives. I don't think "quality of life" is the standard. None of us know with appreciation we can live even if from the outside the "quality" seems poor or what we would endure for just a little more life. I am reminded of the Zen strawberry story
One day while walking through the wilderness a man stumbled upon a vicious tiger. He ran but soon came to the edge of a high cliff. Desperate to save himself, he climbed down a vine and dangled over the fatal precipice. As he hung there, two mice appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine. Suddenly, he noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry. He plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was incredibly delicious!
Wizbang has a number of links and continually updates Mae's story.
Hyscience has a long and excellent post that asks whether hospices are enabling euthanasia.
UPDATE: On Friday, the three doctors determined that Mae's heart condition was treatable. She
was airlifted to the University of Alabama Medical Center. Her nephew Kenneth Mullinax of Birmingham is quoted as saying, "Hospice is only for the dying and my aunt has many more years to live. A crime was being committed by having a person in a hospice who was not terminally ill. I hope that this never ever happens again."
The questions that remain are
1. Why was she in a hospice?
2. Why did her doctor order her feeding tube removed?
3. Why did neither her doctor or her granddaughter abide by the conditions listed in Mae's living will?
Shortly before Terri Schiavo died, both CBS and ABC published polls that showed 68% of Americans were "in favor of letting Terri Schiavo die..."
Pat Cadell, a leading Democratic pollster, an expert on the use and abuse of polls, said essentially this poll was designed to achieve a certain result.
But what's being presented in these polls, particularly with CBS when it's so disturbing to me because it's being cited everywhere, and it's not being cited accurately. .......
only once [before], --have I seen a survey that made me wonder whether or not the results were prejudged before they were written. This poll is so basically designed to produce certain results, and then is being reported as such, makes me very concerned. Now it could be just pure incompetence, however I suspect that there's more here than that.
The Anchoress paraphased the questions CBS asked:
""Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegatative state, and has been for 15 years, she is in a coma and will never recover, should she be taken off life support?"
Well...sure...you ask a question like that...you'll get a number like 68% saying, "yes, let the poor woman die..."
A Zogby poll rephrased the question more accurately,
"If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water,"
The response to the Zogby poll: 79% said the patient should not have food and water taken away while just 9% said yes.
Let me know if you hear this reported anywhere but in blogs.
Hat tip The Anchoress
Saddened by the spectacle Terri's death became, horrified by the manner of her dying where the judge forbade even ice chips to ease her suffering, I haven't reflected sufficiently on her legacy to write about, so I offer you these links.
THE DEATH yesterday of Terri Schiavo concludes a legal battle, but its moral quandaries live on. The Schiavo case gripped the nation because of the lines drawn between life and death, and the middle ground of dementia or coma, agonizingly hard areas to delineate. In addition, because of a mute understanding that this subject is too awful to contemplate, a discussion of Schiavo-like choices has not fully penetrated the public square. It will be a healthy thing if this taboo is permanently shattered. We may not want to discuss death, but it will come to all of us. And, because of medical technology, more people will be empowered, or perhaps some would say condemned, to make judgments about when life is worth living, and when not.
A century ago, death usually came abruptly; the most frequent causes were pneumonia, tuberculosis, diarrhea and injuries, sudden killers all. Today, the average American spends two years disabled enough to need help with the routine activities of living; and growing numbers survive to be 85 and older, at which point they have a 50 percent chance of suffering dementia before they die. In 2000, there were 4.2 million Americans in the 85-plus cohort, but by 2030 there will be nearly 9 million, according to a paper for the Rand institute by Joanne Lynn and David M. Adamson. We speak of people being "snatched from life." Death, for more and more Americans, however, is the final stumble in a slow decline.
We have not adjusted to this transformation, in emotional, moral or economic terms. .......Many Americans, and not just social conservatives, feel that life is always worth preserving and that wavering from this principle opens the door to selfish relatives who don't want the burden of caring for the vulnerable. It's an honorable outlook -- also a natural one. Many believe on religious grounds that life is sacrosanct. With the survival instinct hard-wired into human nature, others find it difficult to contemplate the extinction of the self. Yet there has to be space in a free society for others to differ: to draw up living wills that specify limits to life-prolonging medical interventions, and perhaps also to opt for assisted suicide........Thanks to Terri Schiavo, a national conversation is, we hope, beginning.
From the New York Times
One of the most astonishing things about the human experience is the realization that loved ones die. The first time it happens, we are invariably amazed that nearly everyone who has ever lived has weathered an experience so wrenching. We see other humans on the street and in the shops and marvel that they manage to simply go about their business - that there is no constant, universal primal scream in the face of such an awful fact.
That level of grief seldom brings out the noblest emotions. The sufferers can barely make their way through the day, let alone summon their best reserves of patience and compassion for the lucky people who continue to live. In the case of Terri Schiavo, the whole world witnessed what happens when that natural emotional frailty is taken captive by politics.
It was awful, and according to the polls, the American public shrank from the sight of it.
From Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe
It's why we need a healthcare proxy as well as a living will. We need someone we can trust and burden with the authority to make decisions for us when we are unable.
But this too will require some deeper, bolder, tough talk: If we don't want to live ''like that," how do we want to live? Like what?
A Wellesley College bioethicist, Adrienne Asch, says: ''The typical advance directive or living will does not ask the right questions. It asks what sort of medical intervention we want or don't want. The question that we ought to be asked is what am I experiencing? What will make me feel that I have something to live for? What is enough?"
Asch, who is blind and very conscious of societal attitudes toward disabilities, says that if she wrote the living will form, it would ask people to imagine themselves in a range of scenarios. When would we want our lives prolonged by medicine? In her own advance directive she has written that ''as long as the people who know me believe that I recognize them and can differentiate them from strangers, I want to be alive." After that, enough.
People on all sides share a moral obligation. We need to let the people we leave behind mourn with the clear conscience that, as much as possible, they did what we wanted.
Terri Schiavo was only 25 when this tragedy began. Her family has been, simply, devastated. We owe our own families much, much more than that.
From It is Ended by William Anderson, senior psychiatrist at Mass General Hospital.
SO IT HAS ENDED. The nightmare of judicial execution by dehydration is finally over. How could such a thing have happened? Students of law, medicine, and ethics will examine this tragedy for decades to come.
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To withhold minimal comfort measures such as water is gratuitous cruelty. But the judge must be convinced of his probity and rectitude, for he alerted every sheriff in Florida to be vigilant in preventing a chip of ice from entering Terri's mouth. And appellate courts declined to interfere with this travesty of justice on the grounds that proper procedures were followed. Thus they became complicit in the evolving tragedy.
Much mischief is set loose when the uncertain judgments of medical diagnosis are conflated with the rigid categories of the law. Unlike coma or brain death, persistent vegetative state is a diagnosis that depends on subjective judgment. It requires a finding of unresponsiveness in an awake and alert person. Even skilled diagnosticians may disagree on this assessment. It does not necessarily preclude the possibility of improvement. It has no definitive laboratory tests.
Thus the diagnosis of PVS is not reliable in a forensic sense, and should not be used in life and death decisions. It is a clinical diagnosis, which prescribes treatment measures in normative medical practice
A professor of neurology and neurophysiology at Harvard Medical School describes how a 32 year old woman, born with hydranencephaly, and thought to have been in a persistent vegetative state reacted with joy and delight to music.
I immediately brought her other doctors back into the room, where they began to interact with her in a totally different manner, in some cases holding her hand and trying to speak with her, and treating her more like a normally functioning human being. I was so emotionally moved by her struggle for human definition through the single modality of hearing that I went down to a local electronics shop and bought her an audio cassette player, and some modern and classical music.
She continued to appear to enjoy the audio cassette player and her music until her death some years later.
This patient demonstrated the dilemma we face in determining whether people in an apparent persistent vegetative state, who by all objective measure have little or no function in the cerebral hemispheres, have any residual human capacity that would persuade us to sustain their lives, even by artificial means.
Her case was a reminder of how much we do not understand about the brain, and that even people in an apparent vegetative state may have ways of connecting to the world around them.
A few years ago, unresponsive patients were classified as comatose (eyes closed and responses limited to basic reflexes) or vegetative (eyes opening and closing in a cycle of sleeping and waking but without any sign of awareness).
That began to change when Danny Rios, a 24 year old with a severe brain injury, unable to speak or move his body, was taken to Sloan Kettering Institute on Manhattan's East Side. Danny was placed in an MRI machine and a recording by his sister saying she was there and she loved him was played over his earphones.
The doctors didn't know what to expect when they looked at the images from the scan. They certainly did not expect to see Danny's brain to fire its neurons in a way virtually identical to a healthy subject. Even the visual centers of his brain lit up as "if his sister's words awakened his mind's eye," in the words of researcher Joy Hirsch, an expert in brain imaging at Columbia University. "There didn't seem to be anything missing, " said Nicholas Schiff, an expert in consciousness disorders at Weill Medical College of Cornell University.
Even with a brain injury, neural networks can reorganize themselves into something closer to full consciousness. One doctor said of Danny ""He's aware of himself, he's happy, but it took a lot of skill to see it. If he ended up in a nursing home and started doing things like this, no one would have noticed."
The whole fascinating story - What if There is Something Going On in There by Carl Zimmer - can be read in the New York Times magazine, September 28, 2003. It can be accessed for free here.
These researchers proposed a new category of consciousness - the minimally conscious state - in the Journal of Neurology in 2002, a call endorsed by a string of medical societies and academies.
These researchers think it's likely that a vast number of people who might otherwise be classified as vegetative actually have hidden reserves of mental activity. It may well be that we have given up too soon on many people they think.
As we learn that different parts of the brain regenerate and reorganize even as other parts go missing, if we knew say, that someone who appears locked in a persistent vegetative state, understands who she is, appreciates music, recognizes people and feels emotion, then many of us have to reconsider what we want to do with the 100,000 - 300,000 people in a minimally conscious state.
If thousands of brain-damaged people are treated as if they are unaware, but in fact hear and register what's going on but are unable to respond, how do we care for them? Listen to what one doctor had to say in Signs of Awareness Seen in Brain-Injured Patients, a New York Times article, sated February 8, 2005. Free link here
This study gave me goose bumps, because it shows this possibility of this profound isolation, that these people are there, that they've been there all along, even though we've been treating them as if they're not," said Dr. Joseph Fins, chief of the medical ethics division of New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Fins was not involved in the study but collaborates with its authors on other projects.
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A better understanding of brain patterns in minimally conscious patients should also help cut down on misdiagnosis by doctors, Dr. Fins said. He said one study had found that as many as 30 percent of patients identified as being unaware, in a persistently vegetative state, were not. They were minimally conscious.
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The findings, if repeated in follow-up experiments, could have sweeping implications for how to care best for these patients. Some experts said the study, which appeared yesterday in the journal Neurology, could also have consequences for legal cases in which parties dispute the mental state of an unresponsive patient.
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"The most consequential thing about this is that we have opened a door, we have found an objective voice for these patients, which tells us they have some cognitive ability in a way they cannot tell us themselves," Dr. Hirsch said. The patients are, she added, "more human than we imagined in the past, and it is unconscionable not to aggressively pursue research efforts to evaluate them and develop therapeutic techniques."
Lessons for Living from the Dying by Jeanne McManus in the Washington Post
The first time I sat by the side of a deathbed and watched the life drain from a loved one, it changed me forever.
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I continue to fine-tune my final scene. The more of life that I am given, the more I value it. But the more I value it, the more I think about losing it and the more I try to direct the terms of my departure. I use flip and cynical comments to friends and family about what to do with me, most of my directives involving a wheelbarrow and a steep cliff. On the more serious side, I use the wisdom of lawyers and estate planners to lock my wishes into place.
------
Time spent watching someone die is painful, agonizing and transforming.
Though it would be noble to say otherwise, it's not what you learn about death or about your friend or your parent or your sibling as the life drains from them. It's what you learn about you.
I would only add that failure to plan for the inevitable also says a lot about you.
Far more women than men were killed by the Asian tsunami, in some areas four times as many, according to Oxfam.
This hugely disproportionate impact will have effects for generations to come.
The final vote in the House was 203 yeah and 58 nay. The familiar saying that hard cases make bad law may be true in Terri's case.
While I am pleased that the President has signed the emergency legislation that allows a federal court to review Terri's case, I don't think that an extraordinary appeal to Congress is the way to handle such cases.
I hope that this Congress seriously debates and considers how to provide the incapacitated with rights that insure the same due process if they have left no written directives that we accord convicted criminals. "The facts of this case suggest that existing safeguards are dangerously inadequate" the editors of the National Review write. Democrat Michael Totten writes To Save or Not to Save and questions what the White House will do about people who are taken off life support because their families have run out of money.
I hope every adult appoints a health care proxy first, or at minimum, leaves advance medical directives.
There is no excuse for a competent adult American to leave their families clueless as to what to do.
Because absent a health care proxy, absent a living will, we have entered the twilight zone.
The debate on the right to live, the right to die and the right to euthanize has begun.
Whatever your opinion is on the Terri Schiavo case, there is no debate that the issue touches all of us.
No doubt we can keep bodies alive almost forever. With oodles of money, Sunny von Bulow is still alive after 20 years in a coma. While the battle for Terri raged on, a baby born with a fatal defect died after the removal of life support against the mother's wishes. Does Spiro Nikolouzos meet the criteria for brain dead? If his family can not find an institution who will take him, his life support will be cut off in 10 days. In both cases, the hospitals were concerned about the rising costs of what they considered futile care.
We're hearing about the rising costs of supporting aging boomers in their retirement. What about the costs of keeping boomers alive through tax-supported Medicare? The costs of end of life care can be extraordinary, a fact which prompted former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm to say in 1984 that "we have a duty to die" and get out of the way of younger generations. He was often misquoted as saying the elderly have a duty to die.
"I am fairly sure that the young generation and the baby boomers are going to demand more control over life and death," said Lamm. "I think they're going to demand physician-assisted suicide. We have some of these ethical issues that lie in our future, and we just have no idea of how tough they're going to be."
I don't have all the answers. I do have some sense of how tough these issues are and will increasingly be. I am concerned about the rights of the disabled and incapacitated. I think a lethal injection or increasing doses of morphine is far more humane than starving people to death.
I hope people think of the costs of futile care. I hope people think of themselves as part of a great continuum and face the prospect of death bravely. I hope that people will decide for themselves and spare their families.
UPDATE: These women are yeoman - doing the research and finding the facts and not just spouting opinions. See What Bush Did in Texas by the Anchoress and Katherine Lopez at the Corner
I have written in the past about living wills Is the Living Will Dead?
1.Most people don't really know what they want, apart from the general statement that they don't want to live like a vegetable.
2.People can't articulate what they want, apart from the general statement that they don't want to live like a vegetable.
3. Living wills often can't be found. It's a long way from executing a living will to getting it on the hospital charts.
James Q. Wilson points out the problem in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription only)
[S]cholars have shown that we have greatly exaggerated the benefits of living wills. Studies by University of Michigan Professor Carl Schneider and others have shown that living wills rarely make any difference. People with them are likely to get exactly the same treatment as people without them, possibly because doctors and family members ignore the wills. And ignoring them is often the right thing to do because it is virtually impossible to write a living will that anticipates and makes decisions about all of the many, complicated, and hard to foresee illnesses you may face.
We both come to the same conclusion. You are far better off with a health care proxy or durable power of attorney for health care that authorizes one person you know and trust to make the end-of-life decisions for you.
The most difficult decision is who do you want to make those decisions. It doesn't have to be a relative. Pick one person and an alternate in case the person you've chosen can't serve. You want to avoid family fights, so don't pick a committee. It's simple, straightfoward and not expensive. You don't have to anticipate every possible circumstance which you can't in event. You just have to choose one person you trust.
Get thee to thy lawyer.
Imagine Terri were your sister, your daughter, your aunt. Could you bear it knowing that she would be starved to death over a period of two weeks.
When her attorney Barbara Weller told Terri what was happening, that the Judge had ordered the removal of her feeding tube, "Terri cried and could not be quieted"
Peggy Noonan writes a special piece, If Terri Schiavo is killed, Republicans will pay a political price.
There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live. Their reasoning, ultimately, is this: Be on the side of life.
.....
On the other side of this debate, one would assume there is an equally well organized and passionate group of organizations deeply committed to removing Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. But that's not true. There's just about no one on the other side. Or rather there is one person, a disaffected husband who insists Terri once told him she didn't want to be kept alive by extraordinary measures.
He has fought the battle to kill her with a determination that at this point seems not single-minded or passionate but strange. His former wife's parents and family are eager to care for her and do care for her, every day. He doesn't have to do a thing. His wife is not kept alive by extraordinary measures--she breathes on her own, is not on a respirator. All she needs to continue existing--and to continue being alive so that life can produce whatever miracle it may produce--is a feeding tube.
But in the end, it comes down to this: Why kill her? What is gained? What is good about it?
This case is being too quickly labeled as a conservative issue, which it is not. It is a very difficult case that will impact all families who have a loved one who did not leave a written directive and who will die if a feeding tube is removed.
Most families in these agonizing situations will grapple and find some sort of resolution but not without a lot of pain and agonizing. Some families will be split irrevocably.
Of course, the biggest lesson here is that every adult should have advance medical directives or a health care proxy.
The most difficult area, the grey area is when families are split. When one side wants to "do everything they can" and the other wants to "let them go" and there is no medical directive.
Except in this case, "letting Terri go" requires her to be starved to death. She is alive, conscious, interacts with her family and the people around her, requires no life support and is not brain dead in any way. We don't allow dogs, convicted murderers or terrorists to be starved to death. Why ever should we countenance starvation of an innocent woman.
Katherine Lopez writes
A lot of folks who consider themselves "pro-life"--get worked up about abortion--want Schiavo protected. Those who are indifferent to or support legal abortion aren't particularly interested in hearing about the case--or assume her husband knows best.
I think the key in this case are these fact questions. This woman has not gotten a fair shake in the judicial process. And medically, she may not have gotten what she could--like the chance at rehab. If more people knew some of these basic facts of unfairness, and could see some of these videos ..., I think this "issue" would transcend labels and things.
You would think that having your own blog means that you can post your own comments. But not so, it was rejected for "questionable content."!
So here is my fairly long response to "Buckhead" whose comments you can read at One Settlement, Another Judicial Homicide.
I disagree. We do not execute murderers without due process. What we are facing with Terri is judicial homicide without due process. I believe that the courts must allow due process when it comes to withholding food or water from a patient who is not terminal and who has not left a written directive. 17 doctors have filed affidavits saying that Terri is not even in a persistent vegetative state. I do not believe that a conscious, but disabled woman should be allowed to starve to death, an action which amounts to torture.
Of course, people should have the right to refuse medical care. It's the family first or one member of that family and not the courts who decide to do when a medical directive is lacking. Power has never been extended to courts to decide for themselves who lives and who dies. What they do is rule in favor, Here we have a spouse who has a severe conflict of interest and has not complied with state law regarding his guardianship of Terri. When a guardian is a guardian only because of a default provision under state law, great care must be taken if there is an apparent conflict of interest especially when the rest of the family disagrees and has brought judicial proceedings contesting the default guardianship.
Habeas corpus protection is guaranteed under the US constitution and there is a settled body of law that allows federal courts to review whether state court proceedings have violated a person’s
rights under the 14th amendment No State ... shall deprive any person of life ... without due process of law...nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. I believe that habeas corpus protection should be extended to those whose life support may be withdrawn pursuant to court order. Such an extension of habeas corpus protection will allow federal courts to review state family and probate court rulings where judges have extraordinary powers and discretion. I support the proposed Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act recently introduced in Congress.
There must be some collateral review of state court proceedings, particularly in cases like these where the judge’s conduct is so outrageous that people are now calling for his impeachment. The realities of life in the 21st century are that such situations will arise often. Terri Schiavo is a landmark case because she stands for all profoundly disabled people and for the millions of Americans who will get sick without ever executing an advance medical directive or appointing a health care agent.
Financial Advisor News has a short article about Dealing with procrastinating clients. Seems as if their high net worth clients put off making major financial decisions - especially when it comes to estate planning - for as long as nine or ten years, a major problem for financial planners.
Motivating clients to do what everyone should do is their biggest challenge. So why do people procrastinate? Yes, they're busy and yes they have limited time. Who doesn't?
Dealing with the fact of mortality is very difficult for some people. For high net worth people ceding control of a business they started and grown can be "shocking" says Richard Peterson, a managing partner at Market Psychology Consulting in San Francisco. Some people identify themselves with their wealth and the idea of giving it up can be akin to losing their identity.
Peterson puts his clients at ease by talking about their legacies, what they want to leave to the world.
Fear of death is so uncomfortable, many people can't even begin to think about what they will leave behind. The only way to face fear is with courage. And courage means action of some sort. The real antidote to fear is love. The medieval mystic Meister Eickhart wrote a poem that included the thought, If you are afraid, imagine holding the hand of a small child and then you will become brave. You protect your family and you protect the young. People who love their families, who love themselves, have the self-regard and self-worth to plan for what is, after all, inevitable.
Financial advisors often talk only about the money that can be saved on taxes when they discuss estate planning, when that's not what people are concerned about.
Unpleasant as the task may seem to some clients, neglecting to put one in place could end up being even worse. It could unintentionally hurt survivors financially and emotionally, costing millions of dollars in taxes, leaving assets tied up, putting a business at risk or inadvertently shortchanging some heirs.
People are concerned about their legacies, their reputation, their families. No one really wants to leave this world leaving a mess behind and their families and employees angry and upset. Financial planners should be asking their procrastinating clients what really matters. You do what really matters first.
I was unprepared at the power of disability advocates who speak from the authority of their own experience to say they are not dead yet . They are leading a resistance and opposition to those who too blithely dismiss life in a wheelchair, or blind, or brain-damaged as not worth living.
Maybe this is the beginning of a real debate in America's marketplace of ideas over the value of a human life and it's taking place in the context of the Oscar win of Million Dollar Baby (M$B) and in the case of Terry Schiavo.
Here are what some cripples say about Million Dollar Baby with its "better dead than disabled" message.
John Hockenberry asks whether suicide is the only option available to someone with a spinal cord injury and are they going to tell that to the wounded soldiers at Walter Reed hospital.
Mary Johnson says don't confuse the disability rights opposition with either conservatives or the Christian right, don't dismiss it as part of the left-right culture debate and don't ignore it.
Diane Coleman, an attorney in a wheelchair, wished she had brought a sign to M$B saying, "I Am Not Better Off Dead."
Disability advocates are shocked by Judge Greer's recent order which they call an order of execution because it requires Michael Schiavo to begin starving and dehydrating Terri Schiavo on March 18, 2005 absent a stay from the appellate courts.
"Ordered and Adjudged that absent a stay from the appellate courts, the guardian, Michael Schiavo, shall cause the removal of nutrition and hydration from the ward, Theresa Marie Schiavo, at 1:00 pm on Friday, March 18, 2005."
Disclosure: I've not yet seen Million Dollar Baby and plan to do so; I have a disabled sister; I've great admiration for Clint Eastwood; and I believe that we all have the right to forego extraordinary means to keep us alive if we have executed a proper health care proxy or living will. I'm not against the right to die, I am against euthanasia and murder. I am for the right to live for the old, the retarded and the disabled. Inconvenience, unattractiveness, and expense are not reasons to put them to death.
UPDATE: Wesley Smith writes about the Million Dollar Missed Opportunity Clint Eastwood missed.
[T]he bigger sin of the movie is its peddling of dangerous ignorance. For example, the movie depicts Maggie as a mere slave to medical protocols. In reality, she would have had the legal right to refuse medical treatment--even if it meant that she would die. Thus, she could have ordered her respirator turned off. Indeed, given today's increasing utilitarianist tendencies in health care, bioethicists, social workers, and doctors involved with her care might well have repeatedly reminded her of that fact (hint, hint).
Secondly, while it is true that many people who become quadriplegic later in life become very depressed and suicidal--like Maggie in the movie--studies show that such existential despair is not usually permanent. Indeed, one medical report published several years ago found that the level of depression in people disabled later in life to be no different five years post-injury than that found among the able bodied. Moreover, people suffering the emotional agony that Maggie experienced in the film can be treated for their depression and their suicides prevented--without being force-sedated.
The most important point omitted from the film is that people with quadriplegia, when they are not merely warehoused in a nursing home, live very rich and satisfying lives. That Eastwood never seems to have given this matter any thought is odd, given that Christopher Reeve demonstrated famously that becoming quadriplegic does not mean that meaningful life ends. Similarly, Joni Erickson Tada became a world famous artist, disability rights activist, and Christian apologist after becoming near-quadriplegic. Meanwhile, every day tens of thousands of our disabled brothers and sisters lead meritorious and productive lives, aided by respirators and wheelchairs that come to be seen not as dignity-robbing impediments, but facilitators and tools of independent living.
UPDATE 2 I failed to say that YOU have the responsibility to execute a health care proxy and appoint someone you trust to make the life and death decisions in the event you cannot. No one else can do it for you. I wish Terry Schiavo had done so.
UPDATE 3 Gerald Vanderleun writes on The Passion of the Pope about what we are learning from the Pope as he shows us how to die.
The failure to execute a health care proxy, a simple thing to do, can break families apart, cause long-lasting feuds, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, involve legal wrangles that last for years and mean quite literally the difference between life and death.
Without a health care proxy designating someone you trust to make life and death decisions for you, you may be done in by someone, like a disgruntled spouse, who looks forward to your death as a way of inheriting your money.
That's what's happening to Terri Schiavo in what most of the media refer to as a right-to-die case, like the Karen Quinlan case. To me, it is more a right-to-live case. It shows, in all its legal twists and tangles, just who realizes what a terrible precedent this case sets. I tremble at the anxiety the infirm, disabled and elderly must feel as they follow what happens to Terri. We have reached the line between letting people die naturally and killing them.
Terry has severe brain damage since suffering cardiac arrest in 1990. Michael Schiavo, as her husband, is the default person under Florida law, absent a written health care proxy, to decide what his wife would have wanted. He insists that Terry never wanted to live as a "vegetable", in the state she now is in. He wants the feeding tubes removed so that she can die slowly by starvation. There is no corroborative evidence concerning Terri's wishes. Since Terri was considering divorce before her cardiac arrest, since a bone scan in 1991 show numerous injuries including a head injury suggestive of a history of physical abuse before and perhaps after her cardiac arrest, since Michael has moved in with his mistress by whom he has two children, Michael's motives in wanting to disconnect the feeding tubes are suspect.
Nor is Terri in a persistent vegetative state. She is not hooked up to any life support equipment. She is alert, makes direct eye contact with visitors, and responds to and interacts with her parents and others. Because she can not swallow, she does require feeding and hydration tubes. Twelve doctors have testified in court that Terri is not in a persistent vegetative state and with proper therapy could improve significantly, be taught to speak and learn to eat food again
After Terry's cardiac arrest, her husband won an award for medical malpractice amounting to over $2 million which he stands to inherit if she dies. He will receive nothing if he divorces her.
Although he swore under oath at trial in 1992 that he would take care of his wife for the rest of her life, once he received the settlement totaling some $1.7 million, he ordered all rehabilitative services for her be stopped
Heidi Law, a certified nursing assistant who took care of Terri in 1997 sworn in an affidavit:
• Terri has spoken words, 'Hi', 'Momma', and 'Help Me'.
• Terri, was often in a "cold sweat" and silent for hours after visits by her husband
• Terri was denied rehabilitation by her husband who intimidated staff at the nursing home.
• Michael limited the radio stations Terri could listen to only one.
• Terri would chuckle or laugh as she listened to stories.
• Terri adored baths, having her hair combed, enjoyed sweet-smelling lotions and soft nightgowns.
• It was obvious that her mother was Terri's favorite person in the whole world.
Terry's parents have been utterly devoted to her and want to take care of her for the rest of her natural life. Since 1993, Michael Schiavo has ordered information about her condition to be withheld from her family, according to her brother who also says,
When we visit with Terri she is always happy to see us. She lights up when she hears my mom's voice, beginning with a huge grin and laugh, then by trying so hard to talk. No doctor in the world can ever convince my family that Terri isn't resonding to us when we visit her and that Terri isn't trying to communicate with us. It is sad that we are unable to understand what she is trying to say as she desperately needs speech therapy. She has not had any speech therapy in over twelve years. She usually gets tired and then just listens as we tell her about the latest family events. She sometimes cries when we say we are leaving.
Who decides whether Terri lives or dies? Her husband who wants her to die, her parents who want her to live or the judge who is also acting as Terri's guardian ad litem is ruling for the husband.
Terri is not brain dead, she is not on life support, so pulling the plug is not an option. She is not a terminal cancer patient, weak and gaunt. She lives brain-damaged in a healthy body and weighs 138 pounds. If her feeding tubes are removed, Terri faces a slow, extended death of starvation. Starvation to kill people was used in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka and in the countless Stalinist gulags.
We don't allow people to starve dogs. Or convicted felons on death row. Why would we allow a vulnerable person to be deliberately starved when her parents and siblings want to take care of her?
Will her family be allowed to see Terri as she is starved which might take two weeks?
Is this not torture of the cruelest kind? By what authority does any U.S. Court have to allow this?
Convicted murderers who are sentenced to death, have years to make legal appeals, and, if their sentence is affirmed, get lethal gas that kills them real quick in the end. For the love of God or the love of humanity, if Terri is to die legally, can't it be done more mercifully.
I had written this post before I came across "What if This was Our Daughter or Sister or Wife? What If It Was 'Only' A Stranger's Life which details far better the background with links to court affidavits. I can only echo Donald Hawthorne's conclusion.
As observers from afar, we cannot independently confirm the veracity of all of the information described above. But reasonable people must admit that the information pattern raises enough material questions about the behavior of Terri’s husband and the judge to have concerns.
And that leads us back to the more fundamental question about what value we will place on human life, including that of an ill woman. If we begin to say it is okay to kill off "weak" human beings, think where that will take us over time. It will take us to a place where certain people will seek to play "God" so they can set the criteria for who lives and who dies. Why not then an elderly parent or a young child, should either become a financial or emotional burden? The freedom to do such great evil will only invite more profound evil over time.
Holocausts do not begin with operational concentration camps; they start on a smaller scale and steadily break down our resistance while many people plead that they are "too busy" to pay attention and get involved.
The stakes are enormous here and there is no neutral ground. Not to decide is to decide. The fight for Terri’s life is another battle to determine whether we are to live in a culture of life or a culture of death.
More Links
Terry Schindler-Schiavo Foundation to see documents, the latest information and videos of Terri. With so much demand on this website, it may be down or slow to load.
Hospice Patients Alliance has many of the documents online as well
John Grogan, a newspaper columnist changes his mind
Blogs that are following the Terri Schiavo case
Blogs for Terri has an aggregator, a growing blogroll of supporters and copies of documents and affidavits
Interview of Bobbi Schindler, her brother on February 18, 2005
A certain slant of light
Anchor Rising
The Anchoress
UPDATE: Settlement offer rejected
I just learned that Terri's parents sent a letter to Michael Schiavo in October, 2004 in which they offer to
Michael has refused the settlement. Apparently, nothing less than Terri's death will satisfy him.
UPDATE -2 -Status Feb 25
Judge Greer has ruled that the husband may remove the feeding tube on March 18. The New York Times reports.
He is "no longer comfortable" granting stays. He said that the Schindlers would have to take any further motions to appellate courts before March 18, the date he chose "so that last rites and other similar matters can be addressed in an orderly manner."
UPDATE -3 -What death by starvation is like
Dr. William Burke, a neurologist in St. Louis describes the process: "A conscious person would feel it [dehydration] just as you and I would. They will go into seizures. Their skin cracks, their tongue cracks, their lips crack. They may have nosebleeds because of the drying of the mucous membranes, and heaving and vomiting might ensue because of the drying out of the stomach lining . . . death by dehydration takes 10 to 14 days. It is an extremely agonizing death."
Joan Kennedy's three children sought and were granted legal control of her day-to-day affairs last spring amid her continued struggle with alcoholism
reports the Boston Globe after her son U.S. Representative Patrick Kennedy revealed the legal steps taken yesterday in a statement issued on behalf of all three children.
My brother, sister and I love our mother very much," Patrick Kennedy, 37, said in a statement issued on behalf of him, his 43-year-old brother, Edward Kennedy Jr., and his sister, Kara Kennedy Allen, 44.
''She has done so much for us throughout our lives, and we will take whatever steps necessary to ensure she gets the medical treatment and care she needs and deserves. Families across this country struggle to make decisions for the long-term care of their parents each and every day. These decisions are never easy, and in our case, all too early in our mother's life. . . . We will continue to do whatever is necessary to protect our mother and make certain she receives the necessary treatment for her disease, and hope that others will join us in praying for her well-being," the statement said.
I never cease to be amazed at the variety of burial and cremation choices now available for aging boomers as they plan their last wave out.
I've already written about creative cremains, fantasy coffins, rocket rides for remains to rest in space, green burials, dust to mulch, and in boomer remains how diamonds are forever, silk urns get through airport security, and the promessa process to turn your body into compost.
But I never knew about harleycaskets where you can choose the "custom casket built for bikers" with a velvet interior and custom "highway to heaven panel and decals"
Or the DNA Genome Vault to preserve your genetic strands inside a miniature pyramid with a 3-D memorial bust on the top.
Golfers - and some golf widows - should know that cremated remains can be poured down one of two putting-green holes that lead into two large ossuraries or containers, underneath the putting green for eternity on the greens at Catawba Memorial Park in North Carolina.
If you love parties and fireworks, why not go out with a bang with the help of Angels Flight for a "scattering from within a beautiful fireworks display".
The Eternal Ascent Company is offering franchise opportunities to join their growing business - and the patented process of sending cremated remains on their "final flight to the heavens in a giant balloon."
If you want to make a statement and an environmental tribute at the same time, consider Sea Services for burial in a bio-degradable "Ocean Urn that gently cradles remains at the ocean's depths than safely dissolves".
Sea lovers or scuba divers might really like the idea of eternal reefs where your ashes are mixed with concrete and buried at sea, part of an artificial reef where you sleep forever with the fishes.
Or, in Italian style, you can become one with nature again, buried in Mother Earth, naked and in the fetal position, all tight and cozy in a biodegradable pod from capsulamundi with a tree planted as your marker.
And this is only the beginning of the Long GoodBye.
UPDATE: Just one day after I posted this, I learn that Hunter Thompson is going to have his remains fired from a cannon.
If you hear of any more, let me know.
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When I was in law school, the rule against perpetuities was something everyone had to learn and had to explain. Think of it as a rule against dynasties, against a family or a group maintaining economic power for several generations.
The rule against perpetuities comes from the common law and prevents property from being held perpetually in trust by voiding any agreement (which varies from state to state) which does not end twenty one years after a life in being, or one generation from lives presently in being plus twenty-one years.
When trusts were drafted back in my early days of practice, they would end twenty one years upon the death of the youngest grandchild or Carolyn Kennedy, both then lives in being.
The rule against perpetuities is now being flagrantly flouted. Thanks to the Wall Street Journal research, I learned that in Alaska and South Dakota, trusts can last forever; in Delaware, most trusts can last forever but real estate can be held in trust for only 110 years; in Wyoming, trusts can last for 1000 years, and in Florida, trusts can last for 360 years. These states are particularly egregious because they don't impose income taxes on trusts created by or for nonresidents. Some fifteen other states have changed the rule against perpetuities and permit dynasty trusts which last forever or for hundreds of years. You don't have to be a resident of the state to take advantage, so long as a trustee is located there.
The result could easily be predicted. The Wall Street Journal reports that $100 billion in assets has flown into personal trusts in those states. The bank and trust companies managing the trusts and holding the assets have collected about $1 billion in annual trustee fees. Families can avoid all federal estate and generation skipping taxes FOREVER under the current federal tax laws. With such trusts, people can protect their assets against bankruptcy, divorce, lawsuits and other creditors. Some estate planners are urging their clients to fund their dynasty trusts now.
Hats off to the research by Robert Sitkoff and Max Schanzenbach at the Northwestern University School of Law and to Rachel Emma Silverman who reported for the Wall Street Journal.
If Congress doesn't do something, we can look forward to more and more of the nation's wealth and economic power concentrated in the hands of bank and trust companies. This is not the recipe for a future great society. I have seen the disastrous effects that great inherited wealth has on too many people who struggle to find a purpose in their lives.
With the nation debating how to protect and fund social security for the future economic health of all Americans, nothing seems more repellent and un-American than the rush by those wealthy and socially unconscious to set up their own economic dynasties and avoid all taxes in doing so. Dynasty trusts are the opposite of great legacies.
UPDATE: While I believe that trusts can be a good vehicle to pass on wealth to people that you know like your children and grandchildren which are the lives in being the Rule of Perpetuities envisioned, trusts that last beyond that time are vehicles to perpetuate the accumulation and protection of wealth for bloodlines forever, a perpetual oligarchy that's antithetical to the American dream.
If you knew that your body after your death could save two people's lives would you sign an organ donor card? Think of the happiness and gratitude of the families
Maxine Walters did. Well, she didn't sign an organ donor card, but she told her long term partner while watching the news of the tsunami in South Asia, "You see all them people dying? If anything happens to me, you should help them."
Maxine came from Barbados to New York City eight years ago and died of a sudden stroke at age 44.
Fortunately, her children understood what their mother and gave permission to harvest the organs.
In addition to the small acts of charity that seem easier to recall in sadness, her family said, Ms. Watson subscribed to the broad view that each person had an obligation to his or her neighbor. In her native country, Barbados, that was just the way of things. "Everyone from Barbados is family to one another," said her sister, Pauline Ellington.
Read the whole story, Linked Forever by the Ultimate Gift
Some people fight to be born and some fight to wake up, both to ponder if you are responsible for making life and death decisions for another person.
This baby survived three abortions, was born alive at 24 weeks in a case documented in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
She claimed she had been told that an ultrasound scan had confirmed the child was dead - but shortly afterwards she went into labour.
The 24-year-old mum - who has not been named - changed her mind about wanting to keep the baby after she felt him move on her way home.
Her son is now two years old and is the first long-term abortion survivor to have been born so prematurely.
This woman awoke from a 20 year coma.
"Hi mum," she said to her mother.
The words were a shock and a joy for Scantlin's parents.
"There's just no words," mother Betsy Scantlin told a CBS television news show. "I've just laughed ever since because it's just so amazing."
And this woman emerged from a six week coma to be told that she had been stricken with meningitis and cancer ----and that she had given birth to a baby girl!
A Connecticut woman who was artificially inseminated with the wrong sperm gave birth to a healthy baby boy in January. While the woman and her fiance are African American, the sperm belonged to a white man. DNA tests are underway to confirm the child's paternity.
Her doctor tried to convince her to terminate the pregnancy, but the woman refused. believing this may be her last chance at motherhood. She said, "The race is unimportant and I want this child to be happy and I want this child to grow and feel complete and whole."
While the lawyer from the infertility clinic was not available for comment, her lawyer said, "While she's thrilled to have this baby, this error has made her life much more complicated."
I'll say. Like who's responsible for child support.
A clearinghouse of legal and medical bioethical news and opinion, the Australasian Bioethics Information (ABI) is a rich source for finding out current stories that illustrate complex bioethical questions. We will all face some of these issues. Legal and health professionals will see a lot more of them in the coming years.(I'm having trouble creating a working link so here's the url to cut and paste. http://www.australasianbioethics.org/Newsletters/currentbioedge.html#lisbon )
Take a look at the sampling of stories in just one week's newsletter. You must remember you're not reading crazy stories from the News of the World or the Onion, but from a respectable newsletter. It just shows you how far we've come into an unimaginable future, how close we are to the bioedge.
UPDATE: The 67 year old Romanian woman, Adriana IIiescu gave birth to twin girls today. One died shortly afterwards, the other is in good health
You don't often see ads for mortuaries except for discreet ads in the obituary pages. That's about to change. Boomers want funerals to be more about their lives and they are not alone in their interest in personalizing funerals.
That will likely change as the interest in personalizing funerals continues to grow. Baby boomers are saying they want the funeral industry to be more about their lives.
Kristi Arellano reported in the Denver Post (sorry link expired)
Denver's Fairmount Cemetery & Mortuary has launched a billboard and print campaign featuring black-and-white photographs of smiling people accompanied by epitaphs such as "Walked on all seven continents" and "Put six kids through college."
The tagline: "Celebrating lives well lived."
The aim of the ads is to bring Fairmount to the forefront of people's minds when they find themselves planning a funeral and secondly, to encourage funeral planning.
Can't argue with that, but what about lives not so well lived.
via Jim Treacher
“If you want to be dead-sure to get the last word, pen your own obituary.” writes Gayle Ronan Sims at the Philadelphia Inquirer
Another thing to add to my growing list.
Funeral directors, hospice workers, ministers and newspapers say they're seeing an increase in self-written obituaries, which are making their way into the organized person's "important papers" files, along with burial plans and wills.
Many people are finding that writing their own obituaries can be an inspiring experience, bringing families together. And getting their names and stories published - for most people, for the first and only time - is a commitment to posterity.
"People planning their funerals often include self-written obituaries," said Julian Weinstein, corporate secretary of Goldsteins' Rosenberg's Raphael-Sacks, a Philadelphia funeral home. "They want a memorial to themselves, and they want the facts straight."
The tombstone of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, at Arlington Cemetery lists his military service first before his tenure as U.S. Supreme Court Justice, probably so his wife could be buried there as well, or so he wrote to his friend Harold Lasky.
I have a lovely spot in Arlington toward the bottom of the hill where the house is, with pine trees, oak, and tulip all about, and where one looks to see a deer trot out (although of course there are no deer). I have ordered a stone of the form conventional for officers which will bear my name, Bvt. Col. and Capt. 20th Mass. Vol. Inf. Civil War- Justice Supreme Court, U.S.-March 1841- His wife Fanny Holmes and the dates. It seemed queer putting up my own tombstone-but these things are under military direction and I suppose it was necessary to show a soldiers' name to account for my wife"
In a letter to another friend, Holmes writes about the unknown bones collected from Civil War battlefields.
I shall go out to Arlington tomorrow, Memorial Day, and visit the gravestone with my name and my wife's on it, and be stirred by the military music, and, instead of bothering about the Unknown Soldier shall go to another stone that tells beneath it are the bones of, I dont remember the number but two or three thousand and odd, once soldiers gathered from the Virginia fields after the Civil War. I heard a woman say there once, 'They gave their all. They gave their very names.' Later perhaps some people will come in to say goodbye."
A good photograph of his tombstone can be seen at this link from findagrave.com
An interesting discussion at A Stich in Haste over whether survivors should have legal access to email. In Michigan, the family of 20 year-old Justin Ellsworth, a soldier killed in Iraq, is trying to persuade Yahoo! to give them access to his email account. So far, Yahoo! is standing by its policy of protecting the privacy of its subscribers.
I had never heard of "sweepers", friends of dying AIDS patients who were designated "when the time came" to
go through the dead friend's apartment and "sanitize" it (i.e., clean out the porn and other things best unseen by grieving parents). Today I'm sure such practices would often include email passwords with instructions to wipe out potentially embarrassing emails and cyber-accounts.
KipEsquire asks:
How can Justin Ellsworth's parents be so sure that they will want to see those emails? More importantly, how can they be sure Justin wanted it? My heart goes out to Mr. and Mrs. Ellsworth, as it does for all those who have lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else. But I would give them a somber warning: Be careful what you sue for...you might get it.
This is going to become more and more of an issue in the years to come. Which is why everyone should leave a letter to their executor saying explicitly just what they want people to have access to, and, if they want, the passwords. Unless permission is explicitly given, the deceased's privacy should be respected. You don't read other people's mail. Period.
Bill DiPasquale locked himself into his apartment and drank himself into a coma after losing his job as waiter. After his family pulled the plug on life support, a friend whispered a message from his boss in his ear,
"Get your ass back to work"
Five minutes later, in a whisper that hit a Massachusetts General Hospital room like a thunderbolt, DiPasquale awoke saying, "I've got to get to work.'' His would-be mourners were stunned. The coma had broken. They were his first words in weeks.
Read the full story in the Boston Herald Wake-up call stops waiter at death's door.
This is what happens when you don't let your heirs know where everything is. You want to let someone know you've hidden more than $200,000 in the wall. Otherwise it just becomes part of the 400 billion dollars in unclaimed money in the United States.
Carolyn Said, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicleexamines the history behind a California class-action suit against those insurance companies who use estate-planning sessions to sell annuities to seniors.
Charlotte Cook found out something startling after her East Sacramento neighbor of 20 years, Leo Travis, died. She discovered that her friend, a frail, almost-blind man with severe emphysema, had cashed in his life savings in his final months to purchase annuities that wouldn't mature until he was 98.
Cook was furious. "He would have had to pay major fines to get his money back out should he have needed hospitalization or to go into a skilled nursing facility. He had no liquid capital left," she said.
That's why Cook, as the executor of Travis' estate, joined with two seniors who were sold similar products and two advocacy organizations for seniors in a class-action lawsuit against insurance companies and living-trust companies that market to elderly people. It is the largest case of its kind in California......
The lawsuit, filed late last month in San Francisco Superior Court, charges that the companies sponsor free estate-planning seminars for seniors as a way "to learn about the senior's assets and manipulate them into purchasing manifestly inappropriate financial investments for seniors, namely annuities."
Two companies named as defendants in the suit -- Estate Preservation Inc. of El Segundo (Los Angeles County) and Ameri-Estate Legal Plan Inc. of Irvine (Orange County) -- said they had done nothing illegal or unethical.
Two other defendants, American Investors Life Insurance Co. in Topeka, Kan., and American Equity Investment Life Insurance Co. in Des Moines, Iowa, said they had no comment. Another defendant, Gentry Group of Dallas, did not return phone calls.
"There's nothing wrong with a living trust," said Louise Renne, former San Francisco city attorney and now a partner with Renne Sloan Holtzman & Sakai, representing the plaintiffs in the case. "But there certainly is something wrong when a living-trust seminar or mill is used as a way to gather information about a senior's assets and then sell them an annuity."
Financial planners say annuities are a poor investment choice for people over 65 because they generally have long maturation periods and severe penalties for early withdrawal. Sometimes they even have substantial surrender charges if the owner dies before a certain age.
But they are lucrative for the insurance agents who sell them. According to FundAdvice.com, typical annuity commissions are from 5 to 5.5 percent of the money invested, with some agents collecting commissions of up to 14 percent.
It seems as if estate planning simply doesn't fit the large-firm business model. Deborah Jacobs explores why in "Scaling Down" in Bloomberg's Wealth Manager, the June 04 issue which unfortunately is not online. As top lawyers leave mammoth firms to open their own estate-planning boutiques, they not only find a better lifestyle and more flexibility, they no longer have to compete for partnership shares with high-flying litigators.
Boutique firms offer several advantages. They are more welcoming of smaller estates, they often have a sharper focus and a lower overhead. Since they are not looking for business other than estate planning, they are more open to strategic alliances with other professionals: teams of professionals each with unique areas of expertise who work together on a particular project for their mutual client.
In England, the beneficiary of a 95 year old woman, found that much of her inheritance had been spent by the widow's hairdresser who had been trusted with her financial affairs.
COLUMBUS - The estates of some elderly people, including those losing their mental abilities, could be depleted by caregivers who abuse a powerful legal tool giving them control over the person's checkbook, home and other assets.
State law requires no oversight when someone is granted power of attorney. The forms are available at libraries and on the Internet. No one keeps track of the agreements, and no one ensures the senior is competent to sign over control.
"It can be a license to steal," Franklin County Probate Judge Lawrence A. Belskis said. "When you give somebody a power of attorney, you are giving that person the right to do anything you could do yourself."
The lack of oversight isn't harmful if the person chosen has "a good heart and good intentions," said Diana Kubovcik, director of client services for the Central Ohio Area Agency on Aging.
"But those same powers can be misused, with potentially horrific results," she said.
The same thing can happen with a court-approved guardian, who has even more power, such as where the person lives or whether to approve medical treatment. There is more court oversight in such cases, but there are many guardianships to keep track of: 7,000 in Franklin County alone.
The person might gain the financial power after being hired to provide full-time home health care, said Sally Hurme, a lawyer with AARP's national office in Washington.
"We frequently hear stories of frail older women who hire attendants who isolate them from loved ones so their very survival depends upon them," Hurme said. "In no time, the attendant controls what the older woman eats, when she goes out and whether she gets the medical care she needs."
Of the 161 complaints received last year by the Ohio Department of Aging, 100 were determined legitimate, said Beverley Laubert, long-term-care ombudsman. Of those, 73 were resolved or partly resolved, four couldn't be reconciled and 23 were withdrawn.
Few people are prepared to deal with some of the terrible decisions they will have to make. The New York Times today called it "The Ultimate Family Quarrel" How do adult children decide whether a parent lives or dies when faced with a crisis like Geraldine Reardon's. A terrible situation that more and more of us will face.
Just when a family should be coming together, supporting each other with full hearts, disagreements about what to do and what Mom or Dad would want because of the lack of a health care proxy can split families totally.
This inevitably exposes or creates family conflicts, which then make urgent medical decisions even more difficult, a wrenching cycle that can tear families apart. In addition, doctors often disagree about how to treat such patients, and living wills often fail to resolve critical questions.
"Every hospital in the country has families going through this all the time now," said Dr. Erik Steele, vice president for patient care services at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, where a recent case involved four siblings so divided over whether to keep their 88-year-old mother alive that they first put her on a respirator and then took her off it.
"This is going to be an issue more and more for us, and I think it's an issue almost unique to our generation," Dr. Steele said. "For the first time, we have this degree of technical ability to keep people alive without the ability to always restore them to good health. At the same time we have a much higher expectation of what health care can do." ------
While families often seem to pull together when dealing with treatable illnesses, they often splinter over an end-of-life decision, experts say. Old frictions surface and new ones form, based on family relationships and different ideas of what makes a life worth living. Living wills, advance directives and health care proxies are intended to resolve crucial questions about what a patient would want, but they often fall far short.
Such a life and death decision is fraught with the emotion of the circumstances and conscious and unconscious emotions of the children. While health care proxies are designed to deal with this situation, some try too much to control future medical decisions. I wrote about the recent study by the Hastings Center in Is the Living Will Dead?
A lawyer friend for whom I have a great deal of respect said the most important thing with health care proxies was to give one person the authority to make all medical decisions. The worst thing is not to have a health care proxy and to burden all the children with making such a terrible decision.
As financial services consolidate, trust managers come under fire reports the Wall Street Journal today.
The wave of consolidation in banks has reduced the estimated number of institutions offering trusts from 4000 to about 3000 in the last decade according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Company. At the same time the use of trusts for personal assets has soared, growing to $1.1 trillion in 2003 from $928 million in 2002 according to the VIP Forum, a research group in Washington, D.C. that tracks the wealth management industry.
"In trusts that's a particularly big issue, because relationships mean a lot," says Robert Wolf, an estate lawyer with Tener, Van Kirk, Wolf & Moore in Pittsburgh. "The word 'trust' kind of says it all. How can you have trust without relationships?" One of his clients, he says, has had 15 trust and investment officers in 16 years because of rapid turnover at the client's bank.
Big banks face more pressure "to sell the corporate product of the month," says Mike Carroll, president and chief executive of independent trust company Heritage Trust Co. in Oklahoma City. But, he says, it's a tough business for large institutions: "It's too time-consuming, too much touch, too much relationship-driven."
With trusts more prevalent -- and beneficiaries more financially savvy -- squabbles about trust funds have become common, especially since beneficiaries have little power to control trustees, say estate planners. One big problem: Many older trusts don't have clauses dictating how and when a trustee can be removed, making it tough to switch trustees without expensive litigation. In addition, the turbulence in recent years in the stock market has caused the value of many trust funds to plummet, brewing unease among beneficiaries.
The wave of consolidation in banks has reduced the estimated number of institutions offering trusts from 4000 to about 3000 in the last decade according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Company. At the same time the use of trusts for personal assets has soared, growing to $1.1 trillion in 2003 from $928 million in 2002 according to the VIP Forum, a research group in Washington, D.C. that tracks the wealth management industry.
"In trusts that's a particularly big issue, because relationships mean a lot," says Robert Wolf, an estate lawyer with Tener, Van Kirk, Wolf & Moore in Pittsburgh. "The word 'trust' kind of says it all. How can you have trust without relationships?" One of his clients, he says, has had 15 trust and investment officers in 16 years because of rapid turnover at the client's bank.
Unless you keep your affairs in order, and that is what EstateVaults™ will allow you to do, your family will have a terrible time finding out what's what and what's where and they will be "out of their wits with trouble" as Samuel Pepys was more than 400 years ago.
But above all, our trouble is to find that his estate appears nothing as we expected, and all the world believes; nor his papers so well sorted as I would have had them, but all in confusion, that break my brains to understand them. We missed also the surrenders of his copyhold land, without which the land would not come to us, but to the heir at law, so that what with this, and the badness of the drink and the ill opinion I have of the meat, and the biting of the gnats by night and my disappointment in getting home this week, and the trouble of sorting all the papers, I am almost out of my wits with trouble, only I appear the more contented, because I would not have my father troubled. The latter end of the week Mr. Philips comes home from London, and so we advised with him and have the best counsel he could give us, but for all that we were not quiet in our minds.
As one of the commentators to this entry wrote Dealing with an estate is a special kind of torture.
On the one hand, you’d like to sit the dearly departed down and let them have it for leaving their affairs in such terrible mess for you clean up when you’ve already got plenty to do in your own life thank you very much!!
On the other hand, you feel horribly guilty for thinking such things about someone who was so sick, and who cared enough about you to leave you part of their estate.
Tom Herman's Tax Report as usual as the scoop.
Suppose you want to give money to your kids. You can transfer assets into an intentionally defective irrevocable trust, or IDIT. Because of the trust's special nature, the income it generates is included on your personal income-tax return while you are alive, but its assets aren't included in your taxable estate, says Martin Nissenbaum of Ernst & Young. "This is a positive thing" if your goal is "to have as much money as possible go to your kids" or other heirs.
You "effectively wind up paying the kids' income tax on the trust income" without having to worry that the IRS will label that payment as a taxable gift to the kids, says Lawrence P. Katzenstein, a lawyer at Thompson Coburn LLP in St. Louis.
For more details, see IRS revenue ruling 2004-64, which generally confirms the strategy -- and the point that the payment of the income tax by the grantor doesn't create a taxable gift, Mr. Nissenbaum says.
Because of the trust's special nature, the income it generates is included on your personal income-tax return while you are alive, but its assets aren't included in your taxable estate, says Martin Nissenbaum of Ernst & Young.... For more details, see IRS revenue ruling 2004-64, which generally confirms the strategy -- and the point that the payment of the income tax by the grantor doesn't create a taxable gift, Mr. Nissenbaum says.
About 58% of adult Americans don't have a basic will. 69% don't have any sort of advance medical directives.
Why don't people make wills?
Myth and superstition
What's been your experience? Do you have any horror stories or good stories to encourage others to do the responsible thing?
Last week, I visited with Deborah Pechet Quinan, one of my favorite lawyers. An estate planner, Deborah believes in making it as easy as possible for her clients to understand complex documents by giving them easy to understand flow charts and fiduciary listings. Ive great respect for many lawyers - I should being one myself but Ive never liked the priestly nature of the profession and the I know more than you do attitude of too many lawyers. Of course, lawyers know more about the law, but that doesnt mean that they cant make their documents easier for their clients to understand and access essential information.
After telling me a story about a mother who couldnt see the medical records of her gravely injured 18 year old son because of medical privacy, Deborah now recommends a HIPAA Authorization as one of the standard documents for her clients.
Turns out that the federal privacy rules have put a shield around health-related information that can prevent advisors and family members from getting necessary facts, they used to be able to get quite easily. Overview Privacy
Since violators of medical privacy can be punished with civil and criminal penalities and even jail if the offenses are committed under false pretenses or with the intent to use the information for commercial or personal gain, doctors and covered entities have become quite wary about disclosing health information without clear authorization
Bound and Determined by Deborah Jacobs in the June issue of Bloomberg Wealth Manager lays out areas where the HIPAA shield can pose problems to existing estate planning documents. Without a HIPAA authorization, it may be difficult to establish incapacity. While durable powers of attorney are not affected, springing powers of attorney may be. So may be successor trustees for revocable living trusts.
While the person to whom you have given a health care proxy or health care power of attorney becomes a personal representative under HIPAA and entitled to the same rights to medical information as you, the patient, there are others whom you may want to have some access to your medical records even for a limited purpose such as proving incapacity. Charles Sabatino, a lawyer with the American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging in Washington, DC. is quoted as recommending that clients sign a HIPAA release that authorizes disclosure of specific health information to identified parties who may include family members, friends, lawyers, accountants and financial advisors.
A sample release form is available at the website of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys
So along with your toothbrush, when you go to the hospital remember to bring your signed release and your health care proxy.
At first controversial, then conventional, now promoted policy, living wills are something just about everyone believes in. Patients should be autonomous and no one wants to live like a vegetable. But they havent worked. Why?
The Hastings Center, an independent, nonpartisan bioethics research institute has published
Enough: The Failure of the Living Will in which Angela Fagerlin and Carl Schneider explore why.
1. Most people dont really know what they want, apart from the general statement I dont want to live like a vegetable Even patients making contemporary decisions about contemporary illnesses are regularly daunted by the decisions difficulty. How much harder, then, is it to conjure up preferences for an unspecifiable future confronted with unidentifiable maladies with unpredictable treatments.
2. People cant articulate what they will want, apart from the general statement I dont want to live like a vegetable. Most living wills are terribly drafted. Unlike property wills where lawyers have experimented with testamentary language for centuries in a process that have produced standard formulas with predictable meanings and default rules, living wills have only been around for a couple of decades and the swirl of approaches has been bewildering. Were living wills too general? Make them specific. Were they one size fits all Make them elaborate questionnaires. Were they uncritically signed? Require probing discussions between doctor and patient
3. They often cant be found. Its a long way from execting a living will to getting it onto hospital charts when the time comes. Where are they? Lost? Forgotten? In safety deposit boxes? With the lawyers? 62% of patients do not give their living wills to their physicians. Of those hospitalized with living wills, only 26% of their medical charts accurately recorded that information and only 16% of the charts contained the form.
The authors conclude "Our survey of the evidence suggests that living wills fail not for want of effort, or education or intelligence, or good will, but because of stubborn traits of human psychology and persistent features of social organization.We should repeal the PSDA( the federal Patient Self Determination Act ), which was passed with arrant and arrogant indifference to its effectiveness and its costs and which today imposed accumulating paperworok and administrative expense for paltry rewards
So What Should People Do?
Durable Powers of Attorney for Health Care or Health Care Proxies are the way to go for those who do want to control future medical decisions. They have many advantages over living wills. As these things go, they are simple, straightfoward, and thrifty. They differ little from current practice where family members act informally for incompetent patients and they probably improve decisions for patients since the surrogates know more at the time of decision than patients can know in advance.
Trust the people who love you to make decisions on your behalf. But empower them to do so m effectively. That means an executed health care proxy or durable power of attorney for health care and a HIPAA authorization so your loved ones can see your health care records if necessary, about which more later
I was surprised to learn in a recent WSJ article by Kaja Whitehouse(subscription required) that 20% of parents divide their estates unevenly according to Kathleen McCarry, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. About 1/4 of that 20% did so because they want to support a child who required greater financial assistance. Another quarter wanted to repay a child who helped support them in some way.
To prevent any will contests by disgruntled siblings, Whitehouse suggests