When Someone Dies: The Practical Guide to the Logistics of Death - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Scott Smith is a partner in Viant Capital, a San Francisco-based boutique investment bank and tech business incubator committed to providing emerging growth and small to mid-market companies with high quality strategic advisory and capital-raising services. When Someone Dies is his first book.

Michael Castleman has written more than 2,000 magazine and Web articles, four mystery novels, and thirteen nonfiction books in the fields of health and sexuality. During his thirty-five-year career as an award-winning journalist and novelist, his books have sold more than 2.5 million copies worldwide.

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When Someone Dies

Introduction

If you’re reading this book, someone you love has just died. We feel your pain. As you’ll read, I recently lost a loved one, and I’ve endured the grief that now consumes you. My heart breaks for you.

Grieving is a uniquely individual process. Don’t let anyone tell you what’s supposedly “normal” or the “best” way to grieve.

Most people find that grief is like swimming in the ocean. It comes in waves. One minute you feel fine, then the next you dissolve in tears. Ride the waves and try not to resist them. If you resist, just as if you swim against the current in the ocean, you might drown.

We urge you to explore all the emotions your grief raises—including relief, if that applies. We urge you to obtain all the emotional support you need—from friends, family, clergy, and perhaps a grief counselor and/or support group. We also urge you to read some of the many books on grieving. Our favorite is quite brief (only ninety pages) but remarkably profound—A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis.

But this is not a book about grief or grieving. Instead, this is a succinct, step-by-step guide to all the practical things you must do after someone dies to settle the person’s affairs as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. If you follow our advice, your life will be easier, the costs associated with the death will be much lower, and you’ll find that you and other grieving family members and friends will get along much better.

Of course, no one enjoys dealing with bureaucracies—funeral homes, banks, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Social Security, and so on. And it’s particularly alienating to have to do it now. But some decisions can’t wait, and if you’re the one dealing with the practicalities—the executor of the decedent’s estate—this book should lighten your burden.

How long does it take to deal with the practical details of death? Expect to spend a considerable amount of time and energy during the first thirty days and more over the next six months to a year. The process is challenging and potentially infuriating, but it’s important—and absolutely necessary. If you’re organized, if you follow the path we provide, it shouldn’t drive you crazy. It’s also part of the grieving process, an integral part of saying goodbye, tying up loose ends, and making peace with your loss.

I stumbled on the need for this book when my mother died in 2009. I’m an attorney. I’d dealt professionally with wills, trusts, and estates, and I knew my mother’s affairs were in reasonably good order. I thought—naïvely, it turned out—that dealing with the practical issues surrounding her death would take only a few days. I was so wrong. It took two years, and I made several costly mistakes because I didn’t have a guide like this one. I thought no one should have to go through what I endured—and if you follow the step-by-step program we’ve outlined, you won’t.

My Mother’s Death

I want to share some details of my mother’s death because they provide a context for this book. When someone dies, people imagine the family coming together and drawing closer to say goodbye. But my family was torn apart. We fought and for a while became emotionally distant. All of the “issues” you’ve had with your loved one, siblings, and other relatives come to the fore, and like my sisters and me, you may revert to the family dynamics you experienced as children . . . even if you don’t want to.

My mother was eighty-five, healthy, and living independently in Santa Rosa, California, when she tripped and fell in a parking lot near her home, smashing her head on the pavement. My sister Tory was with her and immediately called 911. The paramedic said she was bleeding into her brain. The prognosis was grim.

Tory called me from the ambulance. I was at work in San Francisco, sixty miles to the south. My presence was especially urgent because I held my mother’s medical power of attorney (see page 135). I was the one who would have the final say on her medical decisions. I grabbed the file marked “Mom” and jumped into my car.

The emergency room doctor confirmed the paramedic’s diagnosis, bleeding into the brain. He determined that she had only a few hours to live.

“If she were young,” he explained, “we’d open her skull and drain the blood. We could do that for your mother, but at her age, the procedure could easily kill her. What do you want to do?”

I’d helped my mother draft a living will. In it, she’d included a do-not-resuscitate order (DNR), in which she’d stated unequivocally that she wanted no extraordinary measures taken to prolong her life. I informed the doctor, who said, “Fine.”

But just then, my mother suddenly regained consciousness and seemed remarkably lucid. (I learned later that among those with brain trauma, this happens fairly frequently.) The doctor spoke to Mom, explaining the situation, and asked her if she wanted surgery or no treatment.

Without hesitation, she replied, “Open me up! I don’t want to die!” Then she slipped out of consciousness into a coma-like sleep.

I was aghast. She’d overruled her living will—but was she competent to make the decision? My other sisters, Kim and Terry, arrived, and the four of us had no idea what to do.

Someone called the hospital’s medical ethicist—the patient ombudsman—who met us in the emergency room. She asked the doctor, “If you operate, what are her chances of returning to her previous quality of life?”

The doctor replied, “Near zero.” My siblings and I split two to two. One sister and I wanted to follow the living will’s instructions. The other two wanted surgery. But I held the power of attorney, so ultimately it was my decision. I decided against surgery, reminding everyone that Mom had emphatically said “no extraordinary measures.” That did not sit well with the two opposing sisters.

I felt awful. Our mother was critically injured and dying. I’d hoped the four of us would come to a consensus—but here we were seriously divided.

Then things got worse. Since I’d decided against surgery, the issue became how to make Mom comfortable. The doctor wanted to prescribe large doses of morphine because brain injuries like my mother’s cause excruciating pain. But Mom was drifting in and out of consciousness, and two sisters argued that morphine would crush her remaining lucidity. “If she can talk,” they said, “I want to talk to her.”

I saw their point, but the doctor said, “If this were my mother, I’d give morphine. I wouldn’t want her in pain.”

I said, “Okay, morphine.” My sisters became furious and didn’t speak to me for several days.

With the doctors united in the opinion that nothing could be done to save my mother, they could not keep her in the hospital and sent her to hospice care at a skilled nursing facility. The nurses there gave her regular high doses of morphine. But one sister felt an overpowering need to talk to Mom. She hated seeing her “drugged” and tried to interfere with the nurses, at...