Then one day you wake up and suddenly find yourself with the keys to the Kingdom of Chaos and crossing the drawbridge to face the dragons lurking in every corner. Battling each crisis as it occurred, we needed to expediently locate a myriad of vital account numbers, documents, phone numbers and addresses. Mildred owned a filing cabinet, which in my humble opinion would have been an ideal and logical central location to systematize fundamental records. I have no idea what made me think it would be that easy.
Here’s a little practical advice: now is the time to have a discussion with your elders about where they keep their personal papers. You may discover that you are responsible for someone who has been successfully masking the early stages of dementia, or that some other underlying health issue has impaired cognitive abilities. The state of affairs may not be as lucid and organized you anticipated.
Mildred’s filing cabinet was so swollen with papers it was difficult to extract the first few manila file folders in each drawer. We discovered utility bills that dated back to the 1940’s, but few current records. Here’s the plain truth: your 1942 phone bill is not a valuable antique. No one in your family wants to inherit it.
The cardboard packaging that came with countless pairs of tweezers Aunt Mildred had purchased were stuffed randomly in with untried recipes, ancient correspondence over disputes with various perceived ‘enemies of the kingdom’, and yellowing warranties for each appliance she had ever owned over the past 60+ years. Yet because of the total unpredictability of what we were unearthing, we had to plod through every scrap just in case something crucial was obscured between a newspaper clipping about a new restaurant opening (which had since gone out of business in 1973) and expired coupons for toilet paper. Mildred obviously had an obsession with keeping every sheet of paper her fingers touched throughout her lifetime.
Toiling daily, it took the better part of six weeks for us to locate most of her important documents. They turned up in boxes and envelopes, layered with stacks of clothes on a spare bed, the closet floor, tucked between a year’s worth of old newspapers, and … well, you get the mental image.
During our excavation into the strata of Aunt Mildred’s existence, I unearthed a handy little 22-page booklet titled Making Things Easy for My Family: What You Need to Know About My Belongings, Business Affairs, and Desires. The pages were designed to guide the user along step-by-step through specific sections with places to fill in the blanks; critical information all assembled in one neat little package. Perfect. Except for one minor detail; the pages were as blank as the day she bought it. So were the other seven identical booklets still in their original, dusty, cellophane wrappers.
It doesn’t matter how many special little booklets you purchased or how good your intentions were; blank pages are absolutely worthless. I can’t even begin to estimate how many hours (think in terms of several 40-hour weeks) that one completely filled-out copy of this booklet, located where we could have found it, would have saved us.
The retirement center needed to call for extra trash pick up twice due to the amount of rubbish we were discarding in the community-sized dumpster. Each day we crammed our car with boxes of papers to sort. We filled both our 55-gallon trash cans to the brim each week, and got permission from neighbors to use their cans for the over-flow. Our paper shredder overheated several times during the process. I suspect that we could have single-handedly supplied enough confetti for an entire parade route through New York City.
Illustration from Wikipedia: Gondor, a fictional kingdom in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings
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