January 25, 2025
“Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
Phil lost count of the times he said to his wife Valerie, “We really have to figure out where we want to be buried and get a plot and headstone.” It was on his To Do list for months and then years. Unfortunately, then it was on her To-do list — right at the top — the day he died. That little piece of unfinished business made his funeral arrangements more chaotic than they already were.
For so many of us, grieving becomes even more complicated by unfinished business that we never attended to. Strange as it sounds, some people don’t have wills, and many others had them, but they were decades old. They meant to change them but never did. They were too busy to call the lawyer and set an appointment.
Even worse, when Valerie finally did get around to calling the lawyer, who had done their will 30 years earlier, she discovered he had retired and no one took over his clients. Sadly, the lawyer never told them he was retiring. He seemed to drop off the face of the Earth, and so did their will. Fortunately, they had a copy … somewhere. What should have been a simple process turned into an excruciating process at a time when they wanted to concentrate on grieving.
How many times have you heard someone say, “I never got around to it”?
Nobody wants to think about dying, but it’s much easier to deal with the details ahead of time through “advance planning” than it is after a loved one has passed and you’re confronted with what is known as an “immediate need.”
For an overview of issues we will all have to deal with, visit https://ctcemeteries.org/advance
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