I don’t want to make this too personal, or reveal too much personal information. Just to convey a lesson.
Six months ago now, I announced that an old friend of mine, Larry Kramer, who’d moved to Texas in 2006 and lived alone ever since then, died. See this post.
He’d made a will, and had it signed by two friends, but left only that one signed copy in his house. He’d told me I was his beneficiary, but didn’t send me a copy of the will; nor did he file the will with a lawyer (I don’t think he had one) or with the county (however that might work).
So when he died, and I’d alerted the country sheriff (who discovered his body), the country waited for his next of kin to show up. I was not a next of kin. He was estranged from his family, as he’d told me 40 years ago, and so none of them showed up. Finally I hired a probate lawyer to gain entry to his house and find his will, which was exactly where he’d told me it was, in a file cabinet in his office, and the will did indeed name me as sole beneficiary, and executor.
Yet it’s taken months to schedule court appointments to validate the will and assign me as official executor.
Cut to today. I just found out today that his body has been buried at the “Hays County Indigent Cemetery”. (I think that’s the modern term for “pauper’s grave”.) Because no one showed up to claim his estate, or body.
And my lesson for you today is: if you, living alone, or anyone you know, living alone, even if you’ve made a will, you or they need to send a copy of that will to a lawyer, or a court, or your *beneficiary,* so they can process your estate, sooner rather than later, and have control over what happens to your body.
We have come a long way. Though [such attitudes] continue to thrive in much of the world and in parts of our society, they have been driven out of mainstream intellectual life in Western democracies. Today no respectable public figure in the United States, Britain, or Western Europe can casually insult women or sling around invidious stereotypes of other races or ethnic groups. Educated people try to be conscious of their hidden prejudices and to measure them against the facts and against the sensibilities of others. In public life we try to judge people as individuals, not as specimens of a sex or ethnic group. We try to distinguish might from right and our parochial tastes from objective merit, and therefore respect cultures that are different or poorer than ours. We realize that no mandarin is wise enough to be entrusted with directing the evolution of the species, and that it is wrong in any case for the government to interfere with such a personal decision as having a child. The very idea that the members of an ethnic group should be persecuted because of their biology fills us with revulsion.
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