PREDEATH PLANNING
Something You Might Want to Do Before You Die
Dismantling the life you lived
I’m only in my 60s, but don’t feel it’s too soon to start preparing for my death. Not wanting to burden my children with dealing with all my stuff.
Dismantling my photo albums now saves my children from doing it after I’m gone.
My husband scanned all our family photos years earlier. One by one, placing them on our home scanner.
Since the year 2000, all our photos are digital and are much easier to share.
I have three children. I went to Winners and found three nice quality boxes to place the photos in. I wanted the boxes large enough to hold an album size page, and 8x10 inch school photos.
I have three grandchildren. So, I purchased a photo album for each child — albums alike for the two siblings.
The biggest job during this project was writing information on the photos.
I began with the two albums of my mother’s. Black and white pictures held fast to the pages with photo corners. Most pictures are of unknown people. They are meaningless to my children and even more meaningless to my children’s children.
Most of the people in my mother’s albums are now lost in time. I don’t want the same to happen to my photos. Labeling them is important.
I started my grandchildren’s photo albums with pictures of their great-great-grandparents. Then their great-grandparents. Down the line to their parents. Creating a visual history of their parents growing up by the sea in Nova Scotia.
One daughter does not have children, the result of infertility. Her box is extra full of photos. It makes me kind of sad in a way. Who will receive her box of treasures after she’s gone? A niece or a nephew?
On October 28, I started this project, which I estimated would take me two months to complete. Not happy about the large space it took up in my art studio, it wasn’t something I wanted to drag on.
With Christmas coming and shipping gifts to our son and his family in British Columbia, on the other end of Canada. I also wanted to include the pictures in the shipment. This meant getting the project done much earlier than planned.
I gave myself a deadline of the end of November.
The project became a priority. I worked for an hour a day. Some days I worked two to three hours. I finished by November 14.
Toward the end of the project, I learned shortcuts. While removing the photos from our family albums instead of writing all the details on the back of the pictures, if I decided the photo was going in a grandchild’s album, I wrote the details in black Sharpie marker on an empty space on the front of the picture. Saving me from having to write the information twice as I had been first doing.
On some pictures, I added a white paper label. I kept paper close and labelled photos for the grandchildren’s albums while taking the album apart. Then placed them face down in a pile by their album.
I worked in chronological order.
As I took apart our family photo albums, it was interesting going down memory lane. The young woman I’d been had assembled the albums so carefully and lovingly.
This process was bittersweet. A life in review. My life passing before my eyes.
Letting go of what was.
While going through the albums, I saw the things we at the time didn’t know awaited us. I knew the end of stories. Relationships that failed. Years left for someone to live.
I saw what we can’t see as we live it. The future we are unaware of. I saw our life through fresh eyes.
I saved old album covers to recycle into handmade book covers. Binders to hold something new.
It has been freeing to accomplish this task, to know it is done and I no longer need to think about doing it.
I pass along what was once mine to future generations and step into the now. The unknown. To the future that awaits.
