No estate plan is complete without communicating information about what to do when you pass. Providing details on burial or cremation, how to announce your passing, any service desired, and more.
This was actually the most difficult part of the process, emotionally anyway, as I really don’t plan to die anytime soon. It helped me to think about this in terms of making things easy on loved ones when it eventually happens.
Thankfully, GoodTrust offered a template for a Funeral Directive making this process quite a bit easier. In the end it was relatively simple to outline what kind of service and announcements we want (very minimal). Since we have no pets or particular knowledge we wish to impart to others, the process was relatively easy with two exceptions; disposal of the body and obituary.
Disposal of a Body While Overseas
While we don’t want to think about our passing, it will happen eventually. Dealing with mortal remains can be a whole can of worms, not just because of individual preferences. As slow travelers we don’t know where we will be when we pass, and the legal landscape may be radically different from one country to the next.
We felt it was important to minimize the burden on our loved ones by spelling out our wishes ahead of time.
Returning a body to the United States can be expensive and complex to manage, though insurance can help if you have it. Cremation may or may not be available depending on country laws. If you want anything more fancy (for example. composting, underwater green burial) it’s going to depend….
In our case we made it easy, we hope. We don’t wish to be buried anywhere in particular. While cremation is the best option, we would actually prefer aquamation. So in our final wishes we spelled out aquamation first, traditional cremation second. If it’s unavailable wherever we are, so be it, and our estate can pay the bill of transporting the body to somewhere it is available.
An Obituary, Notice of Death, Social Media
This has been, by far, the hardest part of the process and we still haven’t completed it. It’s probably better to say we haven’t even started it, though we know it’s necessary. What do we say about ourselves? Who truly cares? Who is the obituary even for, or is it simply convention?
For Hillary, who was a CPA and held leadership positions in the field, it’s important for her to have a notice of her passing shared in this circle.
Neither of us particularly care to have a formal obituary in a newspaper. We’re not even sure if that’s a thing anymore.
That leaves just social media, mainly LinkedIn and Facebook. We both have a love/hate relationship with social media overall and, at the moment, we aren’t sure we care. We’ve effectively left this up to each other as well as our son, whomever is surviving, to post where they feel they need to for their own reasons.
As for writing the actual content for an obituary, this will need to remain a work in progress. We know we need to write them, if for no other reason than to spare others the task of doing so.
In Summary - Our Final Wishes
To our way of thinking, it’s important to balance our final wishes with the needs of the surviving spouse or heirs. We don’t have particularly complicated desires for our final wishes but we have tried to spell it out so our loved ones don’t have to guess.
The trick, with slow travel, is you may well not have any idea where you will be when you die. And this complicates things greatly, especially in dealing with mortal remains. We’ve chosen to outline our wishes but leave room for loved ones to make a decision that works best for them.
This post is part of a larger series covering our approach to getting our affairs together and estate planning ahead of a long adventure in slow travel around the world. Read more background on this series or jump to other topics in the series.