Estate Planning, Probate & Elder Law Attorneys

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» Her Fearful Symmetry, the Victorians, and Decapitation Provisions

The holiday break gave me a chance to finish Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry, which I mentioned in my last post. There are a few references to probate and estate planning in the novel, but this is my favorite -- it's a quote given by one of the main characters (Robert) while he gives a tour of London's Highgate Cemetery (which plays a major role in the book).

"Before modern medical technology, people had a difficult time determining when someone was really dead. You might think that death would be pretty blatant, but there were a number of famous cases in which a dead body sat up and went on living, and many Victorians got the jim-jams just thinking about the possibility of being buried alive.

Being a practical people, they attempted to find solutions to the problem. The Victorians invented a system of bells with strings attached that went through the ground and into the coffin, so if you woke up underground you could pull on your bell till someone came to dig you up. There's no record of anyone being saved by one of these devices. People made all sorts of odd stipulations in their wills, such as asking to be decapitated as insurance against an undesired revival."

A Will with a decapitation provision? Excellent!

» The Ethicist on Switching Guardians

"The Ethicist" column in today's New York Times magazine addresses the issue of whether to tell your friends that you are removing them as guardians of your children under your Will. The column is here.

I'm not an ethicist (insert attorney joke here), but I agree with Randy Cohen that there is no need to tell the friends about the switch. Especially when you are switching to family members (most people understand that blood is thicker than water). Maybe I feel this way because my wife and I did something similar. We named our friends as guardians of our daughter, but then switched to my sister and her husband once they got settled and had kids, and we saw that their parenting style matches ours.

A similar ethical issue (not discussed in "The Ethicist") involves telling people that they are named as guardians. I'm always surprised that people DON'T tell their friends/relatives that they have named them (or plan to name them) as guardians. I know this always makes for a heart-warming film ("lovable moppet(s) show up at the door of self-absorbed yuppie, who then discovers the value of family"), but it's significantly less heart-warming in real life. My advice: talk to those you plan to name, BEFORE you do so. (They may say no. That's what happened to the people my in-laws asked, when my wife was a kid.) And talk to those you have named, AFTER you do so, to fill them in on how things will work.

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