New here? Start with who I am now, then come back.
This week’s step was supposed to be the easy one.
For a month now, I’ve been showing you every step of getting my own papers findable. I chose my one place. I gathered section one of my checklist with a forty-five-minute timer. I wrote down the names of my five most important accounts. And every week, one item on my own audit stayed exactly where it was: letter of instruction — not started, nothing written down.
This week I started it. I didn’t need the full forty-five minutes. The writing itself went quickly. It was everything around the writing that took longer than I expected.
What
A letter of instruction isn’t a legal document, and it doesn’t replace a will. The will tells the court who gets what. The letter tells your family what to do first and where to find things, in your own words.
I wrote mine to our daughter, who will be our executor.
The first instruction was easy: call your brother first. Then I wrote the part I cared about most. She holds the legal role, but I don’t want her carrying this by herself. The two of them should work through it together.
After that I wrote down some of the main things she’d need. And just like the afternoon I gathered my papers, every line I wrote raised another question I didn’t have an answer to yet.
Then it got harder, in two ways I hadn’t planned for.
The first was simply realizing what I was writing. This is a letter that will be read after I’m gone. I knew that when I sat down, of course. But knowing it and writing “call your brother first” to your own daughter are two different things. I got emotional, and I’m not embarrassed to say so.
The second was the tone. I felt a lot of pressure not to add to the pressure my children would already be feeling. I didn’t want an emotional letter. The things I want to say to them as our children belong somewhere else, in other ways. But I didn’t want it to read cold, either, like an assignment to be checked off a list. I wanted something steady that they could lean on.
I didn’t find that tone in one sitting. I’m not sure anyone could.
And then I came to the bottom of the page, where a signature goes.
By the time our children open this letter, one of us, my husband or me, will already be gone. So, the name at the bottom will belong to whichever of us is still here. I sat with that longer than with anything else I wrote.
So what
Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t a week ago.
Our parents didn’t have to write this letter. When my mother died, the first instructions came from other people: a lawyer, a bank officer, a funeral director who had done this a thousand times. They spoke in a calm, practiced, professional voice, and the family followed it. Someone else carried the tone.
That voice is mostly gone now. Nobody is going to call our children and tell them what to do on the first morning. So, the first instructions they get will be the ones we leave, and they’ll hear them in our voice.
That’s why the tone was so hard. The will is written for a legality entity, in our state, the Clerk of Court. The letter is written for a person, on the worst day of her life, and nobody taught us how to write that. The kind of letter we already know how to write, the love letter or the thank-you note, isn’t this one. A checklist isn’t this one either. It sits somewhere in between, and we’re the first generation that has to work out where.
That isn’t a failing, ours or our parents’. It’s simply new. We’re not behind. We’re first.
What if
So, here’s this week’s step, and it’s smaller than it sounds: write the first page. Just the first page.
1. Who should be called first? One name, or a short list in order.
2. Where is the map? One sentence pointing to your one place.
3. One thing you want them to know before they start. Mine was that they should do this together.
The same rule applies as last week: names, not numbers. The letter says who and where. It never holds a password or an account number.
Here’s the part I most want you to hear. Your first draft is allowed to be a draft. Mine is. I dated it and put it in my Vital Legal Papers Box, which I’m only now starting to fill. I plan to keep adding to it and revising it until I’m satisfied with what it says and how it says it. The specifics will change, too. The people and companies they need to call first won’t stay the same for the coming years.
A letter you revise five times is worth more than a perfect one you never start. And a first page in the box today is already more than anyone had to go on yesterday.