On birthdays and deathdays
It was my father’s 70th birthday this week. His ashes still sit in my bedroom and it was a difficult day to get through.
It is stunning how little we speak of death, how strangely suspended we are when processing the loss of a loved one. The experience is so ubiquitous, I’m surprised no one has yet nailed down a formula for grieving, like:
Make toast
Cry
Move on with your day
I’m the executor of his estate in two countries and my experience with death administration is a true nightmare, I can’t believe how much paperwork is required to leave this world. It starts with getting probate. If you’ve never had the rotten luck of learning what probate is, let me fill you in.
When a person passes away, they will hopefully leave a will. You can’t just take a will to a bank and say hey, give me the dead person’s money. You have to first take the will to a court - they will stamp it and say yes that’s a will. That’s probate.
Then you can go to the bank and say hey, the court said this is a will, see? And the bank says good, open a new account to put in the dead person’s money. And I’ll say but I have an account with you, and the dead person already has an account with you, it’s a very simple distribution to three beneficiaries under the will. And they’ll say no, open a new account. Prove your identity to open the new account. Ok, now here’s the dead person’s money.
I dealt with the probate process in Australia myself - then the bank, the shares and the superannuation. I attended places in person to prove my identity so many times, I’m thrilled I’m unlikely to ever forget who I am. There is a lawyer I’ve never met handling the process in Sri Lanka - 17 months after his death, the court has still not said yep that’s a will.
Perhaps it’s the point of paperwork, to give us something to do, to keep us moving on? Why spend time mourning your loved one when you can weep on the phone in frustration when the bank sends yet another letter to your house in your father’s name? One day I can tell you about his death but for the moment, it all remains a swirling jumbled mess in my mind.
The dot points are that he retired from his work in Sri Lanka in May 2022. His relationship with my mother was non-existent after a long drawn out divorce in which my brother and I were frequent casualties. He moved back to Australia with no plans and deeply depressed - he had nowhere to live and planned to figure it all out. He was living in an AirBnB in Perth when he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in August 2022.
The most chaotic months followed, simultaneously the shortest and longest time in my life. If you want to decimate relationships that are already on tenterhooks - put a man who gets angry when he’s afraid on steroids then through three rounds of chemotherapy. That’ll do it. There was never the turn to a gentler conversation - he was too quickly lost to a world of pain, anger and fear. He aged twenty years in four months and passed away a shell of a human in palliative care in December 2022.
Those are the last memories I have of my father. Enough time has passed now that better memories brew in my mind - on dance floors with him, chats on long drives, his unflinching steering of my future, quiet moments where he was his best kind and funny self. But they are still only glimpses, for now.
I’m rarely lost for words but his 70th birthday was such an occasion - I’ve tried to write about him several times over the past week, I keep reaching for words that remain just beyond my fingertips. His ashes are in my bedroom because I don’t know where to bury him.
There was so much to do and so little time. My brother and I started a lease in his name on a little rental unit, furnished it, ended a lease in his name, sold all the furniture, juggled the carers, started navigating the voluntary assisted dying process in Western Australia and planned the funeral.
I remembered to ask - do you want to be cremated? What songs do you want played at your funeral? What is your laptop password? I forgot to ask - do you want to be buried in Australia where your children live and can visit, or with your parents in Sri Lanka? Will splitting your ashes between the two split your soul in the afterlife? How on earth do I find the right answer, now that he’s gone?
I don’t find death a macabre topic of conversation. It’s an unfortunate reality of life - but one that makes me deeply grateful for the time I have left. I wish we were taught to prepare for death as we would a long journey with no estimated departure time. We’re all going to die, may as well be practical about it, no?
Can we get just these basics down in case we step off a curb and get hit by a bus:
make a will - it’ll make life so much easier for whoever has to divide your things and bear the ire of spurned family members.
leave funeral instructions - do you want to be cremated? Do you want to be buried? Do you want The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round definitely not played at your funeral? Forcing someone else to make these calls will keep them awake at night, waiting for your ghost to haunt them.
leave a letter - the last piece of comfort to give those you leave behind (or the last f*** you, depending on what’s written in there).
As I continue to fumble my way through all the death admin, I can’t overstate the constant support I’ve felt from so many. The kindness of family, friends and complete strangers - especially in the airport when I was doing the dash between my father’s treatment in Perth and my home in Melbourne. A friend I haven’t seen in years sent me these photos of us dancing baila at a Sri Lankan New Year celebration. It keeps making me smile and look forward to a time with space to grieve my father free of a paper trail.
I hope you squeeze your loved ones, often. It’s a short time we have on this spinning blue marble and we should wring every experience out of it, with everyone we love, for as long as we can.
Big hugs
Sashi
Thank you for writing this, Sashi. We will all go through an Apprenticeship in Death, (unless we’re the ones who ho, tragically young, before anyone else). its a shame that we have to fumble our way through the first couple of times. I worked in the funeral industry until recently. I like your list. I’d add make sure you know your grandparents’ names and dates of birth (maybe ask parents if they’re still around). So many people have blinked at me in massive grief and said, “Nanna and Oppo?” which the Department of Justice is unlikely to find satisfactory.
I am my father’s executor/sole beneficiary and dealing with probate and banks and doddering accountants makes me want to burn the world down. There was a section from Richard Powers’s novel “The Overstory” that really resonated with me.
“The three girls attack the mountain of paperwork and reporting. It has never before occurred to Mimi: The law doesn't stop with death. It reaches far beyond the grave, for years, entangling the survivors in bureaucratic hurdles that make the challenges of pre-death seem like a cakewalk.”