Confronting my own mortality in my 30s, with silky skin and two young kids, was not something I was going to do lightly. And yet, heroically, I wrote my will.
Voluntarily instigating contact with lawyers turned my stomach enough to earn me at least a year of procrastination. Sure, you don’t want to unexpectedly die and leave your affairs in a shambles, but nor do you want to spend your precious time on Earth finding a lawyer and talking to them.
Most of the process is dull beyond belief. If my husband and I die but my kids do not, my brother’s life is permanently ruined. There is a stack of forms and asking people what their middle names are. It involved a quite hilarious exercise in imagining how our will’s executors, all big personalities, would get along and make decisions.
Having a will allows you to dictate, or guide, your final wishes. Burial or cremation? Other? Being turned into a tree is a genuine option. This decision was paralysing.
I was jealous of my family and friends who hold real religious beliefs. It takes pretty much all the hard thinking out of the process, offering rituals, roles, words, a location for everything to happen. When my nana died over the new year her parish priest came back from holidays and parishioners played music for her service. Everyone knew what to do, what to say and it was exactly what she would have wanted. Perfect.
What I did not sign up for in my pursuit of knocking off life admin was having “am I a Catholic?” haunting me in my notes app. I’ve seen parish priests get people’s first names wrong during their wedding ceremonies. What could happen if I wasn’t there to stage manage the event? Endless generations of Catholicism in my family have translated into core beliefs of feeding the poor and feeling suss about Anglicans. Is that enough?
The other option for me was to have a secular service. I could get together a whole run sheet on what I would want to happen. But non-religious services are so open to interpretation that anything could be a part of it. What if there were geraniums? Yuck.
In desperation I turned to my group chat for advice on last wishes. Many of these people can’t operate a motor vehicle.
One thing I know from my suddenly all-too-short years on Earth is that it’s the right thing to do to leave some instructions and guidance for those left behind. I wanted to do the right thing. Surely uncertainty or ambiguity makes an awful time even worse for loved ones.
Yet ideally I will die in a totally different chapter of my life. The thought of attending a funeral service my 20-year-old self would have planned makes me crawl out of my skin. I probably would have shown clips from The West Wing. Unbearable.
What if I’d hate my own funeral? Would the requests I decided on now be cringe in years to come? I know it’s not for me, but also, it’s absolutely for me.
I do think funerals are for the people left behind. They’re important, they’re healing. They can be tasteful and they can be strange. Ideally they ring true to the person being remembered. But we all go through phases in life, they’re all valid. It’s funny to think of being memorialised in my tweed-dressing era or my drinking-too-much era or, worst of all, the thin-eyebrow years.
As much as I tried to take the approach of simply never dying, I did need to complete the paperwork. And, ultimately, the idea of my close family and friends choosing the music or reading their poetry was enough to make me take a deep breath and actually write down my requests.
So send the poems to me now! All the thinking about death has me appreciating the people around me right now and through the different chapters of my life. And please congratulate me on doing the difficult and icky thing: thinking about death and writing it down to make it hopefully just a little bit easier for the people around me when the day comes.
• Emily Mulligan is a mum, aunty and occasional writer from Sydney
