“Daddy, do you have life insurance?” I’m not quite sure what prompted me to ask him that. In a rare moment of father-daughter bonding, Dad was showing me the inner workings of a car engine; this was a non sequitur. At least I had him all to myself and could speak freely.
“No,” he answered simply.
I was shocked by his answer. He was dying. How could he not have life insurance?
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because no one will write me,” he replied flatly.
Yes, of course. Daddy was a dead man walking. No insurance company would write a life policy on him.
I became aware of the boulder that had formed in the pit of my stomach, which was about the same size as the lump in my throat. I could speak no further. One more sound from me would have been accompanied by a gushing torrent of tears, and I did not want to cry in front of Daddy. He was uncomfortable with any emotion other than joy or anger, and in that moment, I felt neither. I felt devastated.
I was a naïve 19 year-old, but even I could see the train wreck up ahead. Losing my father while still a teenager is one thing. But one of the foundational principles of Leaving Lightly is, “The end of you is not the end of you.” The life you created lives on after the physical body dies, and if your loved ones don’t have the information they need to put a close to your life, the aftermath of your death is a train wreck. Our family would live with the train wreck of Daddy’s death for the rest of our lives.
What made Daddy’s death a train wreck? There are a lot of reasons, but for our purposes here, I’m going to talk about finances.
Daddy was the breadwinner of our family of six. We lived hand-to-mouth, with no investments nor savings. To supplement his income, Mom worked a minimum-wage job as a salesclerk, and my sisters and I worked every summer in the farm fields of Missouri to pay for our extra-curricular activities in school. But our academic work came first, so we did not work during the school year. If Dad’s income went away, five people would have to live on Mom’s minimum wage income. If you wrote it as a mathematical equation, it would like this:
His income + Mom’s income – his income + our financial needs = <$0. It was a mathematical equation with a negative outcome, literally and figuratively.
This unspoken equation was running through my head as I sat silently with Dad. I was trying to absorb what he was telling me, and I’m not talking about where to connect the battery cables. There was so much more I wanted to say to him in that moment, but I could not open my mouth without watering the lawn with my eyes. If I’d been capable of speaking calmly and rationally, though, I would have asked him the following questions:
“Daddy, without your income, how are we going to live? . . . Mom’s income won’t be enough. Do we really not have ANY savings? What are we supposed to do?”
Daddy would not have had the answers to any of these questions. And looking back with the eyes of an adult, I imagine this conversation was as hard for him as it was for me. He was the “man of the house” and as such, he was expected to provide and protect his family. He knew that upon his death, he could do neither.
But what I wish we had done in that moment was brainstorm possible solutions. When he died (suddenly) four months later, I had already moved to another state. But in our mythical brainstorming session, he would have suggested that I move back home once he died and get a full-time job in our hometown to help our remaining family.
Living and working in my hometown was akin to death for me, but if Daddy had asked me to do it, I would have.
My sisters could also have taken after-school jobs. In that way, the family would have survived once Daddy died.
But that conversation never took place. And as I predicted, Dad’s death was a train wreck. Twelve hours after Daddy died, Mom was sitting in front of the hometown banker asking for a loan to bury him. (His body was already in the funeral home. What would we have done if the banker said no? It’s not like we could have taken him home.)
At the same time Mother was with the banker, my 17 year-old sister was sitting with the funeral directors making funeral arrangements for our father who, incidentally, was the most important person in her world. No high school senior should have to make funeral arrangements for a parent they loved more than anyone.
Although I had seen disaster ahead, I could not have foreseen our family imploding, but we did. In January of 1976, we were a family of six. Daddy died January 13th. By September of that year, the family had dwindled to two.
There were a lot of other things connected with this catastrophe, but 48 years later, the details have become a dim memory relegated to the bin labeled, “Things I Wish to NEVER Live Through Again.”
What’s the moral of this story?
Oh, there are so many. As time goes on I will unravel all the lessons I learned from this god-awful experience, but for now, it boils down to this:
We had seven years’ notice that Daddy was dying.
Even though we spoke openly about it, we did nothing to prepare for his death.
Consequently, when he died, we scrambled to figure out what to do, how to do it, what he left behind, what he didn’t leave behind, what we needed but didn’t have, how to fight the Social Security Administration, and how to live on next to nothing. Secrets and rumors abounded. Hurtful accusations and angry feelings were a way of life. Daddy’s life was a mystery – some of it we could figure out, and much of it we couldn’t.
There will always be questions, but the one person who could answer those questions – can’t.
Daddy’s death is the genesis of Leaving Lightly. Frankly, it’s a difficult story for me to think about, and I cringe every time I have to speak about it, but I force myself to do it because it’s necessary. If I can prevent even one family from experiencing what we did, then good on me.
Why wouldn’t I do that?
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