“Who died now?” can be a harsh question, but sometimes it leads to action. In this case, it launched a new podcast.
I’m Gary Ebersole, host of the And When I’m Gone podcast, an online guide to unwinding a 21st-century life.
This podcast is a personal story that began a few years ago with a simple question from my longtime life partner, Bee. At dinner one evening, she asked how to take care of a basic maintenance task for one of our high-tech household gadgets. Neither can recall the specific question, but the remainder of the conversation is quite vivid. My initial response was the typical lord-of-the-manor reply. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, my dear. Man’s work. I’ll take care of it.” As you might expect, that was the wrong answer.
What triggered her question was the news she had heard that morning of another friend who had lost her husband quite suddenly. That was the second time in a month that a friend had suffered such an unexpected loss, so it’s fair to ask the rather harsh question, “What happens if I wake up some morning to find you dead?”
My knee-jerk response is, “It’s not that hard. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.” The reality? This is a real problem. The challenge for us and many people in our situation is that we live in a vastly more complex world than the one we grew up in. 21st-century technology is deeply embedded in our lives. The relative complexity of our lives then and now was demonstrated when Bee was taking care of her 98-year-old father’s affairs when he passed away a few years ago. While a sad undertaking that didn’t always go smoothly, it was relatively straightforward. His financial life was a bank account, a brokerage account, and his home in Florida. A check register and paper bills helped identify accounts that needed to be closed. Bee was able to wrap up her father’s 1950s-style life reasonably quickly.
Unfortunately, I can’t offer Bee that 1950s simplicity since we have fully embraced what the third decade of the 21st century offers us. Our modern household is not out of the mainstream. We have smartphones, personal computers, cars with dozens of embedded computers, smart speakers (“Alexa, set a timer for ten minutes.”), Internet modems, Wi-Fi routers, and home automation systems. Modern appliances are WiFi-enabled. On top of this complex physical home infrastructure, we have each created a digital life with an expansive online presence. We shop online, bank online, and use online streaming for entertainment. In our household, like many others, one person is usually the resident geek who keeps the technical systems running and is the go-to person for solving online problems. That would be me in our home.
Now, I do maintain a variety of documents on my laptop as well as an online notebook service to help me keep track of some of our systems, but I’ll confess that it’s not well-organized or accessible. Even worse, much of my knowledge about our household technology is in my head. In all honesty, it’s a bit of a 21st-century jumble. And if it’s that way for me, what must it seem like to Bee?
I began the journey of determining what aspects of our lives needed to be documented and what the best practices would be to make the project manageable and easy to share. It’s taken me a few years to reach this point. There were several false starts, and I went back and forth trying to define an optimal approach. And let’s get real…planning for your demise can sometimes be depressing. My procrastination was understandable, but recently, other friends have suddenly lost their husbands, reinforcing Bee’s concerns and galvanizing me into action. I have a plan now, and it’s time to get serious and launch this project.
An important note—even though this conversation is recorded in a couple’s voice (Bee and I), the guide is not targeted just at men concerned with leaving their wives a boatload of what is referred to as “widow’s work” in retirement communities. It’s intended for anybody—partner, wife, husband, parent, sibling, cousin—concerned with leaving behind a 21st-century mess for family and friends to unwind.
Join me for the next episode, when l explore just how different our 21st-century lives are from how we lived less than 50 years ago.
Thanks for listening. We’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below, send an email to gary@andwhenimgone.com, or leave a voicemail at 505-216-6171. And if you have family or friends who you think might be interested, tell them about the And When I’m Gone podcast.
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