There was a recent funeral I attended and before the service, I was chatting with the funeral director, who has been a friend for many years.

He was telling me that he was dealing with a separate situation in which the deceased didn’t have a will, didn’t have a life insurance policy and the loved ones didn’t have any money to bury the deceased. Making it even more complicated is the family members weren’t close at all.

He said those kinds of situations put an emotional and financial strain on his business, but when it comes to dealing with a death, carrying out the funeral is the right thing to do.

That conversation was quite interesting to me because less than two months ago my family dealt with a similar situation. My brother, at 58, died of a massive heart attack on Oct. 9. So while we were in Fargo to plan a funeral, my younger brother and I realized we may never sort out the details.

We essentially tore the house apart looking for a will, a life insurance policy; something that would give us direction on what to do. All we found were canceled checks from his bank.

But that’s only the beginning. He owed $110,000 on his house, he had medical bills from a hospital stay totaling $60,000 and there were other smaller debts that weren’t significant, but nonetheless, creditors wanted their money.

We assumed that because he and my niece were really close, he would have had a will and given her everything. Not so!
And because he lived on the Minnesota side, in Moorhead, we don’t understand Minnesota law and so we had to hire an attorney to figure out how to solve these issues.

Fortunately for us, the attorney is very well respected in western Minnesota and has already made some major progress.
But an even bigger issue here with not having a will is that myself, my brothers and sister are all equally responsible for the fate of his estate. We’re not responsible financially, but we have to make legal decisions together and that’s not always easy to do.

Our family is fairly close so the hurdle there is coordinating everyone’s answer to our lawyer’s questions.

Now think about those families that don’t get along. Assume there are siblings who are estranged, then something like a death without a will or life insurance happens. Our lawyer has already told us she appreciates us working together, but she often times deals with what she called “the impossible.”

My brother’s death was traumatic enough because he’s actually one of the younger siblings. But now we expect we’re going to be dealing with these legal issues that could take a year to sort out. It’s not something any of us expected or wanted, but it’s upon us.

We all think we are 10 feet tall and bullet proof. And because many of us have that mentality, we don’t put our affairs in order and our loved ones are left with questions that never get answered. A heart attack, a traffic accident, a military fatality, disease; we don’t like to think about these things, but unfortunately, they happen. And when they do, preparation is key.

Many of us have taken the right path. We have wills, we have life insurance and we’ve provided at least enough information to our families so they would know what to do in an emergency such as this.

Many don’t do that or refuse to do that and it becomes a snarled legal issue that frustrates even the best of attorneys. And if a lawyer is frazzled, imagine what the family is going through.

So, for the sake of your family, if you haven’t done these things, please do. It would make it easier for all concerned. And hiring a lawyer to file a will isn’t always necessary. If you don’t have money for that, at least write down your wishes on a piece of paper and leave it with your legal papers so the family has a starting point. That’s what happened to us.

We didn’t have a starting point and that threw a big monkey wrench into our family’s grieving.