7December 2006

"If you're reading this, I must be dead"

Another cool thing I found out about the Neptune Society is they give you the urn for your ashes right after you sign the papers and give them a deposit. The urn is actually a box, a nice wooden one, too. It opens from the bottom (albeit with a screwdriver) so that your ashes can be scattered. Not being one to let anything go to waste, I joked that it would make a nice container to store stuff in the meantime. To my amazement the representative agreed and even offered suggestions! For instance, you could store files in it. The darn thing is as big as a shoebox, maybe a little bigger.

I just did a Google Image search for a pic of an urn box to put with today's entry, and discovered some with decorations! What a cool idea. Hmmmm... the possibilities are endless. Decoupage, anyone?

So I've decided to write letters to people and store them in my urn. I think how sweet it would have been for my brother and I to find letters to us in my mom's perfect, flowery handwriting.

And as soon as I finish writing my notes to the people I love, I will write instructions for my husband to be able to handle closing my business when I'm gone. Let's face it, most of us who are self-employed probably don't have a plan in place to avoid leaving their clients in the lurch if we die or become incapacitated. I actually wrote an article for my website a couple years ago on the topic, but the problem I ran into at the time is that I had no one I could trust to handle things for me. Now I have a husband who, while not tech-savvy enough to actually take over for me, has agreed to send out letters with instructions to my clients, as long as I put the ready-to-print letters on a disk for him. And as long as I tell him which bills to keep paying, even my web-hosting customers won't suffer any interruption in service.

It takes a lot of work, planning, and foresight to avoid leaving a mess for those you leave behind, but I know that the people I love are worth it.

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