How to prepare for your death

Despite the fact that the finitude of human life is obvious, it is always very difficult to realize one’s own imminent death and begin to prepare for it. For the time being, our own brain includes deep protective mechanisms that take our thoughts away from the topic of death.

Nevertheless, after some internal work, people manage not only to understand that life is really running out, but also to take certain actions so that after death the burden of worries falling on loved ones is as light as possible.

Psychological acceptance of impending death

One of the key tasks when preparing for death is to truly understand and accept its inevitability, and for yourself personally. If this happens, the positive emotional reaction and the ability to take further action remain.

To a certain extent, it is easier for believers to accept the idea of their death, since almost all religions pay great attention to the afterlife and convince them that there is no need to be afraid of death, that life continues in the afterlife.

The fear of death also recedes thanks to social support, which strengthens self-esteem and relieves the negative impact of stress from the awareness of the imminent end of life. In this situation, it is especially important for a person to feel that he is not alone.

Approaching old age, people in one way or another pay attention to the natural and inevitable end of any, albeit long, journey in life.

Lifetime contract

How to Prepare for Your Death: It's Never Too Early

The editors of Tsekh like to tackle topics that are not very common to talk about out loud in our society. We regularly teach you not to feel embarrassed when discussing sex or a pay raise. This time we propose to talk about what needs to be taken care of in advance, knowing that we are all mortals.

No matter how difficult it is to talk and think about death, it is necessary to remember that in the process of life we accumulate a large number of things, documents, bills, responsibilities and debts. And the question of how to manage all this will inevitably fall on the shoulders of our relatives and close friends. To make this task easier and save them from guessing, you can take a few simple steps and collect a folder with all the necessary documents, instructions and wishes.

Shoshanna Berger, co-author of Preparing for the End for Beginners: Practical Advice on Life and Death and a survivor of her father's death, recalls that just before the funeral, she and her sister had to rack their brains looking for contact information for friends and co-workers from his last job. Despite the fact that their father had drawn up a will in the late 60s, the sisters had no idea where to find information about his accounts, how to find out the password for his computer or unlock his mobile phone. In general, Shoshanna shares, people who have not had this experience have no idea that sorting through things and paperwork can take more than a year.

In their book, Shoshanna Berger and B.J. Miller published a list of documents and letters that would be a good idea to write down in the event of your death. There are 20 items in total, we will list only the main part:

a will - preferably notarized;
marriage or divorce certificate;
A flash drive or hard drive with a list of all your digital accounts and passwords for them;
a list of your bank accounts with details;
a copy of the insurance policy;
instructions/wishes on how to arrange the funeral and what type of burial is preferable for you;
letter to your loved ones.

What you need to know about a will

Since June 1 of this year, new types of inheritance have been introduced in Russia, which were not previously included in the legislation. These are joint wills of spouses and inheritance agreements. Previously, the only option to express your last will on the distribution of property was a will. The head of the State Duma Committee on Legislation, Pavel Krasheninnikov, says that “with ordinary wills, when one of the spouses passes away, you first have to divide the joint property, and then resolve the issue of inheritance and heirs. A joint will represents the common will of the spouses. If it is available, there is no need to divide anything, and you can specify in advance in what sequence, to whom and what property is transferred, depending on the situation.”

An inheritance agreement is important if you do not have close relatives or for some reason you cannot trust them with, say, raising your child. The agreement defines the procedure for transferring rights to property with or without any conditions. Let’s say you transfer your real estate on the condition that the person promises to provide for your relative for the rest of his life or continue to finance the theater/museum/hospice. Such an agreement is concluded with any person (it does not have to be a relative) and takes precedence over a will.

Regardless of the will of the deceased as stated in the will, the property is first divided among the obligatory heirs. Obligatory heirs include, for example:

disabled parents of the deceased;
his disabled spouse;
minors and disabled children;
those who were dependent on the deceased for at least a year before death.

A will can be canceled or rewritten at any time. To do this, the notary draws up a special document on the cancellation of the will, or a new will, the content of which will change the content of the previous one. By the way, you have the right to indicate in your will not only your current property, but also what you will acquire in the near future.

What to do with digital data

When creating an account on another social network, we don’t always think about who owns all the files and posts that accumulate during our online activity. But in vain: it may turn out that your digital property after death will remain in the hands of corporations.

For most digital content, purchasing simply means owning a license to access the files. That is, you most likely will not be able to pass on your software and collection of your favorite music to your heirs. Another thing is photos and text documents that were produced by you. But even here, not everything is so simple and transparent, given that the company’s servers are scattered all over the planet and in different countries, each of which has its own legislative features. Therefore, if you need to pass on some digital documents to your children or loved ones, it is best to copy them to an external hard drive in advance.

It's a good idea to make a list of social media usernames and passwords. After compiling it, take care of data protection. Save the list on several media and access them using a password. Tell your loved ones where the hard drive or flash drive is stored and how to find the password to the data.

When it comes to accounts, take the time to carefully review the options for inheriting a page or closing a profile. As a rule, most services provide the opportunity for relatives to contact company managers and ask to freeze the page of the deceased.

Facebook users can nominate a memorial page custodian. The memorial page has limited functionality, but it is still available for viewing by friends and other network users. According to Facebook's rules, “a keeper can accept friend requests on behalf of an account in a memorial status, attach a memorial post to their profile, or change their profile photo/video. If a memorialized account has a section for memorial posts, the custodian can decide who sees those posts.”

Google also allows you to add a trusted contact who will be contacted if your profile is inactive for a long time. Your authorized representative will receive a letter or call after the time that you specify. In addition, you can designate which services the person will have access to in the event of your death: Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Drive, Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube, etc.

Twitter does not provide similar options for transferring control of a page to loved ones. Your relatives or friends will have to independently contact the technical support of the service and/or, it seems, use the login and password that you yourself will leave for your heirs somewhere on an external storage device.

Microsoft also does not yet provide the option of appointing a trusted person by the user himself.

For users of Apple products, the situation is a little better: the “family sharing” function can help out here, thanks to which several family members jointly own cloud storage. However, if you do not want to spend money on this service, then all your collections of films and music files that you paid for during your lifetime will remain hanging on the cloud, inaccessible to your loved ones. As for iPhones and iPads, the company will unlock the deceased's devices, and the family will be able to return them to their use upon presentation of the death certificate and will of the deceased.

The Russian services Yandex and Mail.ru have not yet taken care of similar procedures for transferring digital property to the relatives of the deceased. Mailbox "Yandex. Mail" is simply deleted if it has not been used for more than 24 months, and the Mail.ru account is deleted after six months. The websites say nothing about the possibility of data recovery by heirs.

Paperwork and information preparation

Once the very thought of death no longer causes rejection, you need to take care of the informational component of the funeral. These are the following documents and information:

will (notarized);
marriage or divorce certificate;
A flash drive, hard drive or similar media with all personal digital accounts and passwords for them;
list of bank accounts with details;
a copy of the insurance policy;
written orders about the method of burial and funeral, i.e., expression of will;
letter to relatives and friends.

Whiskers, paws and tail - these are my documents!

First, it is best to put in order all the documents that record your property rights.
They must be properly executed so that the notary, when dealing with your inheritance matter, does not send your heirs to court to prove ownership. There are many subtleties in the matter of inheritance. Thus, non-privatized housing is not inherited at all, since it is not private property. This may be an unpleasant surprise for your relatives, who do not delve into the details while you are alive. However, if members of his family are registered with the deceased tenant, then they will then be able to re-register the social tenancy agreement for themselves and subsequently privatize this housing. If no one is registered, then the apartment will go to the state, and the relatives will be left with nothing.

Apartment by inheritance and will

Making a will: all the subtleties of the law

Another important nuance: whether a will is written or not will not be so important if there are several first-degree relatives and among them there are minor children, dependents, disabled people and the elderly. All of the above categories of citizens have the right to count on a part of the inheritance, regardless of the will, therefore shares in the inheritance will be allocated to them —

whether you want it or not. If, for a number of reasons, you want to leave an inheritance to someone else, then take care during your lifetime to draw up a gift or sale agreement. These contracts are more difficult to challenge.

Planning future funerals

A lifetime contract concluded with a reliable funeral agency greatly facilitates the preparation for a funeral. Such a document not only records the method of burial and the specifics of organizing the funeral, but also ensures their exact execution.

Special studies have shown that a lifetime contract has a positive effect on the life expectancy of the person who entered into it. This is explained by the removal of stress associated with anxiety about the upcoming burial.

A lifetime agreement can be drawn up at City Ritual Service LLC. Detailed consultations are carried out by phone +375 (44) 782 97 76. Our contact line operates 24 hours a day.

Where to begin

Create a new document in a program convenient for you. You can write on paper, but an electronic file will be easier to edit. Plus, you'll be able to copy and paste long account numbers instead of writing them by hand.

Since the instructions will contain your passwords, think about where it will be stored. Choose the option that you think is the safest. Or you can leave a blank space in the digital version of the instructions and enter the password only on the printout.

There are more complex ways to provide access to your accounts. For example, some password managers allow you to add contacts for someone who will have one-time access in an emergency. It's up to you to decide whether you trust this technology. Remember: there is always a chance that your loved one will forget the login or password for the email address you specified. It’s easier to provide your account information to a trusted person so that he can log into it directly.

Keep a notepad handy to jot down tasks and reminders that come up along the way. Mark in a different color those places in the instructions that will later need to be supplemented.

Question and answer

Isn't it better to prepare for death by simply saving money for a funeral rather than entering into a lifetime agreement?
This traditional method does not exclude the possibility of misuse of accumulated funds after death. A lifetime contract, on the contrary, fully guarantees the organization of the funeral described in it.

In the old days, clothes and a coffin were prepared. How appropriate is this practice now?

To a certain extent, it is appropriate (if there is somewhere to store such things). Purchasing ritual supplies in advance reduces the impact of inflation. However, this is only partial preparation and does not cover the entire funeral organization.

Can a lifetime agreement be considered an expression of will?

Yes, because it contains written instructions regarding your own funeral. In essence, this is an expression of will.

How to accept the departure of a relative to another world

What does the church and Orthodoxy say about this?

To make the afterlife easier for the deceased, the church teaches to believe in the mercy of God, light candles in the church for the repose of the soul and read prayers for the deceased. You should also make a bloodless sacrifice - we are talking about alms and helping the suffering. It is believed that God will be able to hear your prayers if you honor his commandments. You should especially not neglect this in the first forty days after the death of a loved one. If you are not sure how to do everything correctly, go to the nearest church and consult with the priest.