Wills: Living and Otherwise

I've been putting off a whole load of must do items for some time now so I've decided to to try to sort them all out at once. That way I can stop worrying about unfinished business and get on with taking the rest of my life as it comes.

First was to deal with my (tiny) inheritance by writing a will. On this one I've taken the easy way out and had somebody from the bank write it for me based on my simple instructions. One (pleasent) suprise was to find out that as Carol and I were married under UK law we could deal with inheritance under UK law too. This is much simpler and more flexible than Swiss law which dictates a lot about who gets what before you get your own wishes considered.

Second up was writing a Living Will (Patientenverfügung). This is a document which instructs your Doctors on how you want to be treated when you can no longer communicate with them and to make sure you assign someone to make other decisions on things that you haven't explicitely covered. For instance once I'm in the final stages of my cancer I do not want the doctors to keep me alive artificially but I do want them to help keep the pain down.

Last but not least was writing the funeral arrangments (Anordnungen zur Bestattung) which explains things like coffin types, burned or buried, what you want to wear, the kind of ritual you want etc.

I was lucky enough to get a hint when it was time to do these things, for the rest of you NOW might be a good time. A useful book for people living in Switzerland for all this kind of stuff we found is Beobachter's "So Regeln Sie die letzen Dinge" (How to arrange the last things) which even has templates to fill in for all these documents.

And what am I wearing to my funeral?
You'll have to wait and see, but I guarantee my bum won't be looking big in it.