Death Is Inevitable. Chaos Is Not.

There is a folder on my phone called Bathroom Tile. It has forty-one photographs in it. Forty-one. I compared grout colours for almost a month, for a room I stand in for a few minutes a day.

I'm not embarrassed by that. Anyone who knows me wouldn’t be remotely surprised and it's evidence of something true about myself and many other women. We are extraordinary planners. We build spreadsheets for a five-year-old's birthday party. We read crash-test data before choosing a car seat. We open an education fund for a baby who can't hold up his own head yet, all on the reasonable assumption that in eighteen years there's going to be a tuition bill.

Look at what all of that has in common. Every one of those plans is for something that might not happen. The wedding can be called off. The child might never go to university. Yet we pour so much care into the maybes.

And then there's the one certainty. It's coming for every person you love and for you, and half of Canadian adults say they don't have a will, the most essential planning document, at all. Another one in eight has one that's out of date, which leaves roughly a third of us with a current will, and seven in ten have never signed a power of attorney. (Angus Reid Institute, 2023; LawPRO.)

Why capable people leave this undone

The gap isn't laziness and it isn't ignorance. Psychologists have a name for part of it. Optimism bias, the quiet conviction that the statistically likely thing will happen to somebody else. We can recite the odds and still file ourselves as the exception.

Underneath that sits something older and less reasonable. A suspicion that planning invites. That if you write it down you've called it closer, put the idea in the air where it can hear you. Very few people will say that sentence out loud because it sounds superstitious. An enormous number believe it anyway. I've watched perfectly rational adults go quiet in their own kitchens at the word will.

Then there's ordinary avoidance, the most human of the three. Later. When things settle down. When I'm older. Older is a moving target and always has been. Nobody reaches the day where they feel ready. Avoidance may feel like protecting yourself. But what it actually does is move the cost onto someone else, and decide when they'll pay it.

What the not-planning costs

My mother died when she was forty-two. I was in my early twenties.

The morning after, I was on my knees in her bedroom closet, pulling down shoeboxes of receipts, looking for anything that might tell me what she would have wanted. There was no time for final conversations. No instructions, no passwords, no plan. Every single decision that week was a guess.

Here is the part I didn't understand until years later, when I started sitting with other people in their same week. The grief was one thing. The guessing was another thing entirely… and it sometimes lasted even longer. Grief softens and changes shape, but guessing hardens. It becomes a question you carry: did I get it right? Would she have hated that? Twenty years on, I am still turning over if I made the right decision about donating my mom’s organs.

Guessing about someone you love is its own kind of grief, and it's also a kind that's preventable.

In most families there's somebody everyone describes the same way: they'll handle it, they’re good at that. That person becomes typically becomes the executor, and settling an estate takes about twenty months on average, running alongside a job and a household and their own grief. I've written more about what we ask of that person in The One Who Handles Everything. The short version is that the plan you leave decides how much of those twenty months is work, and how much is guesswork.

The part nobody expects

Something happens to people when they make a plan. They start a bit anxious, braced. They expect the afternoon to be morbid, or at minimum grim, and they've usually rescheduled it once or twice. Something is almost always more urgent. Then a few hours later they're lighter than when they started. Not solemn. Relieved. Proud.

I think the reason is simple. The dread was never really about dying. Dread is what fear does when you refuse to look at a thing directly, and it grows in exactly the space where you won't look. Once the thing is on paper with a name and a date and a phone number beside it, it stops being a shadow and becomes a task, and tasks are finite. People can do finite.

The other thing that happens is even better. When you write down who matters, what you'd want, what you'd refuse, what you'd like said, you're describing your own life while you're still inside it. Almost everyone changes something afterward. They call the brother. They plan the trip they've been deferring. They stop giving away their Sundays to people who don't deserve them. Planning for tomorrow can help you live with more intention today.

Death is inevitable. Chaos is not. The distance between those two sentences could be one afternoon your family might thank you for, decades from now.