Please do this before you die. I just did and it nearly killed me

This is a clear-cut case of “do as I say, not as I do”. Well, I’ve done it. I’ve fixed my embarrassing inability to come to terms with adulthood. Being face-to-face with death (not my own), I recognised I had to get my own life in order. This is the one thing you have to do before you die – and I finally did it.

Read the story about Andrew Findlay, the bloke who died in a freak boating accident. Findlay’s former partner and their children now face a legal battle over his multimillion-dollar fortune and a trophy home in Sydney’s Centennial Park.

The late Andrew Findlay and his former partner Liz Kemp, who has launched proceedings in the NSW Supreme Court over his multimillion-dollar estate.Credit: Matthew Tompsett

Then wonder how it is that a person who had a serious responsible job and a complicated personal life could possibly have died without a will which reflected his intentions. Then take a good look in the mirror.

Chances are you will join about half the adult population, who hasn’t thought about it, don’t want to do it, think they have nothing to bequeath. And that’s not even counting the ones among us who have wills we signed off on a gazillion years ago. That was the situation with Andrew Findlay. Until a year ago, it was also me.

Having kids concentrates your mind (or completely shatters it, you pick). So when our eldest was born, we started to think about the future. By the time we got to No.3, we wrote a will and assigned our kids and assets (such as they were) to our closest friends with kids the same age. We loved these folks. Saw them all the time.

But time passes. Listen, time passes.

Illustration by Simon LetchCredit:

That was 10 years ago and then double that. We moved. They moved. Our kids grew apart. But still, that was our last will and testament. And it wasn’t until my sainted mother-in-law died that we had to take a good long look at ourselves. The will we had was hopeless. It treated our kids as if they were chattels (they are indeed the goods, but don’t belong to anyone but themselves). And that was in clear contrast to my mother-in-law, whose will was crystal. Divvy it up among yourselves. I could practically hear her add “... and don’t argue either”.

Turns out Australians suck at making wills. Maybe we have convinced ourselves that we are young and free and the thought of coming face to face with our mortality is too scary for words.

I’ll tell you what’s more scary than dying. And that’s leaving behind a hell of a mess for our children or whatever else you’ve got going on. I knew in my heart death was not just for old people but not even that hint of common sense made me do anything about it for years. It made me sadder than I thought possible. Love. Loss. And I hadn’t even gone anywhere yet. Bloody weirdo.

I was young when my father died and not much older when I lost my mother – but their wills were pretty clear-cut. My will was ridiculous. Unlike Katy Barnett, mother of three. Sure, she also happens to be a professor of law at the University of Melbourne, which probably makes her more sensible than most of us.

As soon as she had baby No.1, she and her husband sorted their wills.

“People don’t want to think about wills because they don’t want to think about death or a world without them,” she says.

I so get that. But what if what happened to Andrew Findlay – and the absolutely lovely Indigenous art specialist Tim Klingender, who died in the same accident – happened to you? A freak accident. An unexpected speedy illness. You don’t get time to make your wishes known. Evidently, Findlay kept telling people he planned to sign his new will, but he never did.

By all accounts, Findlay was a really decent bloke. I can’t imagine he would have wanted his children (all under 10 I think) to be at the centre of an ugly row about money. Because that’s what’s happening in this case. Liz Kemp, Findlay’s very former partner, and their children are now embroiled in a legal battle to decide how Findlay’s posthumous pie is divvied up. And if he were anything like us, he would have said to himself, often, “I must get that sorted.”

Barnett tells me that when she was a judge’s associate, back in the day, on what was then the Wills and Estates list, she had a special box of tissues for litigants.

“It always ended with someone crying,” she recalls.

It’s not the first dramatic case regarding wills we’ve seen recently. Kris Schroder, a Victorian forensic psychologist, lost an appeal earlier this year after she was convicted of fraudulently changing her partner’s will to exclude all the partner’s family. Schroder had stood to inherit a substantial sum anyway. But that wasn’t enough.

Look, it’s human nature to want more. I get that. But you make life so much easier for everyone if you write it all down and get it sorted legally. Not to say that is necessarily the case for Kemp, Barnett rather speaks from her own experience: “Fights about wills are proxy for other unresolved family issues.”

It’s about anger and resentment and who was the favourite and why didn’t you get more. Put aside your inhibitions about death, and treat the living fairly.

Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.