Dear all:

There are close to 3,000 subscribers to this newsletter, which I find astonishing. At the same time, I’m keenly aware that many of you joined this list when I published my monthly estate planning newsletter or while I published Life/Death/Law, my podcast about end of life planning. What Gives? is different, but to my mind it is the logical next step.

Over the last 20+ years, my interests and my writing have continued to evolve: from the nuts and bolts of estate planning law to the immensity of planning for the end of life. Unwrapping the law of property transfer and demystifying end of life takes you right to the realization that nothing we have stays ours for long.

I’ve worked with thousands of people over the years, and the subjectivity of wealth was the most surprising thing that I witnessed. Some of my clients had very little and felt wealthy; others had millions of dollars and felt strapped. Everyone that I worked with was objectively rich — they were the ones with the means and the wherewithal to hire an attorney to write their estate plans. No one in my office was struggling with the necessity of getting enough food, water or shelter as so many do. And yet we spent very little time enjoying our mutual good fortune.

And so, as we move into this new year, my goal is to write about the people who are being generous now, or who have made generous legacies for us to enjoy, to talk to the scholars that study generosity in order to better understand what it is and how to foster it, and to find the books that inspire and illustrate the power that generosity holds for ourselves and our communities.

If my new focus doesn’t match yours, I understand. Unsubcribing is easy. But if you are at all interested in the imaginative possiblities of legacy building, I hope you’ll stay and join me in this exploration.

Wishing you all a happy new year.

Liza

Here’s the plan: On October 1st I’m going to ‘turn on’ the payment button for What Gives? and at that point, all existing pledges will turn into paid subscriptions, which I will then donate to a worthy cause.

By donating 100% of all payments received for my work on this newsletter, our exploration of generosity can also be a vehicle for it.

If you are an existing pledge holder and do not want your pledge donated, please go to your account and ‘unpledge’ before October 1st.

But consider this: “One of the quickest and easiest ways to get happier is to be generous,” Dan Harris said in a recent episode of his podcast, “Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris.”

According to the Cleveland Clinic, helping people and giving things to others can increase your ‘feel good’ chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin.

Chris Anderson, author of “Infectious Generosity,” writes that “we are wired to be generous…We feel each other’s pain. When we see another human suffering, we want to do something about it.”

How’s this for scientific validation? In a study that surveyed data from 136 countries, people who had reported giving to charity in the past year reported greater happiness, even after controlling for things like household income, age, gender, marital status, education and food inadequacy. In fact, happiness derived from donating to charity was on par with the level of happiness associated with a doubling of one’s household income.

So, I’d love it if some of you would be willing to pledge to support What Gives? and increase the amount that we, collectively, can give. For this first donation, I will donate to World Central Kitchen. They provide emergency food relief for devastated communities around the world.

Going forward, I hope to be able to offer a poll in our chat, so that people can vote for where future donations can go.

I’m looking forward to seeing how we can work together to explore generosity by doing it together.

Take care,

Liza

It’s July and we are drowning in fruit. Our peach tree, almost always reliable, produced hundreds of pounds of perfect fruit, all at the same time. Over the years we’ve learned to cope with the windfall of peaches, but this year our plum tree, after many years of producing only enough fruit to feed the backyard squirrels suddenly made so many plums that they began falling, like rain, in the evening. Add in a 10-day heat wave and suddenly we had both trees ripening at the exact same time and buckets of ripe fruit on hand. 

I have made many jars of jam, processing the fruit with boiling water on days when it was well over 100 degrees outside, thinking about the generations of women canning fruit in similar conditions without the luxury of central air conditioning. There’s been pie and fruit tarts and even the dehydrator was called into action. My husband has frozen many bags of peaches for the winter. As I write this, the plums are still thudding dramatically to the ground. 

And even so, as I hand out bags of the remaining fruit to our neighbors and friends, there’s a tiny voice in the back of my head wondering if we have ‘enough’ to share. The fruit, after all, is a finite quantity. The harvest will end soon. I hear this relentless inner voice and I cringe a little bit. If I’ve ever had ‘enough’ of something to share, it would be peaches and plums this July.  

Which is a long way of saying that is why I want to explore generosity in this newsletter, hopefully with a community of readers who also wonder how we often live in such abundance and yet struggle with the impulse to be generous. 

I don’t know about you, but I feel like I would benefit from making generosity an intentional practice, not an afterthought. That sense of scarcity is a deeply ingrained habit and this July’s harvest has made it abundantly clear (pun intended) that it often bears little relationship to truth. 

I hope What Gives can create a place for an honest discussion about generosity and a place to share stories that will inspire all of us to step up and be both more generous and more imaginative about what we have to offer each other. 

My favorite definition of generosity is from the University of Notre Dame’s Science of Generosity Project. They define generosity as “ the virtue of giving good things to others freely and abundantly.”  

So, to start us off, here’s a question: “What is one good thing that you have received from others? Why was that an important gift?” Please share in the chat. 

As recounted in his essay in the New York Times, Adam Tendler wasn’t expecting an inheritance after his father died unexpectedly. “My dad,” he writes, “was financially ambiguous and notoriously frugal, so I thought that if there even was one, it would be weird. I was right.”

When his stepmother handed him an envelope full of cash from his father, Adam decided to use the money to commission original work from composers about inheritance, however they chose to define and interpret that.

Two years later 16 composers had created 16 new solo works, in a show presented by Liquid Music that premiered in Minneapolis on April 23. The show then went to Los Angeles on July 10 and then to New York, where it was performed at the 92nd Street Y on March 11.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that the show would spark such a connection from the audience. Grief is a universal experience and music allows us a different way to connect to it and process it. To sit in a room with other people and allow ourselves to feel loss and hope, together, has been so rare these last few years. What a gift. Without organized religion and its rituals for grieving, so many of us meet death feeling alone and unmoored. In our culture that prizes speed, distraction and denial, grief can become just one more thing to avoid.

What a beautiful way to use a surprise inheritance. “These pieces,” Adam writes, “felt like bereavement gifts sent from friends.” I would love to hear them someday. And I would love for all of us who have lost a parent to consider how we might honor their memory and our relationship with them (no matter what that relationship was like) in some meaningful way.

Joe Kloc put it this way, when reflecting on Baldwin’s description of the cemetery as a library of completed lives: “I think I’m beginning to see what he means: a place to take stock of all the books on out-of-reach shelves and imagine the adventures they contain, before going off to have our own.”

I’ve also found graveyards to be contemplative and inspiring places, especially the old ones, like Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge Massachusetts, a place deliberately built in 1831 to invite the living in, rather than simply a place to warehouse the dead.

An afternoon exploring an old graveyard invites you to (even if just for one moment) understand your own death as a completely normal process, one that has gone on forever and will continue to go on long after you die. There’s something so comforting about the epitaphs, the gravestones, the trees, the quiet and the space.

To consider each life honored at a cemetery as one of many stories that will one day include your own is to reframe that place—from a place of loss to a place of continuity, a place of connection, a place of possibility. What kind of epitaph would you want on your grave? (I’d love to know, please post in the comments.)

There’s something luxuriously archaic about a graveyard. These days, more than half of us choose to be cremated, rather than buried, our ashes scattered, leaving no trace behind. While many people choose cremation out of a desire to be environmentally sensitive, it turns out that the incineration of bodies uses a lot of fossil fuel and the incineration process spreads the toxins our bodies contain to the atmosphere, to fall, elsewhere with the rain.

Cemeteries offer us, the living, a physical space to mourn our losses and honor our dead. Maybe, I’ve come to believe, we still need what they have to offer us. I’m not alone in this, and I’ll be writing more about this in future newsletters.

For now, let me offer you this thought: if you want to be buried without the embalming fluid, the grave vaults designed to keep a cemetery even and green, and the hoopla and expense surrounding modern American burial, you can. It’s called ‘green burial’ and 60% of people surveyed by the National Funderal Directors Association would be interested in it.

To learn more, please listen to my podcast episode with Elizabeth Fournier, the founder of Cornerstone Funeral Services, and the author of the Green Burial Guidebook (otherwise known as the Green Reaper): at lifedeathlaw.com. Here’s a link to the episode: https://www.lifedeathlaw.com/episodes/greenburial.

Yesterday, I finally pulled out the dried-out stalks of the zinnias, some 6 feet tall, that delighted me this summer and into the fall. I waited for a long time to do this, because I’m hoping that their seeds have fallen out of the dried flowers and will come up again in the spring, which, right now, seems like forever from now. I filled the space left by the zinnias with winter greens: collards, mustards, Asian greens, beets, and chard. Yesterday, my beds looked spent, crowded, tired. Today, they look hopeful, optimistic, full of potential, spacious. And all it took was a slight change of perspective and a willingness to pull out some stalks that had done their part to make room for something new. It’s easier in a garden, isn’t it?

Eleven years ago, tomorrow, I was standing by the sink in our kitchen, getting my kids ready for our annual 2-hour drive north on Christmas Eve to my husband’s parents’ house. And my mother called with some really bad news. The worst possible news—she was going to the hospital that morning. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had already spread to her liver. That, to anyone who doesn’t already know, is a terminal diagnosis for anyone, especially someone in their 80’s. I cannot think of another phone call with my mother, ever, in which she sobbed openly. Me too. Right there, right then, my world without her began to make itself known, lurking, a large, dark shape passing underneath the waves, a whisper barely heard, a shape in a darkened room, visible yet so hard to see.

The rest of that Christmas is a bit of a blur. I tried not to let my sadness ruin the moment for my kids, then 10 and 17, but, of course, the minute that I put the phone down, they knew. I’ve never had much of a poker face. Mostly I tried to spend time outside, alone, trying to breathe. Everything tasted like sand.

My mother made it to the New Year’s Eve party that she and her husband loved to attend, carried up the stairs no less. By the end of the month, she was dead. It happened so fast that it has taken me years to catch up.

What I couldn’t have known then is how often I still hear her voice in my mind and how much comfort I get from wearing her ring and watch every day. When faced with a major decision or challenge, I consult her still. We go for walks together in my mind.  I treasure the times that she appears in my dreams, which has happened only a handful of times since her death. My sister and I laugh about some of her most identifiable quirks—especially her, “I’ve been thinking” letters, which invariably led to a stern, and usually completely justified, rebuke. Just this week, my sister suggested that I send my 21-year old son one of them. My mom would have. He deserved it.

Despite the constant evidence of endless change (in my garden, in my family, in my body, in my marriage, in our world) it always takes me by surprise.  When those zinnias were at their peak, I gloried in the reds, oranges, yellows and forgot, conveniently, that by December they’d be brown. When my mother called with her terrible news, it was shocking, despite the fact that she’d been losing weight and energy for close to a year. As I write this, my adult kids are home for a few days and I’m sad that they’ll both be gone by the middle of next week and our house will be back to the two of us, the dog, and the cat who stops by for meals a few times a day.

I hate the shortness of the winter days and yearn for summer. As if, somehow, my feelings about any of it can hasten or delay the inevitable. Every day, now, is a fraction of a minute longer already. When I stop and think about it, this is excellent news. It is rather thrilling, isn’t it, to be on such a wild ride? And yet, most days, there I am, on the roller coaster, gripping that safety bar as tight as I possibly can, eyes closed, breath held, bracing myself against each turn.

There she was, Joni Mitchell, on the Newport Folk Festival stage, surrounded by musicians, in a regal chair, singing the songs so many of us grew up on. Her first public performance in seven years, after having to relearn how to walk, sing and play guitar after suffering a brain aneurysm. It was her first full-length set in more than 20 years. She rocked the festival with her courage, her honesty and her art. It was impossible to listen without being moved to tears.

But for me it was also deeply disorienting to see an icon of my own youth on stage so clearly old and disabled, no matter how brave and resilient. In my mind’s eye, she’s still in her early 30’s, which makes me 17, and we are both there forever and unchanging—perfect, youthful, our futures only in front of us.

Appearing on stage last week, surrounded by younger musicians who clearly venerated her, Joni Mitchell challenged the notion that to age is to be only diminished and increasingly invisible. By claiming her rightful place in the center of that stage in the center of that festival, where she first appeared in 1967, her performance confirmed her continued value both as an elder and as an artist. “Listen to me,” her voice commanded, “I’ve still got plenty to say to all of you.”

When she sang:

“I’ve looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It’s life’s illusions that I recall

I really don’t know life at all,”

I couldn’t help but reflect on how meaningful those words were to me then and to me now. As a teenager, I was trying to make sense of adulthood, knowing that I’d left childhood behind; Today, I watch my own children grow into adults, my friends retire, and all of the members of my parents’ generation die. If anything, that uncertainty and that fluidity, that sense that everything solid drifts away like clouds, has only expanded as I’ve grown older.

I find it infuriating when older people are characterized as ‘cute’ or spoken down to or condescended to. To me, the people who make it to old age are admirable and fierce. We owe them our respect.

As an estate planner, I’ve watched many people drift away into confusion, losing their cognitive capacities—some gradually and others quickly. Lifetimes of achievements and accolades are forgotten in the daily struggle to remember the simplest of things—the names of their children, the day of the week, the reason for our meetings. And even that confusion can come and go. I will never forget the time a woman who was clearly lost suddenly looked at me, clearly, and thanked me for my patience in explaining to things to her. “It’s hard,” she said, “to understand today, thank you for repeating things to me.”

I’ve seen so many people struggle through illness and physical diminishment—doing their best to remain capable in the face of debilitating weakness: the 90 year old and her best friend in her 80’s who went out every week (until they couldn’t) to do bodywork for strength and flexibility; the retired engineer whose current joy was working as a crossing guard for the elementary school down the street; the woman whose passion for genealogical research filled 30 volumes over 10 years; the woman who carried her oxygen equipment in a beautiful Japanese basket as she walked; the men determined to flirt well into their 90’s, much to the horror of their adult children.

Mostly I see tremendous strength and resolve, like Joni’s, to carry on despite it all, for as long as it is possible to do so, even in the face of old age, sickness, and, eventually (of course) death.

When she sang:

“Oh, but now old friends they’re acting strange

And they shake their heads and they tell me that I’ve changed

Well something’s lost, but something’s gained

In living every day,”

I thought to myself, how on earth could she have written that song in her twenties?! She captures the sentiment I’ve seen so often, and what makes it a privilege to work with people as they reach the end of their lives—a kind of grace in knowing that all we ever have is this day, and, if we are lucky, the next.

All of us, eventually, discover the truth of the matter. And like any really big moment of insight, there’s always a before and an after. For me, it was just a few days after my son was born. He’s 21 now, so, it’s been awhile.

We were sitting outside on the front porch. He, swaddled, still bearing the mysterious red marks of birth. Me, exhausted, sore, hormonal, trying to remember the language of babies as this one squirmed in my arms, muscular, lithe, so alert. The narcissus were in full bloom at the end of March, filling the air with their sweet, slightly overpowering, perfume. It was going to be, I thought, an early summer.  

Then the phone rang, as it so often does in detective fiction and melodramas.

It was an old friend, calling, she said, “with some bad news, I’m afraid.” Another mutual friend, she told me, had died the day before, ejected from a car that stopped suddenly to avoid a deer bounding across the road near Tilden Park. She was driving to fetch her seven-year old’s forgotten baseball glove with her soon-to-be-ex spouse. She was not wearing a seat-belt. It was a convertible. Her head hit a tree.

My son huddled against me, nursing. My husband continued watering the plants. My five-year old daughter sensed my distress and came over. For a long moment there was only disbelief, then bird sounds, then the warmth of the afternoon sun. Then a crushing sense of exhaustion and weight, like the lead apron the dentist uses to protect you from X-rays. Then surprise. Then anger. Finally, tears.

I remembered an afternoon when I was in college, sunning myself in a meadow between classes. Suddenly I heard a guttural rattle of doors and windows and watched an earthquake ripple through the grasses, felt the earth move as a wave across the field. What was solid was liquid, if only for a moment. I was the only one there. In the instant before everyone came running out of the library, I considered the possibility that I had imagined the whole thing.

The moment before that call was the last moment that I could feel only one thing, exclusively, at a time.  Now, joy and sorrow are always mixed—the way that honey can taste both impossibly sweet but also savory, in the finish.

Looking back, I can remember the day that she and I left our toddlers behind, climbed into sea kayaks and navigated Puget Sound. I can see the sun’s reflections on the water, I can feel the wind, I can taste the salt spray. It is almost unbearable to recall my certainty, then, that there would be more days like this.

After she died, her friends gathered to clean out her house, deciding what to save for her son and what to share. Twenty-one years later, I still sit in her office chair at work. Impossibly, that day her earrings hung in pairs on a wire grid above her dresser—organized by color. She was a graphic designer to the end.

Turntable

Dollhouse

Leather jacket

Kayak

Gargoyle

Solid. Liquid. Permanent. Temporary. Always. Never.

That day the distance between birth and death was inconceivable and indistinguishable. The moment before that call and the moment after it was endless. Holding Sam, feeling him breathe in and out, marveling at the solidity of his tiny, warm body I felt fierce, protective. Terrified.

I’d like to report that what I lost in certainty that day I gained in gratitude. But to be honest, I constantly forget. I still believe that the ground is solid beneath me, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the constant reminders that nearly everything that matters is outside of my control.

If every family could acknowledge how fleeting our time together really is, would we prioritize taking time to create memories together? Would our legacies feel more worthy of protecting?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks.