Two things in life are certain, death and taxes. Even though we know that everyone eventually dies, we still have trouble dealing with such a loss. There is a welter of emotions all jumbled together when someone passes on. One of these emotions that comes into play is anger, how dare that person die, leave us, how fair is it that your loved one dies and that no good rat keeps on going? Coupled with sibling rivalry and family squabbles over estates are usually pretty common. The Bible tells us that Jesus was asked by a man, tell my brother to divide the estate with me, Jesus let the man know that was not what he was there for. In our country Jesus does not divide estates either, it is the job of the executor to carry out the deceaseds wishes. My dad passed away from a stroke last February, he was an active 79 year old man, there was no lingerring illness, he had the stroke and passed three days later in the hospital, he always used to say, a bad case of dying will put a man in bed for days. My dad made me the executor of his estate, when I agreed to it when he asked me I did not know what the duties would entail, but like many things in my life I sort of learn on the job. His will was pretty simple, after the bills were paid, everything was to be divided between his children, there were eight of us, from two marriages. But I have a nack for making simple things complicated, the first thing that we did was make state quarters sets for his grandchildren, then I realized that I was violating the terms of his wishes, some of us have three children some of us have none. That was not fair, so I assigned a value of 33 dollars for set and started a log of what items people wanted and what their values would be. So far there has not been any overlapping wants, but the rules I made was that in case two wanted the same thing, they would bid on it, what they think it was worth, taking items from the estate and putting a value on them let everyone have some keepsakes. I knew that my dad had collected coins back in the 60s, and that he had amassed a large quantity of state quarters, but I did not know he still had a pretty large collection, researching those coins took quite a bit of time, and I will admit that along with getting the house and yard in shape to sell, that I did not do as thourough a job as I could have. I assigned values for most coins as bullion, checking for key and semikey dates, (not variations, and not errors) and giving the value of silver as 9 times face. I tried to put a value depending on what a person should get if they sold it. I checked myself on some coins that were more collectable by paying for appraisals of them by different dealers, the rule of thumb is 10 percent variation. I made lists of estate items along with their values and sent them to family members, telling them to ask for what they want. Some family members felt bad about that, those were dads things, but I have to remind them that if they do not want or take them they will be sold, better that if you want something that you should have it rather than a stranger. Like I said along with the emotions associated with mourning and natural sibling rivalry, estates can sometimes bring out or create animosities, I have tried to redirect that natural animosity to our lawyer, which it seems to me a good purpose for an attorney. We have the estate account set up, the house and yard are starting to take shape, everyone has recieved items from the estate, we are getting ready to sell items to friends and acquaintances, they say it takes about a year or so to settle an estate, it has been about 4 1/2 months so far. I have put in about 160 hours on it, not counting time spent writing letters to medical billing places. I think sometimes it may be harder for survivors who are not the executor, part of the way I have been mourning has been to clean dads house, to box up items, to make lists, to do all those sorts of things, perhaps it is a form of avoiding thinking by keeping busy. I know that sometimes I think that I have become closer to my dad by doing this job.
