Grief Arrives With a Clipboard

Thirteen years ago this week, my parents died together in a car accident. This episode isn't mostly about the grief. It's about the part the sympathy cards leave out: the logistics. Four hundred drawers. A saw my dad carried from house to house for a lifetime, and the question neither my brother nor I could answer. Why this saw?

It took me years to see that we weren't sorting objects that week. We were sorting knowledge that had lived inside exactly two people and now lived nowhere. When the translators are gone, the objects stop speaking.

According to Caring.com's 2025 Wills and Estate Planning Study, only 24% of Americans have a will, down from 33% in 2022. My parents were boringly normal. So are most of us.

This week's tool is a single document called If Something Happens. It's a free template. I hope you find it useful. http://www.yourthirdthird.com/resources/IfSomethingHappens.pdf

The challenge: if something happened to you tomorrow, what's the one object in your house whose meaning would disappear with you? Email the story to steve@yourthirdthird.com.

Here's the substack if you want to subscribe: https://substack.com/@yourthirdthird

Source: Caring.com, 2025 Wills and Estate Planning Study (with YouGov). caring.com/resources/wills-survey

Transcript

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Thirteen years ago, I'm standing in the middle of my parents' house with my brother David. People who know us sometimes ask about that time about their accident or their funeral. What stays with me most happened after in their house, surrounded by fifty years of a life they had built together. I never before noticed how many drawers they had in their house. Every one of them was holding something that used to have a reason, even if that reason had long since skipped town. You could smell the things before you could see them, old wood and older paper inside those drawers, keys that opened nothing that we recognized, cords saved for machines that died years before their owners did. My brother and I clearing out their garage. My dad's collection of tools. I picked up a wood saw, used once as far as either of us could tell, carried from house to house for a lifetime anyway, wrapped up, packed, unpacked, set down in a new place to wait being used. David held it up. Neither of us could answer the question why this saw? Dad would have known. Or more likely he'd have a funny answer ready before we finished asking. But here's what surprised me. Thirteen years later the funeral comes second in my memory. The drawers, they come first. Don't call it a comeback! I've been here for being. Well, that script runs out of pages. This week marks 13 years since my parents, Marty and Marlene, died together in a car accident. Sudden. Both of them in the same moment. Well this episode starts with grief, and then we'll spend most of the time on the administrative shadow that grief drags in behind it. You know, the the forms, the phone calls, the passwords, the drawers. And it ends with one document that you could write this month that would that would spare the people you love the experience that David and I had. Quick housekeeping, by the way, if the show is useful to you, subscribe to it wherever you're listening. And if you're already subscribed and you care to leave us a review, please review us on whatever platform that you use, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. There's a half dozen. There's a written version of some of this over on my Substack. There's a link to my Substack Your Third Third in the show notes. Though today goes places that that article doesn't. Back to the drawers. Here's what I'm learning. Well, grief is emotional. Of course it is. But what caught me off guard is that grief is also a job. Forums to sign, accounts to close, calls to call centers that put you on hold for an hour. Bills keep arriving like nothing happened because as far as the electric company knows, nothing did. Press one, then four, then hold for a representative who really values our business. But they also really need to speak with the account holder who is dead. So there you are trying to remember the exact sound of your mother's voice while you're on the phone with the DMV about a wrecked Toyota Camry. There's no long goodbye when it's sudden, no kitchen table conversation where your parents tell you what matters and where things are. You get a phone call from the highway patrol instead. And then an empty house. We turned into detectives inside a museum of two entire lives, and the museum had no placards and no one left to ask. I don't recommend taking that job, but it is assigned to you nonetheless. The stuff sorted itself into categories I didn't expect. I mean jewelry was easy. Everybody already knows what an engagement ring means. The hard ones were the middle things. A bowl of quarters on Dad's dresser, worthless and priceless at the same time. A garage full of screws in glass jars. Everyone I recognized instantly and will never see again. I think David might still have them in his garage. How many screws does one man need? Where do they even come from? Every object came with a decision, keep it, give it away, donate it, toss it. Or do what we did most, which was set it down and deal with it next week. Hundreds hundreds of small decisions together, heavy enough to flatten you. It took me years to understand what we were actually doing in that house at that time. On the surface we were sorting objects. Underneath, sorting knowledge, the kind that lived inside exactly two people and now lived nowhere. You know, every family runs on knowledge you can't see. A password, a recipe that exists in someone's head instead of on a card, which face in the photo is your great aunt and which one is a neighbor who just happened to be standing near the photographer in 1963. And when the translators are gone, the objects stop speaking. Before I build a whole world view out of one grief-soaked week in an entire lifetime, I went looking for the research. I wanted to know if my parents were unusual. Turns out they were boringly normal. I found that caring.com runs a wills and estate planning study every year. Their uh numbers done last year in a survey that they did with Ugov, they surveyed more than 2,500 American adults, and here's the number that stuck out for me. 24% of people had a will. 24%, down from 33% in 2022. More than half of American adults have no will at all. And a will is the easy one, the document everyone's at least heard of. The top reason that people gave for not doing it? Procrastination. They meant to, they just hadn't gotten around to it. My parents had a will. And at the bottom of the will, even a note to David and I. We love you. Please share everything and don't fight over anything. They meant to make it easier eventually. My parents were generous people. My mom saved anything that held a memory. My dad kept every screw because I'm guessing someday it might save the day. Every so often maybe it did. Yeah, they meant to make it easier. But time never RSVPs. It runs out anyway. I understand the avoiding. I do it too. We tell ourselves we're protecting the people that we love. We don't want to turn a Sunday dinner conversation into a seminar with our kids around how it all ends and what to do. So we stay vague. We say, Well, you'll figure it out. We let us believe that love can stand in for instructions. Well, I learned that it can't. Your family can love you completely and still have no idea where you kept the title to the car, which they will need. What might have made that week easier for David and I turns out to be small, almost embarrassingly small, compared to everything else. You know, names on the back of photographs, a list of the accounts, where to find the passwords. A few sentences about which objects carried stories for them, and which were only stuff. I've tried to imagine the letter I wish they'd left. It might have gone something like this Keep what you want. Let go of the rest without asking my permission first. I'm giving it to you now in advance for everything. I would have stood in that house and read it and felt for the first time in days like someone had left the light on for me. I should write that letter for my own kids. I haven't. Not the whole thing. The the passwords part is done because passwords don't really ask anything for you. The part where I say what actually matters and give my kids permission to let the rest go. You know that page has been blank. I know exactly why my parents never finished theirs. I'm doing the same thing right now while I'm telling you not to. Actually, that's not entirely true anymore. I did write a version for myself. I sent it out as a link in my substack. I'll put a link in the show notes. If you want the blank template, uh not my filled out one, it's in the show notes. I guess my realization is you're allowed to let the stuff just be stuff. The meaning is the fragile part because once the translators are gone, it's the one thing that we can't rebuild. But what I've learned is that without that, love slowly turns into storage. And storage given enough time, storage becomes confusion with dust on it. This is a vulnerable episode, uh but I can't stand it when somebody gives you a tool and pretends that their own life is fully sorted when they give you a tool. Clearing out my parents' house did not turn me into a model of organization. I still buy stuff, you know, supplies for a future version of myself who apparently intends to become a serious gardener despite a long track record of killing houseplants. That future Steve is going to be magnificent. I keep funding him. Anyway, there is this one thing that I did do. It's a single document. I call it If something happens. Smaller than a trust, simpler than a binder, anybody who loves you can open it and actually use it. Five things go in it in order. Who to call first, where the important documents live, where the passwords live. Which objects carry stories? A line or two each. You know, this watch was your grandfather's. This photo is the apartment in Michigan. This one's a neighbor. I have no idea which neighbor, but your grandmother laughed every time she saw the photo. And fifth, which objects they're free to let go without a second thought. Permission written down in advance. Might be the most generous line in your entire document. I think it works because it's specific and because it exists. I turned it into a template for myself because a blank page is a miserable place to start anything hard. So the download links in the show notes. You can fill in the blanks and tell one person you trust where to find it. That's the whole challenge for this week. So here's one question for you to think about. If something happened to you tomorrow, what's the one object in the house whose meaning would vanish along with you? Write in your note that explains your version of the saw. You know the thing that turns into confusion with dust on it because you're the only person alive who knows that story? And if you want to, share it with me. I'm Steve at your third third dot com. That's Steve at your third third dot com. Tell me the object and the story behind it, in as many or as few words as you like. I'm collecting these. I have a hunch they add up to something bigger. And if enough of you write in your stories will help me with a future episode. If this one landed and something came to mind, a sibling, a friend, your parents, well, maybe this is the episode to forward to them. And a reminder subscribe wherever you're listening. It's the best way to help the next person in their third third help find us. I'm Steve Gershik, and this is our third third.