Of Sound Mind and Memory: On Wills and Language and Lawyers and Love

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Preamble

I, _____________, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, hereby declare this to be my Last Will and Testament. …

Before I became a writer of novels, I was a writer of wills at the oldest law firm in Rhode Island. The firm was founded by two attorneys in 1818, but by the time I was hired as an estate planning paralegal, 160 years had passed and there were now fifty-some lawyers, almost all male, a like number of staff, almost all female, and a roster of prominent clients, almost all inanimate. The clients were banks and hospitals, manufacturers and developers, municipalities and Brown University.

But one of the few services the firm performed for actual individuals was the work I did in the Trusts and Estates department. If you needed a will, especially in those days when there were no downloadable legal forms because there wasn't any Internet, you could call us. One of the lawyers would meet with you, have you fill out a questionnaire—your family members, your assets, your wishes. Then he'd give the questionnaire to me, and I'd determine and prepare the kind of will and other estate-planning instruments you needed.

I was twenty-six when I arrived and meant to stay for only a short while, only until I figured out who I was supposed to be. But I was slow—"I've heard of late bloomers," my second husband would one day say to me, "but, honey, you're kale"—and I wound up staying nearly twenty years. Even then, when I left to get an MFA at a two-year program in the Midwest, I thought I was taking a leave of absence, that I'd get my degree and return to Providence and my job, where I'd write wills by day, novels by night. Had I not stumbled into a university teaching position, that's almost certainly what I'd have done. Would maybe be doing right now.

But I got this tenure-track gig in Wisconsin, and I never returned. So I guess it was good that, even though the understanding was that I'd be back, the firm went ahead and threw me a going-away party. Toward the end of it, workday blurring into evening, one of the attorneys came up to me. He was drinking white wine from a mug with the firm's name stenciled on it. "Just what the world needs," he said. "Another poet."

I told him not to worry, that I was leaving to write fiction, not poetry. "But, of course," I said, "I've been writing poetry all along."

He rolled his eyes, held the mug out as if in a toast, but it was just sarcasm. "Only you," he said, "could look at a will and see poetry."

Article First: Payment of Expenses

I direct my executor to pay my just debts and funeral expenses, the expenses of my last illness, and the expenses of administering my estate. …

So maybe the poetry doesn't exactly jump out at you. If wills really were poems, wouldn't there be more concision? Less obfuscation? When contemplating the just debts of the dying, wouldn't a poet suggest that these debts might include the unremittable: love unexpressed, moral obligations unfulfilled? When writing of last illnesses and funerals, wouldn't poets fume or fret or express regret? Wouldn't there be at least a little raging, raging against the "dying of the light"?

And yet, when you think about it, the will is essentially the story of a person called, in good old allegorical fashion, Testator, and Testator is on a journey. At every stop along the way, something that once mattered is cast away. Sell my home, Testator says. Give away the bed I slept in and the wedding ring I wore. Divide my wealth among those I leave behind. Burn my body and let others care for my...