Financial Intimacy by Jacquette M. Timmons

Author:Jacquette M. Timmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2010-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

Death Always Comes Too Soon

Toni

Sad but true: none of us are exempt from mortality. Sadder still is the fact that we never know “the day or the hour.” Some of us will die after a long battle with an illness; others will die unexpectedly. In either case, the death of a spouse is the second leading reason for the dissolution of a marriage.

As much as I know death is a fact of life, it is not one I easily embrace. Yet in an interesting twist of fate, I might not have been inspired to create the “Women, Money, and Romance” workshop that preceded this book or to write this book itself were it not for the questions death prompted me to ask. Just as we have a tendency not to talk about money substantively, we also tend to shy away from having similar conversations about death.

Yet, the relationship between death, grief, and money is almost inextricable when it comes to the death of a spouse or significant other with whom your finances are entwined. And one of the things I think is unbelievably unfair about life is that it asks you to make decisions that can potentially have far-reaching consequences while you are in an altered state. I have observed how a widow’s grieving process can be interrupted by the discovery of what is unknown or partially known as she goes about making these important decisions.

On February 6, 2003, I was struck with a deep, piercing pain I had never experienced before. This was the day Deno, a dear friend who was like an older brother, died of a brain aneurysm; it was two days after his forty-first birthday.

He was too young for the arms of death to touch him; his wife, Marcie, my college roommate, was too young to be a widow; and their daughter was too young to be without a father who adored her.

Deno and Marcie were together for nineteen years, and during their entire marriage they never commingled their assets. His sudden death brought to light just how little she knew about his finances, particularly his investments.

A month after Deno passed away, the father of my friend Annette died. Though he had been battling an illness for several years, his death was still a surprise. However, a bigger surprise awaited my friend’s mother, who had been married to her husband for almost forty years. Unbeknownst to her, her husband had accumulated $500,000 in debt. To avoid being obligated for this debt and to protect what assets she could, she declared bankruptcy.

It has been ten years since Toni lost her husband, Jim, to cancer. Like Marcie, Toni was also widowed at a young age, thirty-eight, making them, according to the Census Bureau’s statistics as of 2003, two of the 4.2 million women who lost their spouses before the age of forty-five. It is common knowledge that women generally outlive their husbands, but I was surprised at how many women are widowed at such a young age. I

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