Candace sat at her husband’s bedside, watching his measured breath as he slept or endured whatever unresponsive state he was right then in. Sometimes, he awoke and opened his eyes, but only for a brief moment, and not of clarity but of confusion or even panic. In those moments, he seemed not to hear Candace’s reassuring words or feel her squeeze of his hand. But thankfully, he would soon close his eyes again, to sink back down in the nursing home’s bed. After each of these brief troubling but also somehow precious and important moments, Candace would take a deep breath of both thanks and relief, and herself close her eyes for prayer. Soon, very soon the nurses said, her husband would pass. Candace wondered whether that moment, too, would be a precious mix of trouble, distress, and relief.
Passing
Helping one another navigate the final journey of passing is the last act of love and care married couples share. Giving due attention together to that process of passing can help one another maintain the greatest possible degree of comfort, peace, security, and assurance, while avoiding fear, confusion, and chaos. Think of the process of helping one another toward and through demise as the last and greatest act of love and greatest witness to the beauty, tenderness, strength, and devotion of your marriage. Help one another navigate passing in grace, poise, and confidence, and you will immeasurably bless not only your spouse but also your children and grandchildren, while reassuring your community. The confident, orderly, and celebratory passing of you and your spouse is the capstone to the broader legacy that you leave as a married couple.
Planning
The earliest part of the process of a married couple’s passing involves estate planning. An estate is an artificial construct providing for the identification, management, and distribution of the decedent’s accumulated interests, according to the decedent’s instructions, if any, and according to state law if none. You and your spouse have the opportunity, and in some respects the expectation and even obligation, of planning for how your adult children or others manage and distribute the property you leave behind. If you and your spouse hold any significant property interests, you and your spouse should together form an estate plan, including retaining an estate planning attorney to prepare the necessary documents. You and your spouse should put at least a preliminary estate plan in place as soon as you acquire any significant property or have children, for whose guardianship while still minors your estate plan would provide. Don’t wait to put an estate plan in place until you or your spouse have a terminal illness. Start with a simple plan in your thirties or forties, refine the plan in your fifties and sixties, and ensure the plan’s appropriateness in your seventies or eighties if you have the good fortune to live that long. Revisit the plan with any significant change in family relationships such as the passing of your spouse, divorce, remarriage, or the birth or death of children or grandchildren.
Inheritance
If you and your spouse have an estate plan, the wills that you each execute will provide for your children, grandchildren, or other designees to inherit your property. You and your spouse can specify, right down to the last silver fork and spoon if you wish, who receives what tangible items or intangible interests, or what percentage of the total value of your estate after costs of administration. If, instead, you and your spouse fail to form an estate plan and execute the necessary documents, then the property that you and your spouse own will pass on your death by the state’s laws of intestacy. Those laws tend to provide for interests to pass first to the surviving spouse and then to living children, or if the other spouse has already passed, then straight to living children. But laws of intestacy can vary from state to state, and the desires that you and your spouse have for who receives what specific property or proportion of your wealth may vary even more from the laws of intestacy. Prepare a thoughtful estate plan with your spouse. Designate one another as the personal representative of the other’s estate so that you can control and manage affairs if the other should pass first, unless one of you is incapable of sound management, in which case designate a trusted adult child or, if none are willing and available, a professional or institutional representative. Don’t leave the disposition of your property to the state’s assumptions of what most people would prefer, when you and your spouse may have very different ideas for the best disposition of your property.
Foundation
If you and your spouse have more-substantial property than you wish to convey all at once upon your demise, and you wish to continue to support a charitable cause, forming a family foundation may be an option. A foundation is a tax-advantaged charitable entity funded by a single person, family, or corporation. Your family foundation would survive your demise to continue to pursue its charitable mission. Your children could direct, manage, or otherwise maintain an association with your foundation that could give purpose to their own lives while preserving and advancing your legacy. You may alternatively be able to establish a fund in your family name and for your chosen charitable cause at your community’s foundation. Consult a qualified attorney regarding your options.
Trust
If you and your spouse wish to convey property or funds to your minor or mentally disabled children, who lack the ability or maturity or other faculties and disposition to manage the funds, you and your spouse may establish a trust for their benefit. A competent and trusted adult child or professional may manage the trust for their benefit, while keeping them from invading and wasting the funds. In that way, you and your spouse can provide for a minor child to their maturity, upon which they can receive and control the funds, or for a mentally disabled adult child or adult child incapable of conserving funds throughout their lives, for as long as the funds may last. If your spouse is not competent to manage financial affairs or is vulnerable to influence, a trust may also be an option for your spouse’s welfare after your demise. Your pour-over will can fund the trust at your demise. Consult a qualified attorney regarding the advantages, cost, and management of a trust. What greater legacy of care can you and your spouse leave your family than to ensure their financial support, even when they are unable to manage funds for themselves?
Guardianship
Another potentially critical action you and your spouse can take as soon as you have a child is to name a preferred guardian for your child in the event of the sudden demise of both you and your spouse. You and your spouse may name in your wills a preferred guardian or married co-guardians, such as a trusted sibling and their spouse, a parent or parents still young enough to care for a child, or trusted married friends. You and your spouse would of course consult in advance with the guardians you name in the event of your sudden passing, to get their agreement and consent. Designations in your will are advisory to the probate court that would review and confirm an appropriate guardian or guardians, but your desires should at a minimum carry great weight. While guardian designations in your will would only be effective upon your demise, you and your spouse may also execute powers of attorney for limited guardianship of a minor child, to empower a trusted relative or friend to care for your child while you and your spouse travel, complete military service, recover during hospitalization, or are otherwise incapable of that care. A power of attorney for guardianship of a minor child may enable your child’s designated guardian to authorize emergency medical treatment and other necessary services for your child. You and your spouse can in this way show your care for your child or children, in your absence or after your demise.
Healthcare
Helping one another access and manage healthcare in the final years, weeks, and days of illness or decline leading to passing is a first act of care. Take constant interest in one another’s medical health. Help one another pay attention to health, reminding one another of the need for checkups, follow ups, lab tests, and prescription medications. Maintain Medicare and supplemental insurance for both of you to ensure your access to medical facilities and services. Accompany one another to appointments for reassurance and to hear together the diagnoses, prognoses, and medical recommendations, so that you can help one another recall, consider, and choose options, and follow up with appointments and medical care. Involve a wise and trusted adult child if you are both less capable in that regard than you wish. If you both feel competent but your trusted adult child begins on the child’s own to quietly intercede, listen to the child, who may observe or sense that you are both not as competent or insightful about your health as you should be.
Nursing
Helping one another through your declining abilities for maintaining the marital household is another supreme act of love and care. Be mindful of the approaching day when you will no longer be able to safely and securely live on your own together. Rely on a trusted adult child or children, and on home healthcare services, hospital or nursing home social workers, or similar professionals, to help you determine the day that one or both of you need living assistance, and to help you investigate and choose assistance options. You may both strongly prefer to stay in the marital home until demise. And one or both of you may manage to do so with the help of home services including those of your adult children. But as hard as the move out of the marital home is, spouses and their adult children often find great relief, and the spouses find much better care, once they do move to assisted living, which proves that you’ve chosen the right day for the move. You may have the privilege of moving to an assisted living facility together before one or both of you move to a nursing home. Extending your residence together for even a year or few years, before the move to a nursing facility where you may not necessarily room together, can be a special time of intimacy, not just for the two of you but also for your children and grandchildren who visit.
Hospice
The last weeks and days of life represent another precious stage in passing for a married couple, when their concern is less for managing healthcare and residential services, and more for maintaining closeness and ensuring comfort, while minimizing physical pain or mental and emotional distress. Hospice services have the medical knowledge, compassionate services, and sensitive personnel to help married couples through that process, especially when the couple struggles with managing terminal medical issues and does not have reliable assistance from adult children, who may not live nearby or otherwise be in a position, or have the necessary disposition, to help. Get hospice help to minimize the risk and pain of an arduous passing.
Event
The moment of a spouse’s passing can be especially important and poignant. Ensure that medical care providers, nursing home personnel, and hospice services keep you closely informed of your departing spouse’s decline so that you can be present for your spouse during the moments of last consciousness. Notify caretakers of your desire to be present at your spouse’s passing, especially if your spouse has the capacity for consciousness. You and your spouse may share unforgettable and precious last words, looks, touches, and comforts. Make arrangements with your adult children or nearby close friends to support you during or immediately after that last moment. You may wish to have them present, nearby, or available for transportation, consolation, communicating the passing to the family or community, or other support.
Communication
Give some thought in advance of your spouse’s passing as to whom you will notify first and how you will reach them. Your children, your spouse’s surviving siblings, or other family members may expect notice of your spouse’s passing within a certain time or even in a certain order. Don’t, for instance, notify one child without notifying another child, if your children would expect simultaneous or nearly simultaneous notice. You don’t need a child’s jealousy and hard feelings at this time. Arranging in advance an order of notice acceptable to everyone, where you notify one child who notifies others, may help if you expect to have too much difficulty giving notice. Don’t assume too much about the response you expect to the notice of your spouse’s passing that you share with children, siblings, or others. They should comfort you sensitively, but they may be dealing instead with their own feelings.
Memorial
Your declining spouse may wish to participate with you in planning a memorial service well before, or shortly before, your spouse departs. It is not unusual for an individual or married couple to express at least some memorial preferences at the time that they prepare their will or other estate plans together. Yet once your spouse passes, the memorial service is up to you and the pastor, funeral home director, or other officiant whose church, chapel, or other venue hosts it. You are not bound by your departed spouse’s wishes if they turn out to be inappropriate or unduly difficult or expensive under the circumstances, which your spouse might not have been able to foresee when making the requests. Your pastor and funeral director will help you through the memorial preparations and event. Quietly choosing and notifying the pastor and funeral home sufficiently in advance of your spouse’s passing for preliminary planning, without your spouse’s knowledge and participation if it would upset your spouse to learn of the advance arrangements, can certainly smooth and promote an orderly and assured process, although expect them to handle things adroitly even without advance notice if your spouse’s passing is sudden and unexpected.
Interment
You may also expect the pastor and funeral home director to assist you in choosing the form and ceremony of interment, whether cremation or burial with or without a graveside service. Don’t let mortuary services related to your spouse’s remains unduly disturb you if, for instance, your spouse passes unexpectedly in the marital home. Medical or law-enforcement personnel can assist you by arranging for mortuary services to secure and remove the body for the funeral home to handle according to your directions. You don’t have to be present. Also, don’t be unduly alarmed if medical or law-enforcement personnel involve a county medical examiner in the process of the body’s removal. Medical examiners have the obligation to confirm the cause of death. Their involvement does not necessarily mean suspicion of criminal wrongs. If, on the other hand, your spouse’s passing looks at all suspicious and law-enforcement personnel or a medical examiner questions the nature of your involvement, respond only that you need first to consult a qualified attorney for advice. You don’t need your confusion, distress, and fear of criminal prosecution complicating your spouse’s passing. Your attorney can help calm you, keep things orderly, and assure the examiner or other law-enforcement officials of your innocence.
Probate
Your deceased spouse’s estate may have to pass through probate before you have full access to various accounts, deeds, titles, and interests that your spouse held alone in name or that the two of you shared. Probate is the court process ensuring the orderly disposition of a decedent’s estate, according to the decedent’s legal obligations and any expressed wishes through an enforceable will or trust. Depending on how effectively you and your spouse arranged your estate plans and prepared your affairs, and the type and amount of your property and any obligations your deceased spouse owed, you may have to wait months or even up to a year or more for your deceased spouse’s financial and legal affairs to resolve. Be patient and persevering during that time, while engaging qualified probate counsel to guide and assist you, assuming that your spouse designated you in the will as the personal representative of your spouse’s estate. Do not be unduly surprised or upset at family or other disputes that arise in the course of probate. A parent’s passing can cause children and other family members to act emotionally and irrationally for a time. Show your children grace, even if you are the grieving widow. It’s another gift you can give them and legacy you and your spouse can leave them.
Rearranging
You may have substantial rearranging of your household and affairs to do after your spouse’s passing. Your spouse may be able to help you with some of those arrangements before passing. Your deceased spouse’s estate may have to pass through probate before you can make other rearrangements. But in any case, you may find it necessary to remove your spouse’s name from accounts or transfer funds into new accounts in your sole name, change beneficiaries on your life insurance policies, obtain new vehicle titles or property deeds in your own name, and even sell vehicles, clothing, recreational items, tools, and other personal effects your departed spouse left that do not help you. Some transactions you may complete with your spouse’s death certificate and your own attestation, while other transactions may require probate court orders. The probate attorney for your spouse’s estate can help. You may also need or choose to sell the marital home, in which case you will have yet more rearranging and administration to do. Give yourself time and attention during this difficult period, and get the help of adult children, trusted friends, and reliable professionals.
Mourning
Rearranging your affairs after your spouse’s passing may burden you, but it may also help you mourn the passing and remember your spouse. Use the process in that way, as you sort through things. The time you spend with adult children whom you invite to help you in that process can help them, too. Comfort one another, celebrating memories. Take time to remember, mourn, and adjust. Avoid making major decisions, if you can, until the cloud of emotion has lifted and your path forward as a widowed spouse clears. You may wish that your life changes little, and you may be able to see that wish fulfilled. Or you may need and want your life to change much, and you may also be able to see that wish fulfilled. Your ability to support yourself in a lifestyle to which you have grown accustomed or a different lifestyle of your choice is another gift your spouse will have shared with you.
Salvation
The greatest gift of all that spouses can share with one another is the gift of one another’s salvation in the name, way, and grace of the good Lord Jesus Christ. You and your spouse have an eternal destiny in the Lord’s presence and kingdom, relieved of all pain and sorrows, a destiny filled with wonders and glory that even the splendor of earth can only barely foreshadow. If you know this truth and have embraced it in the confession of your need for the Lord’s self-sacrificial gift of eternal life, then share that gift liberally with your spouse so that your spouse may receive and enjoy the same gift. Your best way to do so, and to bring your spouse along with you on the greatest journey of all, is to love your spouse to the very end in the same sacrificial, tender, complete, wise, and forgiving way that the Lord Christ loved you to win your own heart. Show your spouse the Lord’s love through your own love, until the Lord finishes his work in both of you, in the receipt, redemption, and restoration of your bodies, lives, and hearts.
Reflection
Do you and your spouse have wills designating a trusted guardian or guardians for your children and providing for family inheritances? If so, do you need to amend those wills to provide for changes in family members, family relationships, or property interests? Do you and your spouse need to arrange and fund a trust to safeguard financial support for a mentally disabled or incompetent child? What assistance with healthcare decisions and access do you and your spouse need? Do you have you and your spouse adequately insured through Medicaid and supplemental insurance for your health? Is the time now or soon approaching for assisted living or nursing-home care for one or both of you? Can you do some research now into options? Have you helped one another share any memorial plans you desire after your passing? Do you have a pastor and funeral-home director in mind who are available to assist you, and a church, chapel, or other memorial venue? Can you do anything in advance of your spouse’s passing to ease probate administration and reordering of your financial and legal affairs after your spouse’s passing? Which of your adult children and close friends do you expect to ask for help with your spouse’s passing? Have you and your spouse rested assured in one another’s salvation and faith?
Key Points
Caring for your spouse through passing is your final great act of love.
You crown your marital legacy through aiding one another in passing.
Plan for passing as soon as bearing children or amassing property.
Arrange for inheritances through wills for each of you and your spouse.
Consider a foundation for substantial wealth devoted to charity.
Consider a trust for minor or mentally incompetent children.
Designate a trusted family or friend guardian for your children.
Help your spouse with healthcare decisions and access late in life.
Support one another in assisted living and nursing home care.
Allow hospice to assist you and your spouse with final days of passing.
Be present for your spouse in final days, with family help.
Enlist family assistance with communicating news of passing.
Plan a memorial and interment with pastoral and funeral home help.
The probate court may need time to order a departed spouse’s affairs.
You may need substantial time and help rearranging your life.
Give yourself time to mourn and adjust before making big decisions.