Nobody Budgets for the Bear

Get death done

In the Final Destination movie series, the characters’ deaths are swift. They don’t have time to linger on any one death for longer than a few seconds. Most deaths are instantaneous, with the character reduced to a bloody splat. As disgusting and gory as that is, such a demise is preferable to what normally happens - that slow, dreadful creep towards death mired in pain, confusion, and financial burden. Which sounds better? Existing for years as a dementia-ridden shell of a human who has to have people wipe your butt, or having a traincar fall on top of you, obliterating you before you even knew what happened? You know which ending you would choo-choo-choose.

Death comes for everyone. Few proactively think about it, and many believe they know how it will go down. How do you see yourself dying? Yes, that’s the most morbid question I can ask you, but it’s not like you don’t know you’re going to die. Everybody dies.

I know your death dream

I have a feeling that I can use my mental psychic energy to predict how you think you’re going to die (in no particular order):

• Peacefully in your sleep at the age of 70-something after a joyful night spent with loved ones, where you shared stories about the good ol’ days. Bonus points if there’s a campfire

• Being randomly murdered by either a psychopathic serial killer, a lunatic gunman, or a random carjacker

• A massive heart attack from hearing horrible, unbearable news, like someone you love voted for the politician you hate

• Getting chased, killed, and possibly eaten by a large, scary animal. The usual suspects are: bear, shark, or snake; honorable mention goes to a bug in your shoe

• Fiery car crash because you were either a passenger in a vehicle driven by a moron or hit by another car driven by a moron

Did I get at least one right? If so, please vote for me to receive the Psychic of the Year award. Every year I see myself winning, and every year I don’t. Weird.

If you have another way you see yourself going, let me know. Oh, and having someone pull the plug on you while you’re in a coma doesn’t count. It’s what got you in the coma in the first place that is the culprit.

The things on the above list, humorous or not, have something in common: each one has you dying swiftly with little to no added responsibilities to others. That’s ideal, but not common. It’s more likely that the end of your life will be more arduous for you and those around you. Chances are, you’ll live to around 85 years old, BUT up to 65, you’ll be doing OK, then those last 20 years will be slow, horrible, and deteriorating. You’ll encounter multiple health problems, experience incontinence, lose your ability to drive, and maybe even walk.

On top of that, you’ll be battling your own morbidity as you witness a string of people your age pass away. Your days will be long stretches of lonesome nothingness as younger people - family members and such - are busy living their lives. You’ll grow weary and bored with TV, books, and games. You may even call for death to come to your door - the same death that you’ve been running from your whole life - and, as all the other people you wish would visit you, it too will reply with, “Maybe later.”

How’s that for a final destination?

Dying with dignity

You can’t avoid death, but you can change how that last leg of your journey plays out. Have you ever heard the phrase, “Die with dignity”? It’s used in the life insurance industry as a selling point for Long-Term Care. As you can guess, Long-Term Care (LTC) is when a person needs care for an extended period, such as being placed in a nursing home or having a caregiver come to your house to help with everyday activities. And while I’m licensed to sell life insurance, I’m not trying to sell you anything. I’m sharing why people buy this type of coverage.

If you’re a woman or a man who has ever dated a woman for any length of time, you’ve no doubt seen the movie The Notebook. The older version of Allie is confined to a care facility with a private room, clean, manicured surroundings, and qualified staff to tend to her. Do you think you’ll get that same level of care without planning for it? Nope. To get into a place like that, it’ll cost roughly $8,000 per month with additional costs for laundry, diapers, medication management, and more. All in, you’d be looking at around $10,000 per month for a fancy Notebook-like place, and that’s not including the set-up cost to get in. If you spent five years in a place like that before you croaked, that’s $600,000. Do you have that stuffed in a mayonnaise jar above your fridge? I didn’t think so.

What’s that I hear you say? Will Medicaid pay for you to live like a pharaoh in your decrepit years? Ha! That’s a good one. I’m no Medicaid expert, but from what I understand, Medicaid will step in and pay for some things, but only if you can prove that you have no other resources. Basically, you have to have almost no money to your name and a limited monthly income. And it’s less than you think. There’s even a chance that the government will seize your house after you die to repay itself. Don’t get any ideas about giving your stuff to friends and family; none of this selling your things for $1. The government has this thing called a Look-Back (sounds Big Brotherish, doesn’t it?) where they review all your transactions for 5 years before you say you need their money for a care facility. If you transferred $X in dollars to your kids during that time frame, the government uses its assumed cost of care to calculate how many days/months/years you could have paid for your own care with it. For example, if you gifted $10k to your kids during that five-year look-back period, the government says that you were able to pay $10k worth of your own care but tried to hide it so that Medicaid would have to pay. They won’t fall for it. Instead, they’ll lock you out of care for that time, then [metaphorically] flip you off, and yell, “FAFO!”

Maybe family will step in and give you around-the-clock care. Or maybe they won’t. Or maybe they’ll try and get completely worn out that they’ll need care themselves. In any case, you’d be better off not making the family method your Plan A.

Camping to Death

I have a plan for the end of my life. It’s framed as a joke, but it’s only half a joke - part of me wants it to be my actual plan, but there are some legal and ethical issues. You’ll see what I mean. Here’s my plan:

Phase I: On my 70th birthday, a family member will drive me 10 miles outside of the city limits and drop me off, leaving me there to find my way home. I can get home; however, I can use whatever resources I can muster except calling a family member to pick me up. This means I can walk home, hitch a ride, get an Uber, etc. I should have the wherewithal to do that at any age. However, if I can’t get home in, say, 24 hours, then everyone will know that I’ve basically reached my expiration date. They can pick me up (I’ll have some sort of tracking device, like my phone with 360), and we can go to Phase II.

Phase II: We plan a camping trip to a somewhat remote mountainous location. During this trip, in the middle of the night, I’ll wander off into the forest in search of something. In the morning, they’ll wait for old man Jason to emerge from his tent, only to find that my tent is empty. Oh, no! They’ll spread out and search for me. I won’t have gotten far, as I’d be old and weak. They will find me either mauled by a bear, fallen down a ravine, or maybe I tripped on a tree root and hit my head on a sharp rock. I prefer the bear since that would be kinda cool. I could wrestle the bear for a bit to see what that would be like. YOLO! I’ll set it up so that when I die, the coroner should take me to the closest incinerator and pop me in immediately so that I don’t take up space in a refrigerated drawer. If the bear attack were my demise, they probably wouldn’t want to store my dismembered body parts, as that could be messy. Just gather up all my bloody bits into a burlap sack and toss everything into the fire. They can gather my cremains in a shoebox and FedEx them to my family back home, where they’ll be delightfully received along with a check from my life insurance.

Have mercy!

In the book The Giver by Lois Lowry, the elderly are taken care of institutionally by the community with the assistance of teenagers/young adults who were voluntold to do so. Then, at a point when the community feels that you’re no longer of use to society, they shoot you up with a deadly cocktail and then dump you somewhere mysterious. The whole thing is called The Release, and it’s akin to taking an unwanted dog to the Butterfly Farm - it sounds flowery and utopic, but it’s simply just lethal injection and disposing of a corpse. Is it wrong of me to want the same thing? I’m not saying I’ll do it, but it does sound nicer than rotting away in a state-run facility if I don’t have all that Notebook cash.

Maybe the whole thing is moot. Maybe, once the time comes for you and I to get over that last hill, they’ll have something merciful and beautiful for our families and us. I doubt it. There’s always a dollar to be made from death, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

The true mercy is keeping my family from having to endure my slow death crawl. I want them to remember me as someone who filled their life rather than drained it. Nah, I’ll take the bear any old day. So if you go to Chili’s one day and see my family all gleefully (possibly tearfully?) sharing a nice dinner accompanied by a random shoebox on their table and I’m nowhere to be found, you’ll know I made a hasty exit, and I did it my way.