There’s a scene in the old movie Beetlejuice that depicts the afterlife as starting in an office—an office full of old filing cabinets, bored assistants, unhappy “clients” and long waiting lines. It’s meant to be funny, but somehow it strikes a little too close to home these days.
In our current society, death seems accompanied by an endless series of bureaucracies. Some of these work well, some work well together; and others … don’t. I recently had the honour of serving as executor of a small estate. I was backup to an 87-year-old who classified serving as a “piece of cake,” and then turned everything over to me.
The first bureaucracy in this case was the funeral home’s. The staff were very respectful of the grief associated with a death. There were a few hiccups, like sending the death certificates to the wrong person, issues with the payment system, and so on, but all were minor.
Although the funeral home, in this case, was down south, I have also found the local funeral home to be very helpful. The one thing the home down south gave me, which I hadn’t seen before, was a fabulous document from the B.C. government on all of the things that an executor needs to do with different bureaucracies. The document is 16 pages long and suggests priorities for action, from urgently cancelling a Visa card to eventually removing the deceased from the voters’ list. It’s easily found on their website; just search “after a death checklist.”
After the dealings with the funeral home, I felt strangely on my own. It was a small estate and hiring a lawyer would have chewed up all of the funds. As a seasoned public servant, I believed it was easy to do it myself. I’m sure you can all hear the gong going, as I couldn’t have been more wrong.
With a certified will, death certificates, birth certificates, marriage certificates, signatures from beneficiaries—I thought I had everything I needed. I sort of did, but I also needed information on who decides when probate is needed (good luck with that one) and what the criteria is for needing probate.
I also needed (need!) mountains of patience. Every interaction eroded mine and took it out to some foreign sea of bureaucracy. I’ve never had a ton of patience to begin with (more like a small hill), so the erosion grew more and more painful.
I can’t begin to describe the process of trying to set up an estate account with the bank. I will say that my patience through that process was eroded sufficiently enough to establish a small island in the aforementioned sea. Then there were things like cancelling union dues and trying to get back the ones that had not been cancelled—another system of bureaucracy involving several sections (and still more erosion of my patience).
Getting the taxes done and paying what was owed was relatively easy, until the final step of getting a clearance certificate. Canada Revenue Agency decided that being the second executor wasn’t sufficient and I needed a “letter of renunciation” from the first named executor. I mean, they have the money, the bank is happy, the CPP death benefit has been paid, pensions are settled—what on earth is the risk?
There are times I think that the entire process of dealing with the bureaucracy of death is designed to drive ordinary people into the hands of lawyers, or else just leave the money unclaimed in the bank.
As you may be able to tell, through this experience of being an executor, my small hill of patience has now been eroded to an open-pit mine. Please don’t fall in! If you are doing it yourself, talk to friends who may have gone through being an executor, or to an accountant/bookkeeper used to dealing with estates. If you are older and don’t have a will, please make one. There are many simple ways to do it and it will save your family or friends hours. Check the internet or wander through the YG web-maze to look for information (try the “Public Trustee Learn About Wills and Estates” as a search question). The Yukon Public Legal Education Association (YPLEA) also has a helpful booklet at https://yplea.com/wills-and-estates.
And, whatever you do, don’t say “Beetlejuice” three times or you may end up in the waiting room, at the end of the line.
