List Making

Along with writing letters I also think about making a list of what things I want to pass on to whom.  My mom gave away most of her heirloom pieces well before she died.  She split up some significant furniture pieces equitably between myself and my sister probably 15 years before she died - most likely  she was just redecorating.  At some point she also split up all her silver serving pieces.  There were other things that she thought were valuable that she didn't designate.  She used to tell the story of one of her relatives who put names on the back of objects to indicate who she wanted them to go to.

I don't feel like I have anything really valuable.  But there are some things of sentimental value that I feel like are important to pass down.  Like the VCR tapes on top of my closet that are the childhood videos of my older two children.  I've always intended to get them recorded onto DVD - but assuming that doesn't happen, I don't want them to just languish on top of the closet.  They are not the children of my current husband so the videos mean nothing to him.  

A rational person would think he'd just call the kids up and get the videos to them.  But anyone who has actually experinced a blended family may know that things don't always run that smoothly.  And anyone who has ever experienced the death of a close family member may know that, even in the best of families, emotions may cause people to behave in unreasonable ways.  Therefore I feel it would be worth my time to, at least informally, put into writing that my daughter inherits my entire coupon collection - including my electronic spreadsheet in the cloud that catalogs every coupon I have and its location.

And that is probably the real root of this post - I tend to over organize things.