So it is open enrollment at work for our healthcare and other benefits. This year I am taking care of something I should have done at the last open enrollment, upping my life insurance to cover the cost of the condo should something happen to me. I want to make sure my sweetie-wife has no worries about where she will live if that happens.
So I got on line and made the changes and upped the coverage to cover the outstanding price on the condo.
This has left me with a curious sense of my own mortality. I’ve been married less than two years, and I was never married before and never had a mortgage before. Somehow making these changes really brought home to me that death is out there waiting for me.
(It didn’t help passing the scene of a deadly bicycle/auto accident on the way to work Monday.)
I’m actually surprised this wasn’t addressed when you completed the mortgage paperwork for your condo. We had to address it and we pay for term insurance(steadily declining as we pay more and more of the total cost of the mortgage down) toward that item separately from other insurances. Should one of us drop dead, A. would actually be better off if it was me. He’d have no bills at all and a nice amount to start up with. (Don’t worry – there are suicide clauses. I am not going to off myself for the money and no one should do so either.) We had to pass an AIDS test for our mortgage. (Apparantly there is a really high rate of AIDS in our area. Who knew?)
Back to you and your feeling more mortal – I feel this way every time I move to a new box when I take a survey – you know the ones 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-64, 65-74, etc.) Yep there is nothing like a survey for reminding one that death is definitely getting closer. Then I remember what my dad once told me. He was talking about when they first started Social Security. He thinks they took a whole $0.19 out the first time and all his ultraconservative relative were sure it was going to be the end of this country because they were taking our money and we weren’t getting it back until we were 65 – and no one lives that long anyway!!
Oh, the times they are a-changing…