One of the things that all of us from junior dev to CEO will encounter in our lifetime is personal loss. Besides dealing with the often overwhelming trauma that is grief, one of the complicating factors facing the recently bereaved are the myriad mundane and practical concerns that follow the death of a loved one. Following the tragic loss of his husband, David Smith was brave enough to offer Monktoberfest attendees and alums his practical technical guide to death and grief.
Transcript
>> All right, thanks so much, everybody for being here. Try not to trip over the wires like that.
My name is David Smith, I work for one of the big tech companies that you’ve definitely heard of. I’m in Developer Relations, I specialize in artificial intelligence, but I’m not going to talk about any of that here today, because this is a personal trip, and I wanted to tell a personal story.
Now, when Steve told me I was going to be doing the wrap-up talk today, I was like, you really like you really want me to do this talk with this title at the end of the day before we all go and enjoy ourselves and have beers, but you know, this is a talk that I wanted to give, and this is the only venue where I can give a talk like this. It’s inspired by the death of my husband, Jay, almost three years ago now, and I am going to try and make this talk not so much of a downer by focusing more on the practical and technical aspects of dealing with death and grief.
You know, when you talk to people about death, people naturally focus on the emotional side of it, that is, super, super important and I’ll be touching on that, of course when I talk.
But I thought Jay and I were well prepared for this situation, and it turned out that there were a bunch of things that nobody had ever told me that I was going to have to deal with through that process.
And so I thought I would share those things with you in the hope that you might be prepared when it happens to you, because it happens to all of us at some point. In our lives.
This is Jay on the right there. That’s me on the left. You might not be able to guess that. That photo was taken only in 2019, so I’ve gone very gray through all of this process. That photo — I actually went through my iPhone and found the last photo of us together before our lives very suddenly changed. Just a couple of months after taking that photo, Jay was unexpectedly diagnosed with leukemia. He was at the doctor’s for a routine checkup, happened to faint in the doctor’s office. They sent him to the hospital there, and they did some routine blood tests to figure out what was going on, and discovered that his blood cell counts were all wrong and he had some form of leukemia.
My first tip is when you do your annual physical with your doctor, do ask them to do a complete blood count as part of that process. It’s not routine, had it been done in Jay’s case, we might have detected it quite a bit earlier than we did. So that was the diagnosis.
I also want to mention that there are people in this room that have met Jay before. He actually came with me as an attendee of Monktoberfest back in 2017, I think it was. I wish I had a lot of time to talk about him personally, but like I said, I’m going to try and focus on the practicalities here. I do want to give a disclaimer I’m not your lawyer, doctor, therapist, financial planner, estate planner, or tax adviser but I’m going to touch on all of these topics and my experience with dealing with those topics through this process.
I also want to emphasize that I talk with a lot of people about this topic, you know, especially over the last few years, and everybody’s experience is different.
I just want to emphasize that this is the experience of one very privileged childless gay couple from California, and your experiences or those that you love might be different, as well. But I do want to share what I’d learned through this process that nobody had ever told me before.
So let’s talk about preparing for this eventuality. Like I said, I thought Jay and I were well prepared with this. You know, as a gay couple, we were married in 2004, in Canada, but that was before gay marriage was legal in the United States, and so as we were traveling back on the road from Vancouver to Seattle, this became very apparent to us when the American border agent asked us, why are you coming to the United States or why were you in Canada is the question, and we said, we just got married in Canada and he said, well you’re not married here. And we said, thank you for that.
But we were in the closer we were in America where a gay marriage was not recognized at that time. We did write medical directives so we would have the right, because we did not have a right as a couple, that we could go to the hospital in the event of an accident or something like that. We went through the process of writing out wills so that in the event of one of us having to inherit from the other, there would be no contention that in the eyes of the American society, we were just two random people who happened to live in the same house, we had to be very careful in the way that we wrote our wills that our wishes would be followed.
But as I found out, there was a lot more that we needed to do, even after marriage was legal in the United States and we adopted so many benefits that come with being married. So that’s my second here, is get married. I mean whether you love people or not, I mean there are so many benefits
[laughter]
That come in American society with being married that just it was night and day for us in the process of that becoming a legal thing. And also, all the rights that I had as Jay’s actual legal spouse throughout this process, a lot of what I’ll be talking about just simply wouldn’t have been possible. And I feel for a lot of unmarried people going through this.
One of the things that we did after Jay was diagnosed is we went to a lawyer to try and figure out, you know, is everything in order at this point, because especially that first diagnosis was devastating, because at that point we didn’t know what type of cancer we have or the varieties of leukemia, some of them are essentially an immediate death sentence. Some of them you can live a long life with the drugs that are available now. One of the diagnoses is exactly what variant of leukemia you had. We thought he would die of old age with leukemia. It didn’t work out that way, but it did prompt us to actually get our affairs in order. As I mentioned I work for a big tech company. One of the benefits is you get a legal benefit. You probably only thought about using it for getting out of parking tickets, but one of the really good things it provides is the establishments of wills and trusts. That’s one of the main reasons these benefits exist, so do take advantage of it if you haven’t done that. Certainly establish a will. But it actually turned out that setting up a trust was important in our particular situation, and probably is in yours, as well.
I didn’t have a lot of time to do these slides. I only found out I was doing this talk a week ago, so excuse the scrolls here. But imagine you’re a married couple. Married is not necessary in this space but it applies, as a married couple you probably have assets, you might have bank accounts, you might have property, homes, for example, and the normal process is that you would each write a will which basically says that in the event of one or the other’s death, that your share of those properties, the bank accounts and so forth would go to the other person and you can also write in the will about other people, as well. I’m just focusing here on the couple. That does work, but there are two problems in the United States, and particularly in California, where we live, with that process.
The first is just an administrative one, is that the will says you take your share of those properties from your deceased. But you still have to go through the process of changing ownership, rewriting deeds, all that kind of stuff. So that’s a hassle at a bad time. There’s also another issue which is that wills generally have to go through a process called probate. Won’t go through all the details here, but basically you file the will, there’s an opportunity for people to challenge it. That can take a long time, first of all and secondly, at least in California, I’m not sure what it’s like in other states, but by statute, the lawyers will take at least 5% of your entire asset base, which is transferred through the will at that point. And this is why lawyers recommend setting up something called a trust.
So like in the same way that we’ve heard earlier on, these lawyers can set up an open source foundation, you can also use lawyers that have interest entity called a trust. It’s basically an organization that you and your spouse co-own and the developers in the audience, you can think of this, it’s kind of like pre-allocated memory for inheritance. And the way it works is, you take all those assets that that you had as a couple and you transfer ownership of all these assets to this trust. So that’s the preallocated memory part. You’ve gone through the whole process of changing your ownership before the actual death happens, saves you a lot of hassle and time, and also that pointer is about whichever one of the two spouses dies first, it automatic that the ownership of the trust automatically reverts to the other. So there’s nothing you technically need to do there. For most people’s purposes, it’s treated exactly like an inheritance, but it avoids that whole probate process.
A few other things about preparation to talk about. I mean, especially in this digital world that we live in, think about the features that various platforms provide you, like inactive account manager if something doesn’t touch an account for 30 days, you can designate who that goes to so the executor of my will is Google’s inactive account manager. Social media companies don’t do this well. Lots of issues here, but it turns out that the real solution to this problem is passwords, and second actual authentication. Getting access to the passwords of your deceased’s files. We were lucky in this case. We had both used LastPass. There’s a password manager that I do not recommend, but it had a nice feature that, in the event of an emergency if they didn’t respond in a certain amount of time, you would automatically get access to all those passwords. This was absolutely necessary for me to manage all of the digital events we had together.
The other part of that is second factor authentication. Also know your spouse’s Pincode to get into their smartphone so you can access their authenticator app or access their email to be able to get access to those codes.
So that’s the preparation side of it.
Also want to talk a little bit about what happens when … like I said, we had thought Jay was going to live forever. Everybody does.
In the end it was quite sudden. Happy to share the details of that over drink if you want to know.
One thing that I really wasn’t prepared for was the questions that you get from hospital staff right at that very moment when somebody dies.
This all happened during the height of Covid, and so Jay was in the ICU for about three weeks in San Francisco at the end. Luckily — through that whole process, we only could have one visitor at a time and it was a whole process of figuring out who was going to be the visitor per day, but at the end, in the final moments the staff actually let all of his family and friends to come up to his bed at the ICU for that very last moment, which was wonderful.
The first question, of course, that you’ll get, this one I did expect, was do you want to turn off the life support? And that’s when that medical directive becomes so important, particularly if you’re not married.
But there were two other questions which I did not expect at all. The first one was — first you have to sign some forms about the time of death and all that kind of stuff, and then they asked, like, what do you want to do with the body? Are you going to bury? Are you going to cremate — and Jay and I had discussed this, but we hadn’t discussed it in front of his friends and framely, so I wasn’t really ready to answer that question right at that point. We went for cremation as it happens. The other question that came at that time, again, I was unprepared for, was, do you want an autopsy? And I was just like, he died of leukemia, why would we ever want to have an autopsy? But I was really stuck at that point to be like, what am I supposed to do in this situation? Luckily Jay was in the room and said, you know, we don’t really need to have an autopsy so I was relieved to not have to say anything. So be prepared for that one. Because that one really caught me by surprise.
And so that’s the moment of death and of course what happens immediately after that is the grief. Eamon talked about the five stages of grief this morning which is a very helpful way to think about it, especially as you’re preparing. It does explain a lot of the changes that go on through that process, but something that I really wasn’t expecting was how much grief fucks with your brain. You know, I’m a smart person. I rely on my brain and my job is to innovate and ideate and all these kinds of things. What I wasn’t prepared for was the way that the grief stopped me from thinking in a very, very fundamental way.
I didn’t know if it’s depression or grief or whatever, maybe it doesn’t even matter, but I suddenly cared about absolutely nothing. From I don’t care if I get out of bed in the morning. I don’t care what I have to eat, even if I do eat. I don’t care about my future.
But the implication of that is, is that it completely interferes with your ability to make decisions. When you don’t care one way or the other, there’s no basis to decide anything. As a result, you can’t decide anything, and as a result, you can’t do anything, and I had a lot to do suddenly at this point. We had named each other as executives of our will, and that means you have a lot of responsibilities of things that you need to get done. That is one choice I really do regret is naming myself as my spouse’s executor. Hire a lawyer. Because you don’t want to be doing that.
Later on in that process with the grief something that helped my brain come back was antidepressants, not something I’d ever done before, but I talked to my doctor about my problems and he suggested doing this and that was the thing that really helped me to be out of the dark again. I’m not a doctor, but at some point I said, hey, I’m all good, the antidepressants have helped me and I decided to stop taking them and I don’t want to go into details, but I really needed people to be around them at that point. I’m back on them now and I’m good, but that was scary.
Execution. I use that word because of the when will executor thing. This is the point where I had to be the executor of the will. Like I said, I regret choosing that. One of the things you’ve got to do, of course, is you’ve got to decide whether you’re having a funeral or a wake or a showing, and organizing all of that kind of stuff. A surprise to me in that process is when death certificates start coming up is the funeral director that actually issues the death certificates and death certificates are something you absolutely need to be able to move on with the rest of the process.
I asked for 20 copies of them, because a lot of like insurers, for example, need physical copies mailed this them. It takes about three weeks for them to come back at least in the State of California. Make sure you have those, because you’ll be needing them. You have to deal with the government. Social Security, of course, you’ve got to deal with. One of those benefits of being married is that you are entitled to your spouse’s Social Security, it starts paying out from the age of 55. I don’t believe that’s true if you’re not married.
Also, little random Social Security thing, they send you a check for like $250, it just appears in the mail to help with funeral expenses. Where does that come from? You’ve got to deal with all the bank accounts, of course, you have to transfer any names. All that is important. We did actually make one little mistake. There was one particular account that we hadn’t actually got around to transferring the ownership of the beneficiary to a trust. So then I had to get the lawyers involved and it was going to go to probate, but then because we had a note in the trust document saying we were going to put it in but we didn’t, we didn’t have to do that, but just so you know.
Another thing to deal with, of course, is life insurance. We had both taken advantage of the life insurance from our employers, which you may also get to cover your spouse with your employer’s life insurance. We had done that. That was very fortunate.
One of the benefits of being married is that both the life insurance and all the inheritances are tax free. That was something I had worried about who was going to happen further down the line. That’s true at a federal level. It’s also true at a state level in every state if you’re married. It varies state by state if you’re not married, so you might want to have a look into that, as well.
Then of course there’s the whole process of dealing with that digital life. As I said, I had the passwords to all of Jay’s accounts. That made things so much easier. One thing to watch out for, though, is one time I was sitting in my bedroom, Jay’s iPhone was sitting on his dock on the side of the bed where it always is, and suddenly it lit up, and it said iPhone erasing. And I panicked, because this was my way into all of the processes that I need to do. Turned out that Jay’s employer was remotely managing it through intune or something.
And had initiated a remote wipe. No fault to the company, they were actually great through this process, but it was something I wasn’t expecting and it was pretty traumatic at the time. Turned out not to be a big issue, because I could just use i cloud backups to restore Jay’s phone. All right, it’s time for a palate cleanser. Thank you, Ashley for normalizing pictures of dogs on slides. This is my dog, Dawson, when I fostered him he was just a little bundle of fluff this big, I had no idea what he was. His mother looked like she was half German shepherd, half Husky, he’s probably half Labrador the way he looks, but he has been amazing for me, he has been one of my real pillars of support and really helped me with my recovery, because one of the things that I discovered pretty quickly, after all this happened, was that I couldn’t be alone.
You know, Jay and I lived in our house together in California. And suddenly, it was just me.
My mum did come over from Australia, she was on the literal first flight from Sydney to San Francisco after Covid lockdowns ended and she came to stay with me for three months, which is as long as a tourist visa would allow her to do. My sister came out and it was actually my mum that encouraged me to go and foster a dog. And that’s where Dawson came from. There was also a range of cast of characters who brought me food, brought me comfort, absolutely necessary, but after a while, that dwindled off and mum and Rebecca had to go back to Australia, and suddenly I was alone in the house that Jay and I had built together.
And I did not prep for that, but I had a savior on that front, my best friend Johnny is actually here giving emotional support to me here today.
[applause]
And Johnny has given me emotional support throughout this thing and still does today. He lives together with me in my house and has got me through this. Thank you so much for being here today.
[applause].
I took three months off of work, I did the whole bereavement thing. I actually couldn’t have done my work. So that helped. Something that did help me randomly is jigsaw puzzles. In that first period, even still today, because of the whole brain not working thing, I couldn’t read books, I couldn’t watch TV or play video games, all things that I loved to do before, but the one thing that I could do to occupy my brain is doing jigsaw puzzles. Jay’s sister actually subscribed me to a jigsaw puzzle subscription service, got a new one in the mail every now and again. Random, but still, my brain is not, working well, one piece of advice that my Mum gave me, she was also a widow at a fairly young age is, just don’t make any big decisions in the first year and get that support around you to help you make the decisions that you do need to make in the meantime, before you get there. Therapy, another benefit from work, something I’d never done before, but it did help talking through that process with a couple of therapists.
I didn’t keep with it, though. I don’t have code review anxiety, Carol, but I do have life review anxiety, and just after a while, I just ran out of things to talk about with my therapist. You know, I’ve got the black lanyard on because I don’t want to talk to people here, but I just want to say that the main thing I need to recover is time.
There we go.
All right. So I don’t have a call to action or a book or podcast or anything like that. I do have my speaker slides, speaker deck from my slides right here, so I check boxes like a checklist. So if you find that useful, you’re welcome to it. First of all, and just to wrap up, I’ll say thank you, especially the RedMonk team for allowing me to give this talk. Some men would rather give a presentation like this in public rather than go back to therapy. But I just want to end with my last real call to action, which is to tell that special someone that you love them, because you never know when it’s going to be their last day and I love you, Johnny, thank you so much for being with us, and thank you all for being here today.
[applause].
