Living Will

A will is a love letter. A place of hope. A will is also an archive of longings

- Chinki Sinha

"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift." - Mary Oliver

I am a single woman. I don’t have children. I don’t own a house yet. Or any land. I spend all my money travelling and on collecting books, objects and furniture. None of my furniture is in pairs. Everything is singular. Like me.

I have begun to draft my will to protect my memories. 

Everything must go like in that story called Why Don’t You Dance? by Raymond Carver in the book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The book lives in one of the shelves. In that story, an alcoholic man stands in his kitchen looking at his bedroom suite in his front yard. He has put everything on sale after his estrangement from his wife. In that story, the man says, “everything must go.”

In my case, “everything” includes kidneys, eyes, the Milagro Cross that I got from a monastery in Big Sur in California where I spent days looking out at the ocean in silence in the company of 13 Benedictine monks, the dream catcher, etc.

Not that in the general ordinariness of life, these objects I have collected stand out in terms of “wealth”, but for me, they are precious because they contain stories.