Term Life

I have the propensity to make decisions with little forethought, then when things fall apart, cast around for help to get out of the situation I created. My siblings have always come through, although I have never been deserving of their help.

Some years ago I was making a decent wage, and decided that the only way I´d ever be able to reciprocate for their patience and generosity would be a healthy life insurance policy on myself with them as beneficiaries.

So, like always, with little forethought and no research I bought a $100,000 term life policy. I had no idea what term life was, but I figured insurance was insurance, and that´s all I needed.

It´s been a few years, now, and the other day I learned that the policy will mature in three years – something I should have known before I wrote the first check. I was told that it's a "ten year" term policy, and when it reaches maturity I´ll have to renegotiate. The renegotiation wasn't in the plan.

I pay them a little over $100 a month, now, but when the ten years are up in 2021, the premiums go to $950 a month. They have me on the financial ropes. A lot of other people who live by impulse like I do probably are in the same situation.

So, a couple years from now, a decision will have to be made. The policy doesn´t have a suicide clause (I made sure of that,) so I have two options. I can pay almost $1,000 a month, which I don´t have, or I can take action and cost that bloodsucking company $100,000, in order to provide a little money to my long-suffering siblings.

Considering my shabby physical and emotional condition, nature will more than likely have its way with me before the deadline, and no decision will be necessary. But there is an outside chance that I might continue to breath for another three or four years, and there´s the rub. Decisions and action are not my strong points.

I have put some thought into this situation. A good friend of mine is keeping my last dog´s ashes, and the plan, tentatively, is to put him in the cemetery with all the pomp and prayers, then scatter my ashes in the corrals at the ranch. But that´s a secret nobody should know. I love the irony, and that dog deserves a decent headstone, while being mixed with 100 years of manure is more to my liking. But when it gets to that point, the decisions won´t be mine to make.

So I´ll put things off for a year or so. That´s my way (postponement.) A dramatic and ironic suicide, with a touch of morbid humor is much better than dying of a heart attack in the produce aisle of Walmart. That´s terribly mundane.

So both you and I will have to wait on this one.

Patience.

Patience.

I´ll let you know.