Update Your Will While The Sun Shines

Update your will then. I'm poor. I don't have anything to leave for my kids. You'll be surprised.

‘Wake up! Honey, wake up.’

“Ooh! I’m still alive!’

‘Again?’

‘Yeah. Same nightmare. He tried to kill me.’

We don’t want to die because we’ll miss personal debt or millions of dollars in the bank, traffic jams, floods, fire, the boss, the government and the people who shake us when we have nightmares.

I’m not laughing, just thinking about why talking about death is taboo, when it’s inevitable. Ask ghosts. They have the inside story. Do you buy old houses/apartments, renovate and rent them out? There is dirt cheap real estate in Europe. Castles, but you won’t buy them because you are scared of ghosts, when plumbing should be your only problem.

How are we going to know what happens in the after life, when we don’t embrace people who live there, if I may put it like that? Commodores, the old school African American group has a song, Night Shift. It makes sense. People who left us live in a dark place, like the night. Ghosts are in the best position to tell us about night clubs in the area. Well! Not exactly, since it’s night 24/7.

Seriously speaking, death is about ignorance. We are scared of things and people we don’t know. We build walls for protection. Protection against what? Against what we don’t know. It doesn’t make sense, does it? But death is devious like bed bugs. It slips through the car and plane seat belt, through gated communities, state-of-the-art security systems and through expensive sheets made from Egyptian cotton.

Write a will. Otherwise your family will never say RIP (Rest in Peace). ‘I wish she could rise up and fix all this mess she left behind.’ Write that will. You’ll live longer.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.