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Now my phone is with me everywhere I go and constantly trying to sell me something.

Recently, my Instagram feed was flooded with ads for something called the NOK box, an end-of-life organizer that stands for Next of Kin.

I am a sucker for these IG ads. I have bought sweaters, joined dance apps, and even once purchased a tin of $70.00 Valentine’s Day cookies.

The NOK box ads use guilt marketing: “Do you want to leave your loved ones with the chore of having to go through all your junk? Trying to figure out what you would have wanted for your final wishes?”

I do not want this for the people I love, so I shelled out the money for the box of folders. I hoped this would be the push I needed to help me organize my life and ease the fear of my own death, which first consumed me in my second-grade Catholic school classroom where “God Is Watching” crucifixes stared down at my child-sized desk. The words “He Suffered, Died, and was Buried” were great fuel for my seven-year-old nightmares.

To get started on this chore, I grabbed my “Compassion First” mug from the cupboard. I watched as my Nespresso machine dripped a steady stream of mocha motivational juice into it.

I picked this mug intentionally because I’m a yogi, and I might need to be compassionate with myself while working on my NOK box. I worried I’d get derailed if the dust of sadness got stirred up—dust that sits dormant most of the time, but arises when I think about leaving or losing loved ones.

I selected the Spotify playlist titled “Focus Music,” inhaled deeply, and then exhaled. I said out loud to myself, “Let’s get started” and stuck the point of my pen into the cellophane wrap. The fifty folders and paper inserts of the NOK box splayed across my kitchen counter.

The first folder, and I already wanted to shut down the whole operation. Most of my passwords are stored in my index finger, and I have no idea what they are. Over the years, I’ve been hacked and thus gave up using my own creative passwords. I opted instead for the suggested ones labeled “STRONG.” I’m sure they are all stored on my phone, in the cloud, or on random pharmacy receipts. I occasionally fail my own security questions: What was your first car? Answer: Chevy Vega. “No, sorry,” says the computer. “That’s wrong, try again.”

I took a sip of my coffee, looked at the words on the mug, and whispered to myself, “Do your best. You’ll be dead, and they’ll just have to open their own Netflix account if they can’t guess your password.”

Passport, marriage license, birth certificates, wills, and car titles. What makes something important? Webster’s Dictionary defines importance as “marked by or indicative of significant worth or consequence: valuable in content or relationship.”

Would my life be considered important? Significant? The box forced me to think about these things.

At a funeral, family photos, not important documents, are displayed on giant easels,.

I have an Ethan Allen wooden chest filled with letters and years of my children’s artwork, including a letter written to me by my father on my twenty-first birthday in the most elegant cursive writing, and a stick figure doing laundry drawn by a preschooler for a Mother’s Day card. All are important to me but maybe not to the NOK.

The focus music didn’t work. My brain started to jump, thinking of important phone calls made from airplanes and towers to say one more last I love you, one last I’m sorry. It’s not a document, but could I fold up my paisley blue-and-white skirt and put it in this folder? The one I wore on 9/11 the morning the planes hit, and that I kept as a talisman because I was one of the lucky ones whose husband came home that day?

Will anything I put in this folder matter to anyone after I’m gone, including my NOK? Most likely not, unless they are trying to gather information for my obituary. I got sidetracked. I felt an urgent need to look up the poem “Success” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the one I read during my mother’s funeral. I found it online, and not once does he mention grades on a report card.

I decided that this folder will be filled with some of my favorite poems, a photograph of me on my first day of kindergarten marking the start of my formal education, and one from my high school graduation, the end of it.

I decided to include some important observations—derived from the Post-Its on which I wrote points of wisdom that have been part of my life’s education. For example: speak highly of those not present; it’s essential to floss; sending handwritten thank you notes on quality paper can make people feel truly appreciated; say I love you a lot; and learn the art of actively listening.

The information for folder four seemed obvious. Please, no extensive measures—but the word extensive could have different meanings on different days. Your heart stops, and a doctor jumping up and down on your chest yelling CLEAR, breaking your ribs in the process, may be considered extensive. Yet would the Heimlich maneuver be extensive?

When my father had a debilitating stroke, my mother willingly disregarded all the plans they had for no extreme measures so she could keep him with her just a bit longer. “One more minute,” my granddaughter says on repeat when she is being pulled away from something she enjoys.

I thought about adding an amendment to my directives. A list of “one more minutes” (or two): Please, if at all feasible, allow me to view one more stunning sunset, take one more dip in the ocean at East Beach, have one more piece of pizza from Jennie’s restaurant, enjoy one more belly laugh, one more cuddle with a Vermont Flannel blanket in front of my fireplace, one more book, one more kiss, one more song.

Warning to my NOK! I still have birthday cards from my childhood. One folder will not cut it. I attach meaning to everything. Is this the place for my stack of yellowed newspapers, with the headlines July 21, 1969, Man Walks on Moon or Obama Makes History, US Decisively Elects First Black President?  What about my mom’s note from Jacqueline Kennedy thanking her for offering condolences after the death of her child, or all my Broadway Playbills and ticket stubs? I know no one is going to want my junk, and that stings a bit. One of the purposes of this box is to deal with all your shit so someone else doesn’t have to. Then why was it filling me with so much dread and superstition? If I finish the box, am I that much closer to being finished myself? Or is it because I’ve had so much good fortune in my life, and I want one more minute?

When I started on this folder it struck me that I should have been working on my future healthcare instead of organizing my death.

I become paralyzed with inertia when trying to complete a task like this. The creeping feelings of not being smart enough, driven enough. Instagram’s ad algorithm knows this about me. It knows I have osteoporosis, and I’m terrified of my bones crumbling underneath the weight of the weighted vest it wants me to purchase.

The NOK Box must think I’m wealthy. Why would there be any residence other than the primary one? We have lived in this residence, which we intended to be our starter house, for thirty-two years. It sits on a busy main road where cars race by, ignoring the 35mph speed limit. The tradeoff was the spacious backyard with its three giant maple trees, which I nicknamed the Holy Trinity because they bring me so much joy and shade. It seems strange to me that with all my sentimental attachments, I could say good riddance to this house, but I would miss my trees. In this folder: “Do whatever you want with the house, but don’t let anyone hurt the trees. We have been friends for a long time.”

If you have lived in a house for thirty-two years, this folder should be thick. However, we would rather go on a trip to Costa Rica or spend money and time preparing food to share around a seven-foot-long farm table than fix the gutters, the recurring garage flood, the holes in the siding, or the cracks in the driveway.

Paid in full. Never thought that would happen. We refinanced to help our kids go to college. Refinanced again for a new roof and to remove the black mold in the basement, which was slowly killing us. The chronic cough we all had was like a question: When are you going to take care of this?

People? I couldn’t find a Help Desk phone number in my NOK Box instruction pamphlet to ask about this. Not sure what to do. I have lots of people. Six siblings, a husband, two kids, a daughter-in-law, three grandchildren, and a bucketload of people whom I love. I’m much more fearful of losing my people than I am of them losing me. I wish there were a folder labeled Trust. Not a financial trust, but one where I could tell my NOK to trust the path of their lives, to be open to outcome and not attached to it. This has been, and I trust will continue to be, my continuing mission, telling the scared seven-year-old who lives inside this sixty-five-year-old brain she is brave and capable and strong enough to ride the waves of her life.

The last folder, the one I didn’t want to fill out. I wish we did a better job as a culture talking about death. The way we sanitize it with words like “passed” and “no longer with us.” The way the body is whisked away to be embalmed or cremated. Not one more minute for your loved ones to sit with your Earth suit and just “be” with what’s left behind after the soul, the prana, the lifeforce has moved on. Where does it go? I’m not sure, but I believe it exists, I hope it exists, and it can’t be contained in an answering machine or a NOK Box.

Remote Control

A New Medical Thriller by Paula Bernstein

  Dr. Alanna Davidson’s life is upended when her father is shot and paralyzed the same night a cutting-edge medical robot is stolen from his laboratory at DARPA. Three years later, the crime remains unsolved.
 
Alanna, now a senior resident at Los Angeles Memorial Hospital, is puzzled when high-profile patients start dying unexpectedly after routine surgeries and resolves to investigate the deaths.
 
At the same time, the LAPD is tracking a serial killer with a surgical signature who is leaving bodies in the most dangerous neighborhoods of the city.
 
When a Memorial resident becomes the newest victim, Alanna’s investigation leads to her father’s stolen robot and to a predatory healthcare company intent on taking over Memorial Hospital. But Alanna’s sleuthing draws the killer’s attention. Not only her career, but her life is now in danger.
 
"Smart, relentless, and terrifyingly plausible, Remote Control fuses cutting-edge medical technology with chilling suspense. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough watching Dr. Alanna risk everything to uncover a truth more sinister than you could ever imagine!"  
— Laurie Stevens, author of the Gabriel McRay Thriller Series.
 
Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books2Read, or ask for it at your local independent bookstore.

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