A Will Is Part of a Love Letter

A will is part of a love letter.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

It is how we take responsibility, for ourselves and for the people around us, while we are here. A love letter tells one person: I want to keep living with you. A will tells the same people: if I go first, here is how you keep living without me. The two letters usually go to the same addresses.

While writing this post, I learned for the first time that the English word for 遗嘱 is “will.” Will can also mean what a person wants. And when we talk about what we are going to do, we use it too: I will.

Suddenly, the word made so much sense to me. In a love letter, I say I want to live with you. I will love you well. In a will, I am expressing my wishes too, only now I am thinking about the days after I am gone. I had already written “a will is part of a love letter” in Chinese before I learned the English word. What I was trying to say seemed to be there in “will” already.

I first saw death more than ten years ago, when the uncle next door passed away. Everyone stood around his refrigerated coffin and cried. I stood in the crowd with two questions in my head. After people die, do their souls move on somewhere? After people die, do their thoughts stay in the world?

I still don’t have answers.

I wrote a love letter 13 years ago. I wrote a will 12 years ago. One year apart.

My girlfriend from more than ten years ago was what first made me want to write a will. Being with her gave me a sense of responsibility and made me braver.

I did not write a will because I wanted to leave. I don’t know what death means.

In the last two years, I lost people in two different ways.

One evening the phone rang, and a relative was suddenly gone. Ten years ago, this relative took part in and witnessed a major decision of mine, and, just like me, had spent eight years drifting abroad. One phone call, and they had stepped out of my life.

I also went through a different kind of departure. The person I had been with for two years, the person whose name I had written into my will, and I broke up in the last few days. She knew I had included her. She was there to see it. Still alive, just no longer in my life. I have spent these days thinking about all of this, and it hurts.

The line in my will is still there. The relationship between the one who wrote it and the one it names has changed. When I see her name now and think about changing it, I feel at peace. I also feel the weight of it.

I am 22, almost 23. By now, I have died three times, and I have seen my life flash before my eyes.

So I know death is terrible. I am still figuring out what life is for. I often cry, guilty that I haven’t reached the goals I set for my life. I often grieve that life is short and I haven’t made time to enjoy it. And every now and then, the family in my will give me a headache.

But when I look at what I have done at this age, I think I have already been very successful. The guilt and grief coexist with that judgment. If you ask what exactly I keep putting off, I am still not sure.

Recently I realized I probably need to revise my will.

It is not only a name that needs to change. What I am about to take on has changed too. Maybe I will focus more on myself now, on my startup and my career. Taking responsibility for myself was part of what I wrote at the beginning, too. A will says who I am responsible for and how much. Both of those have shifted, so the will has to shift with them.

A will is not the only document like this. A prenup says how things get split if two people part. A term sheet (the key terms an investor and a founder agree on first) says who gets their money back if the company fails. Each one is written while things are still good, for the day they might end.

That is why a will is part of a love letter.

This is what I have been thinking about these days. I wrote it down because I want you, my readers, to know.

So, everyone:

Have you written a will?

Have you signed a prenup?

Have you signed a term sheet?