The Complexities in Death

The Wall Street Journal had the following article on making ones arrangements for ones virtual presence when one passes away.

You Need an Online Estate Plan

If you’re smart about your online life, you’ve created strong and varied passwords for all your accounts. You change those passwords often. And you never write them down or share them with anyone.

That’s all well and good while you’re alive. But your admirable devotion to protecting sensitive personal data can wreak havoc for your heirs after you die.

With an increasing portion of our personal lives stored online in password-restricted accounts — including bank accounts, automatic bill-pay arrangements, personal messages and even items with small monetary but major sentimental value, such as photos — piecing together an estate after a death can cause major headaches.

For example, if you have an online savings account separate from your regular bank account and the statement notifications are only emailed, not mailed, that account may get overlooked when your finances are disbursed to beneficiaries.

“We spend hours or days trying to track down the information,” says Hyman Darling, an attorney with Bacon Wilson in Springfield, Mass., and chairman of that firm’s estate-planning department. “Very often things don’t come in the mail and we wouldn’t know about [the account] for some time.”

Not something I had thought about, but you know they may just have a point.

Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt dies

Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt dies

Frank McCourt, the Irish author best known for his Pulitzer prize-winning book Angela’s Ashes, has died.

The 78-year-old passed away today, the New York Times reported.  

He had contracted menigitis and was in a hospice in New York, the author’s brother Malachy confirmed last week.  

Frank McCourt was recently treated for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, but his brother said he had been doing well until about two weeks ago, when he contracted meningitis.

Angela’s Ashes, published in 1996, rose to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for more than two years, selling four million copies in hardback.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for biography the following year and was made into a film by British director Alan Parker in 1999.

Until his mid-60s, Frank McCourt was known primarily around New York as a creative writing teacher and as a local character – the kind who might turn up in a New York novel – singing songs and telling stories with younger brother Malachy and otherwise joining the crowds at the White Horse Tavern and other literary hangouts.

But there was always a book or two being formed in his mind and the world would learn his name, and story, in 1996, after a friend helped him get an agent and his then-unfinished manuscript was quickly signed by Scribner.

With a first printing of just 25,000, Angela’s Ashes was an instant favourite with critics and readers and perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.

“F Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I’ve proven him wrong,” McCourt later explained.

“And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools.”

A native of New York, McCourt was good company in the classroom and at the bar, but few had such a burden to unload.

His parents were so poor that they returned to their native Ireland when he was little and settled in the slums of Limerick.

[From Stuff]

Author of the Week: 20 July – 16 July

Thomas Harris

“Quiet simply a compelling and brilliant thriller” Daily Mirror.

Thomas Harris (born April 11, 1940) is an American author and screenwriter, best known for a series of suspense novels about his most famous character, Hannibal Lecter. All of his works have been made into films, the most notable being the multi-Oscar winning The Silence of the Lambs.

Harris was born in Jackson, Tennessee, but moved as a child with his family to Rich, Mississippi; he had a difficult childhood, and was regarded as a loner by many of his peers. He attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he majored in English and graduated in 1964. While in college, he worked as reporter for the local newspaper, the Waco Tribune-Herald, covering the police beat. In 1968, he moved to New York City to work for the Associated Press.

Bibliography

• Black Sunday (1975)
• Red Dragon (1981)
• The Silence of the Lambs (1988)
• Hannibal (1999)
• Hannibal Rising (2006)