FUTURE PROOFING

Yesterday I had a meeting with brokers who spent an hour trying to explain the blunt details of Income Protection against Disability and Dreaded Disease. It was fitting they were both wearing black, although I’m not entirely sure it was orchestrated. The discussion was informative and in darker hours the kind of thing you’ll be most grateful for having thought ahead – planning on mortality seems so difficult when your first reaction is ‘that wouldn’t happen to me’. But it does happen, and the closer it gets the more necessary investments in a potentially ugly future are.

The trick to getting through a conversation about how to spend money on your own demise (we touched on a Life Policy too) is to imagine three alternate realities and in each one you’ve send a message to your future self saying ‘I had you in mind many years ago and whatever unhappiness you’re currently facing, take a little time to reflect on your foresight’.

Let’s look at them in detail. The first, the one I actually initiated the relationship with the Brokers on, is Life Insurance. Simplest and most benign of them all. You die and those closest to you get an amount of money paid out to them directly. It’s less about you, and more about not leaving a mess of debt and panic. Let your family spend more time mourning you in other words.

Dreaded disease refers to the big three: Heart Attack, Stroke or Cancer. Should you fall victim to any of these your Medical Aid should kick in, but to what extent? And while you’re being treated, with escalating costs accumulating at some or another private clinic, what income in covering the domestic bills. You don’t of course think you’ll just jump right up and get back to work now do you? This is the point where the Brokers issue veiled threats and it is important to not to get defensive, but even more importantly, look beyond the emotional shock and simply focus on something peaceful – like having a few million injected into your account. Again, let your family spend time nursing you, not negotiating with a mortgage.

Disability is the dark horse. You’re maimed, incapacitated, no longer capable of functioning as you once effortlessly did, and although still a thinking, rational and creative mind, something darker has been mixed into the water. Things are cloudier, a sense of gloom invades you, and now you’re expected to continue the business of business. Do you think you’d have time and inclination for inane meetings and presentations; for handling that difficult client; for recruiting idiots that apply for positions they don’t understand with qualifications some institution didn’t imbue with market reality? I can imagine, again in darker hours, how difficult it must be. So the theory is, once you’ve crossed the limit of imagination (‘it wont happen to me’) your beneficiary will offer up 75% of your monthly income - while you remain incapacitated -until you’re 65. At which point you’re either dead and the Life Insurance springs forth; or, and this option is something I need to spend more time on, your Retirement Annuity matures.

The Brokers left with smiles and promises of sending paperwork.

It’s hard not to think about it when you’ve had death whisper in your ear it’s coming for you either way. The balancing act here though is that it’s less about death – I mean you’re gone, there’s nothing to worry about anymore and it was only money and you spent it wisely leaving your family so much behind. It’s also about quality of life, whatever should become of it.

Whatever should become of it.

Frost wrote of the path less travelled, making two – but there are actually four: 1. You lose your health, contract disease. 2. You Die. 3. Something sudden and damaging happens to you. 4. You wait to Die. There may only be one way out, but there are a few ways to get there. Can you imagine how disappointed, ailing you will be with Mr 35 if you don’t invest in any or all of these possibilities? How your amazing sandy-haired child with endless blue eyes will look into yours if you didn’t think what would happen to them, having been warned this moment would come…

And there it is. That’s when it hit me. I’ve been in this position. When my father lay in a coma, his cold, crouched, shivering body convulsing sporadically in an open ward at a general hospital, under-staffed and overburdened, with no hope of recovering from a violent stroke at the age of 54, I faced three days of desperation fueled by panic and helplessness. Financially cornered by the magnitude of the medical universe, I had to accept that my father had spent the last years of his life cutting back on all his policies – and if I wanted to ease my intuition that a private clinic might offer some hope, in the least a little more dignity, I’d have to pay for it myself with money I didn’t have. My father had spend the better part of our intense relationship asking me a pretty repetitive, and to his mind rhetorical, question: ‘Who pays…’

He always thought it was him.

But this isn’t about that. Guilt has few positive outcomes and should not be the motivator for making such investments in Inevitabilities. No, there’s something else that shines much clearer for me. It still has to do with my father, but it’s a different time –one more innocent, if ever our relationship had the luxury of that rare intimacy…

1979 and I’m in the passenger seat with my father. It’s Sunday afternoon, my most anxious time of day in any week, and we’re crossing Johannesburg central from the south of Rosettenville to the west of Florida in a Ford Cortina. In an attempt to illustrate to me how much better my life with him would be, he spoils me with a stop at a corner café to grab some treats. Granadilla Yogisip and a beef samoosa – when you’re 6 you have capacity to mix unmixable things with joy not nausea. Just before the M1, on a long stretch of road through the industrial outskirts south of town, my father goes head on into a stationary car.

My first thought, after the slow motion shock of the metal grinding sound and piercing shatter of the glass, was the fact that granadilla yogisip was spilling on the floor and my dad would probably be very mad. My next was that I wouldn’t have to drink it – it had dated and was so sour my stomach had been churning just swirling the straw around in my mouth. I could have just mentioned this to my father and left it, but I knew it would have resulted in a swift about turn and flagrant unsettling cursing of some poor Portuguese cafe owner. Then the pain hit.

I was aware that during my spilt milk distraction, my father, covered in blood, was unleashing bile on the crew in the stationary car we’d slammed. It’s 1979 and if there’s a fault in the lives of the incredulous and oblivious South African psyche, it’s can be placed on the blacks. The four in the stationary car must have assumed he was possessed to be shouting such atrocities while smearing off blood from his face and hands and well permed hair. I watched the stodgy curdled liquid with dark little pips pour out of the cardboard box onto the floor. It smelt even worse, now all spread out and with the acrid sting of the accident still around me.

When he arrived back at the car it occurred him I might have been hurt. The glass of the windscreen was shattered and I was bent over with my head between my legs facing the floor. He could’ve only assumed the worst to have suddenly screamed out my name in such cold terror. I slowly looked up and towards him, a moment, now, sitting here, 2009, contemplating future proofing policies – must have been one of infinite relief. When my first words came pouring out, “It’s sour…” I think I saw for the one of those rare moments in my father/son relationship, pure love. Not the offspring of a failed and frustrating shotgun marriage at the onset of the 70s; not the constant disappointment of a man visiting uncertain expectations on a young boy; not the fury of self pity and wallowing – it was pure love. He was happy I was alive.

“Don’t worry about it my boy, are you ok, let me look at that bump on your head…”

I’m going to sign the papers.


(August 2009)