“Beyond the hassle and cost of jumping through all kind of hoops to draw up legal paperwork to achieve what opposite sex couples gain automatically through marriage, sometimes it doesn’t even work. When my partner of 17 years died, the funeral home required her family’s permission to perform the cremation - even though I had an unrestricted durable power of attorney, a health care surrogacy contract, and her will, which requested me to make all final arrangements and listed me as the exclusive heir to her estate.
My partner’s legal next of kin was her estranged sister who lived several states away. Thank God, she consented to the cremation and allowed me to have the ashes. The funeral home was fine with me paying, but said I didn’t have the legal authority to make decisions about the disposal of the body. They stated that the power of attorney and health care surrogacy were binding up until the time of death, and that even though the will named me as the executor and exclusive heir to the estate, the will was not valid until it went though probate. So there I was, devastated by the loss of my partner to cancer, at the mercy of distant, estranged “next-of-kin”, who had no idea what my partner’s end of life wishes were. All that said, even with all the paperwork, things are unequal…
Don’t even get me started about freeze the bank put on our joint checking account or how much taxes I paid that year (over $25,000) because the state and federal government considered the inheritance of our JOINT assets as windfall I received from a total stranger!”
Well said. Now let’s work to change this bullshit.
No comments:
Post a Comment