The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock could well have been written by an old man contemplating his estate plan. In Prufrock, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) weaves together the following lines:
The narrator of the poem is reflecting on his long life, and all throughout the City of his narration there is yellow fog, yellow smoke, that is mysterious and unknown, and which nevertheless settles about the house in a sort of restless peace.
"This is a very peculiar relationship," one of my planning clients said as he hugged me and left my office yesterday. "Its like measuring my life out spoonful by spoonful."
I remembered the Prufrock poen from college and this man being well educated, I assumed the allusion intentional. "Its bigger than coffee spoons," I responded. "Its beyond your mortality - the mark you make - the legacy you choose to leave."
This wonderfully insightful client knew that the power (and choice) we exercise over our fate is all we can do to address the inevitability of 'the yellow fog settling in.' "Like a patient etherized upon a table" is one of Eliot's metaphors for this process by which the evening (or our life) 'spreads out against the evening sky.' We risk becoming numb to what is important if we limit ourselves to the coffee spoons of our materialism.
Also germane to this thought, today I received a call from the Kaiser room where a husband client reached out for a moment to express his feelings of gratitude to us for handling his and his dying wife's estate plan just a couple years ago. We talked for a few moments and, after the formalities of ensuring their affairs were in order, we got down to what really matters. She has lived a good life, she has left the mark she chose to leave, and she is gracefully dying with her husband at her side, unable to speak but holding him - and when she can muster the strength - kissing him. He needed assurances from me (not just legal assurances), like a child needs his hand held and his cheek kissed every morning before he leaves for school, that everything is exactly as it should be.
And then there was Tuesday lunch, where my editor and I had a long, light lunch at Dave's - our favorite dive in the City - and discussed her empowering experience of holding her friend's bedside hand at the hospice, while other, healthier cancer patients and other volunteers came in and out of the room at all hours of the day and night to ensure that under no circumstances would her friend die alone. Finally her friend let go, and the breathing became easier, lighter and softer until she took her final breath.
We choose the metric by which we measure the relative success or failure of our lives - money, health, love or even (for Prufrock) coffee spoons. Each of these clients (and Prufrock) have chosen their metrics and have, by that choice made perhaps many decades ago, achieved the success that was the object of their aim.
It has changed me as a lawyer and a person to have embraced this spiritually relevant practice area. The metric of my success is no longer some number (a dollar figure) that the Compensation Committee has deigned in its munificence to bestow upon me, or the dollar value of the corporate dispute to which I have been assigned first-chair responsibility. It is a much more humble and clinical practice that requires an entirely different skill set - empathy, compassion and care. Sure, a little foresight, facility with numbers, and a basic level of extroversion are also important. And we cannot throw out the logistical means by which this end is achieved (I have to cover payroll and balance the checkbook like everybody else), but the aim is not the dollar. The dollar and I got an amicable divorce.
Coffee spoon by coffee spoon, my clients are changing my life. They are sharing their deepest, most hopeful aspirations and their darkest, coldest fears. I can endeavor to match their contribution to my humanity, but I fear that the people I serve leave me with debts I may never be able to repay.
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