“Oh, that mine enemy might have written a book!”

As I was reading through this thread, those thoughts kept running through my mind. Personally, I wouldn’t want any Freudian, Jungian, or any other kind of psychologist clawing his way through my papers and triumphantly declaring that he had found the real ME, only to be refuted 25 years or so later, when the wheel of psychology had turned, and his ideas had been totally discredited.

My innermost thoughts will remain mine.

Precisely my point. I want my journal to be realistic, so I can realistically see how much I have grown or how I have fallen short. If I write with the expectation that it will be destroyed when it’s not longer useful to me, then I don’t feel the need to “sanitize” anything or show any sort of consideration at all to any kind of audience.

That’s why it makes sense to me to arrange for all personal writings (like journals, etc.- that obviously does not include letters I have written or blog posts like this one) to be destroyed. My writings are not meant to inspire, they are meant to be a record and help me keep track of how I am doing in all aspects of life, so that ten years from now I can look back and say- I was thinking such and such ten years ago, and now my thinking has progressed to this and that. (or regressed…) Or I was doing this or that and now I have improved that behavior.

My question is whether this philosophy makes me a bad church member. We have been asked to keep journals, but is there an explicit instruction for us to make those writings available for posterity?

(p.s. what “new, pessimistic” Jordan? This is the new, over-worked and over-stressed Jordan. Welcome to the real world?)

“I think the Church wants members to self-edit every statement as if there were an audience, whether in one?s journal, letters, or conversation. After awhile, it may become difficult to distinguish the edited self from the authentic self.”

I thought this was an intriguing thing to say. What makes you think that the Church encourages “self-editing” ? Please say more.

Both ukann and Kaimi bring up the issue of whether or not to retain writings that may prove to be hurtful to others. I am doubleminded about this. On one hand, the historian in me feels protective of all written records. While we should probably be more protective of living people than of documents, it is difficult to know how people will be affected by what they find in an ancestor’s journal. Even negative reports may be beneficial in some way. I’m glad to know, for example, that my great grandfather PD resented being sent by the prophet to live in Emery County. He went, but he wasn’t happy about it. In fact, I don’t think he ever really got over it. Being sent to Emery County felt like being exiled to him and he was spitting mad about it.

I’m grateful to know that another great grandmother was opinionated and sort of hard to deal with. When her husband was asked how he felt about taking on a second wife, his response was, “Another wife? Hell, I can’t handle the one I’ve got.” Lizzie was headstrong and independent. Some people even thought she was mad. She actually died in a flashflood because she insisted on delivering soup to a sick neighbor several miles away against everyone’s advice. There’s something endearing to me about the thought of her out there in the desert with her bucket.

My great grandpa George died on his mission to New Zealand. When Grandma Katherine, who was left as widow with 4 little children, found out about it from a neighbor who’d read it in the Church News instead of being notified by the church, she was devastated. I’m glad she didn’t edit her rage or despair. Nothing sanitized about grandma Kate’s grief.

There’s much for me to learn from this family record. I can see my grandpa PD both as an obedient and hardworking man, but also as a real human being with weaknesses and struggles. Grandpa George was a martyr for the faith, but it permanently changed grandma Kate. There was no way to ever make it okay. She was never herself again. Knowing this makes the fact that she continued faithful and raised the children in the Church that much more meaningful to me. And, I’m glad to know grandma Lizzie not only as an outspoken model of early Mormon feminism but also as the sortof crazy lady she was.

I would not love these ancestors as I do if they weren’t made real to me by the candid records they kept about themselves and each other.

1. Everyone should have a will. If you die intestate (without a will) you’re just asking for problems. And if there’s any chance that family members will disagree about who should receive what — any possibility of problems at all — then you should talk to a lawyer in drafting your will, rather than just filling in a form (the form is better than intestacy, however). An estate planning attorney won’t be particularly cheap (probably a few hundred dollars at a minimum), but will help you plan out to protect against contigencies, in a way that a $20 fill-in-the-blanks form will won’t do.

2. I’m not an estate planning attorney, so don’t ask me. :P

“How can anyone (except maybe the Pope?) be sure that one’s death wishes will be respected and followed?”

It’s simple — you talk to an estate planning lawyer. You write a will, or put assets in trust, or both.

If I want my guitar to go to my brother Danny, I can say “I give my guitar to Danny.” I can place conditions on this as well — “I give my guitar to Danny, provided that he takes guitar lessons by age 25; otherwise, I give it to my cousin Ricky.”

And that’s the sort of thing that your mother (or anyone) could do by will — “I give my cats to my son Danny.”

Now, what you _can’t_ do is guarantee any action by another person. You can dispose of property — “Danny gets the cats.” And you can dispose of property contingent on actions by another person — i.e., you can say “and Danny gets the house and the swiss bank account too, provided that he also takes care of the cats.” And you can give alternative recipients — “Danny gets the cats, but if he doesn’t want them, then they go to the Humane Society.”

But that sort of carrot-stick is all that one can do to try to influence actions. If Danny doesn’t care about the financial incentives, then there’s no way to _force_ him to take the cats.

My mother-in-law wanted a lot of stuff done with her possessions and property, and it isn’t practical or even physically possible to do all she wanted. The way she wanted her remains handled is unlawful, for one thing.

Her almost feral, non-housebroken cats, had to go to a no-kill animal shelter–that was the closest we could come to doing what she wanted, as none of us were able (or, frankly, willing) to take them.

Just saying, if you want something done, and it really matters to you, you’d better see to it yourself while you’re able. My MIL knew she was dying and she procrastinated dealing with the problem of her cats because she’d miss them too much.

If she’d wanted something special done with all her papers, we might not have had TIME to do it, and there were so many people in and out of her home in her final weeks that a lot of things went missing. Hospice workers stole a lot of stuff, including papers. We’ll never know the extent of the loss because we really don’t know what there might have been, and we couldn’t find most of the stuff she talked about.