Somewhere in the middle of a men’s group dinner the other night, the conversation turned to wills.

Nobody had planned it. One man raised the subject and, within a few minutes, we discovered that a few of the men at the table either did not have one or had not updated it in years.

I was a bit stunned.

My first reaction was not especially generous.

How do you reach this stage of life and still not have a will?

The more I thought about it, though, the less comfortable I felt with my first reaction.

I could imagine one reason for putting it off. A will asks us to confront something most of us would rather not think about.

It means picturing a world that continues without us. It asks us to consider what happens to everything we have accumulated and who would be left with the responsibility of sorting it out.

It is not simply paperwork.

It is mortality in a manila folder.

That can feel morbid. It can feel frightening.

And because there is no immediate deadline, it is remarkably easy to put off. There is almost always something else to deal with, something that needs our attention while we are still very much alive.

We have had wills since our kids were born, and we review them every few years.

I do not do that because I believe death is imminent. I do it because life keeps changing.

Children grow up. Grandchildren arrive. Finances change. People move. Relationships change.

The person chosen as executor ten years ago may no longer be the right person for the job.

A will can remain tucked safely in a drawer while the life it was written for becomes increasingly out of date.

Having one is reassuring. But it is worth asking whether it still says what we want it to say.

This has always felt important to me.

Still, not having a will does not necessarily mean someone is careless or does not care about the people in his life. He may simply not want to spend an afternoon imagining his own absence.

I can understand that reluctance.

But avoiding the subject does not prevent the decisions from being made. Some fall to the people left behind. Others are already settled by rules we may never have considered.

A will does not make death tidy.

It does not eliminate grief, paperwork, legal costs, or the possibility of disagreement. It cannot anticipate every circumstance or prevent every problem.

What it can do is answer some important questions while we are still here to answer them.

Who should handle the estate?

Who should receive what remains?

Are there particular belongings that matter to someone?

What should happen if the people originally named are no longer alive?

Those questions may have straightforward answers. They may also require conversations we have been putting off.

Either way, we have an opportunity to think about them, talk them through, and explain what we want.

I have sometimes said to others that even a will stating, “I don’t care what happens to my possessions,” must be better than leaving no instructions.

That is too casual a way to put it. It is a feeling, not a useful set of directions.

But I know what I was trying to say.

Not everyone cares who gets the furniture, the tools, the artwork, or the boxes that have been sitting untouched in the basement for twenty years.

Some people may be perfectly comfortable allowing someone they trust to sort through those belongings.

But it is worth making clear what we mean, rather than assuming the people left behind know.

Do we truly have no preferences? Have we promised something to someone? Is there an object of little monetary value that matters a great deal to a child or grandchild?

A qualified professional can help us understand what instructions are needed where we live and put our intentions into language that works.

Silence, however, is not much of an instruction.

The person who dies never has to deal with the uncertainty.

The people left behind do.

They may already be grieving when they begin looking for documents, determining who has legal authority, locating assets, dealing with the home, and trying to understand what the person would have wanted.

A will cannot spare them all that work. Clear instructions can, however, spare them some of the uncertainty about what we wanted.

That is the part I find difficult to ignore.

The discomfort of making a will belongs to me. The uncertainty I leave behind would belong to someone else.

I do not know why each of the men at that dinner had put it off. I did not ask.

Their circumstances are their own, and there may be reasons I know nothing about.

My surprise softened as I thought about that.

My concern did not.

I cannot spare the people I love from the loss that eventually comes. I cannot remove every complication or answer every question.

But I can make some of the decisions while I am capable, calm, and still here.

Not making a will does not make those decisions disappear.

It leaves them for someone else.

Jim O’Grady writes The Post Game, a newsletter about life in the GoGo years. He lives in White Rock, BC.