This week on the Gilmore Girls forum we are discussing episode 7.5 (because it reruns this week) and episode 1.6, Rory's Birthay Parties (because we have started over at the beginning and this is week 6).
In the opening scene of 1.6, at Friday night dinner, Emily tells L&R that after dinner they are to go around the house and put a Post-It on items they would like to have left to them in the elder Gilmores' wills.
Both L&R think it's creepy and weird and go all eewwwwww. Why?
Admittedly, given the single grandchild staus that Rory holds, it's a superfluous excersize. Everything goes to her, anyway. But, just as the Palladino's later mocked elementary school musicals with an adult in the lead role because they had seen one, here they are unfairly mocking a common and practical practice in many multi-sibling families.
I have two brothers and three sisters. When our parents decided to down-size from the huge house and yard they no longer wanted to occupy, they had us all over for the very Post-It event depicted in 1.6.
We had different colored slips and we tagged the things we wanted to have. Interestingly and, perhaps, amazingly, very few items got more than one tag. If there were two, a coin was flipped. If there were more, straws were drawn. Only one item had six stickies.
In the 1930's our paternal grandmother acquired 12 huge fiestaware dinner plates in bright southwestern colors. Grandma had given them to my father when they closed down the summer cabin after my grandfather died. We only used them on Thanksgiving when we were kids. All of us wanted them. The only thing that all of us wanted.
When the folks moved to the smaller place, things they didn't want/need went to the sibling who had chosen it. There is a detailed list of who eventually gets what they still have, including the fiestaware.
In multi-sibling families, the Post-It concept is sound and the mockery was misplaced, is all I'm saying.
And as the named executor of our parents' estate, I am extremely pleased that I will not have to referee fights about who gets what. And, I am happy for the opportunity to cheat my youngest sister out of the fiestaware.
Comments
After dinner, after the pudding! I guess the moment just didn't feel right.
And your parents were giving the stuff away once they downsized... not when they died.
Or it might have been for when they died as well, I don't know.
It sounds like something my grandmother would do.
Also it was the flippant tone Emily used.
It was like when my Grandmother had me pick out my urn... she had gotten all of my family members urns from the auction (her favorite place to shop. she got me a barbie doll from there for Christmas last year...)
Anyway, that was a creepy conversation... I asked her which one was her's (I was kidding) and she said she wasn't going to be cremated... she was going to be buried... across the street... they already had the plot picked out.
There has been a few cases in our extended family where there has been fights over items of the deceased. In one case the family doesn't even speak to one another anymore. All over something, which now seems totally juvenile. It's a great life lesson, when learned by observation. Because of this, My mom wants to make extra sure that doesn't happen in our family. I think every family should have something worked out, just in case. I would hate to not speak to my siblings for the rest of my life, just because they got the 'crystal candleholders' I wanted.
As for how morbid it is in contrast to the practicality, I don't know. Like you said, it's good when the executor of the will doesn't have be a referee, but really, is it that necessary? People should not be so attached to those things as to need a referee. Just compromise and if you really care about your siblings, you'll give up something that perhaps you'd like, but will let them have, etc etc. It's all about the kind of family you have I guess.
But as rayc said...it really isn't exactly "dinner conversation." Then again, I'm never one to buy into societal constraints on how/when/where to discuss something.
See Swim and Black- that is a comment!
We did it after some big family celebration because that's the only thing that's gets all 6 of us in town at the same time. It wasn't morbid at all. It was kind of fun to see who had grown attached to what. And there were certainly a lot of things nobody wanted.
I'm the executor of the estate because that's cheaper than having a bank or lawyer do it and I'm the eldest that lives in the same city as them.
swimgirl8392