Endings...and Beginnings

I tucked my kids into bed and moments later, my son came downstairs to tell me that I really needed to talk to my daughter. Frustrated, I stomped upstairs thinking the kids were just angling for some extra time to stay up, but my daughter was crying hard. “I don’t ever want you to die,” she told me.

It’s a moment every parent comes across, I suppose. It’s also one nobody ever prepares you for.

I sat on my daughter’s bed and held her and I told her that I would be around for a long time, and that she had nothing to worry about. What else could I say? My job was to comfort my little sweetpea, and enable her to sleep soundly. I couldn’t tell her what I knew to be true: that I will do everything to live for as long as I can, yes. But I don’t know if a car will take me out or if I will fall to some unnamed plague or succumb to any number of premature ends that could befall me. I just don’t know. That’s why my wife and I have insured ourselves as much as we have. Because we just don’t know. Nobody does.

I went downstairs and meant to talk to my wife about it, but she was already asleep on the couch. And so I started writing this out, reflecting at first on the emotional content of the day, but in a more distanced sense, on what it really meant to insure our lives. We call death insurance life insurance, and we call life insurance health insurance, as if the importance of these things is so heavy that we can’t really look them in the face. Even when we take measures to prepare for them, we cannot call them by name, as if to do otherwise would invite their occurrence. There is such a powerful, visceral tone to contending with these issues that it boggles my mind when I encounter the mainstream notion is that selling life insurance is some kind of boring, whitebread job that requires an unusual mix of personal blandness and tenacity. But I know this to be untrue.

Earlier in the week, I had the chance to ask a life insurance executive if selling life insurance was something you did, or something you are. He said with confidence that it was something you are; nobody gets into the trade of delivering money to grieving mothers, fathers, husbands, wives and children on a lark. Maybe some do it for the high potential compensation, but eventually, they must all face the transaction of money for the loss of a loved one, and that cannot come easily. Speaking with one of my editors just today, he noted that for many life agents, actually dealing with the death of their clients is often an unexpected emotional burden, and it lends a certain moral component to a business transaction that would otherwise be fairly impersonal. We hear so often that in business, it never pays to mix one’s business and personal lives, but in this industry, I don’t see how keeping the two separate is entirely possible. It makes the work of a life agent that much more complicated.

And in the end, that much more indispensable.