Leave A Loving Legacy
Nov 25th, 2007 by Editor
This is a true story of what happens when a person dies without writing a Will in Malaysia. BK wrote on her blog
Many years ago when my mother was still alive, my father had gingerly broached the subject of will-writing to her but was stopped short of finishing his sentence. That was how taboo the subject was to my late mother and I am sure, still is, to many people today. She waved my dad away, telling him that we will have to ’sort’ things out ourselves AFTER she’s gone and not before.
This seems like a common taboo, especially as Malaysians, death plus the fact of talking about transferring of assets!
Now that she has left us without a will, the family has been thrown into a tangle of bureaucratic mess. My mother passed away in 2004 and after a lapse of three years, we have yet to settle her estate. There was some complications with her banker and the application for the Letter of Administrator has taken more than a year before we were finally called for a hearing two days ago.
The LO Administrator asked us to raise our right hand and recite the oath aloud by reading a card laid out on the table. Since my elder sister could not speak English, she read the oath in Chinese and the rest of us repeated after her. Honestly, I really didn’t know what I was saying. Both Lara and I tried hard to keep a straight face. Since both of us had received an English education, those proper sounding Chinese words seemed so foreign to us.
BK wrote the article in June 2007, that only now, more than 3 years later, the process only started to get in motion. Many people don’t realize the trouble they cause their loved ones when they depart from this planet.
Read part 2 of this story here