Who’s dead at the current time? None that I can think of.
A promise made to someone who will likely be dead when it comes time to actually perform it, yes. In college, a friend of mine’s father would swing through town fairly regularly on business and take his daughter, me, and another friend of ours out to lunch or dinner somewhere pretty nice every time and wouldn’t ever let us pay, knowing that we were broke. I finally asked “Steve, are you sure? You’ve bought me a half-dozen meals this semester alone.”
He said “Tell you what… when you have a kid, do this for them and their friends.”, and I said “That sounds like a good idea- I can do that!”
I’m that kind of weirdo that not only remembers that, but fully intends to do it when the time comes. Since I’m 40, my oldest is 1.5 years old, and Steve’s probably pushing 70, I figure he won’t be alive by the time I’ll be able to fulfill the promise.
The choices the gas and oil companies give you is to lease the land for X amount of money to drill a set number of wells in a specified period of time or buy the mineral rights outright from you and do whatever they want with it forever. We have about 150 producing wells right now but they are time and well limited and we still own all the mineral rights.
You get more in the immediate term if you sell rather than lease but it is a terrible deal overall that borders on a scam. Lots of people just want the most quick cash possible though so they go for the quick payoff. That is what my great-grandfathers were concerned about. They didn’t want someone falling for any number of dollar signs for a sale when the lease value is much higher than that if you hang onto it and lease it out over time. Their intention was to provide for the family in the very long-term (several generations at least) and someone could screw that up if they just took the quick cash.
My sisters and I promised my mom that we would get her body to OSHU within 24 hours after she dies and when we get the cremains back in about 2 years we are to scatter her ashes at the Oregon coast. What can I say, she’s donating her body to science. We didn’t follow my dad’s directions of splitting his cremains between his 6 children, we went by an earlier direction of being buried at a National cemetery. It will be 20 years since his internment at Willamette National Cemetery, in the “marine” section, we call it that because when it rains almost all the headstones are covered in water.
No. I know my dad has been very vocal about how he wants his immedate after death events handled, and I intend to do as he desires, but no real commandments. And I really hope I don’t have to follow those wishes for many decades.
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My parents are also clear about what they want done for heir funerals and all that, but I don’t think I’ve been given any special long-term instructions. I suppose they’d tell us kids to stick by each other and help each other out, but that’s pretty normal. There are a few family heirlooms that are supposed to stay in the family, but that’s more a tacit understanding than a demand. Most of the “commandments” I’ve been given from my family members have to do with their funeral wishes, not with how my life will be lived long after they’re gone.
Unfortunately, my father and my aunts are taking my grandmother’s demand for “no funeral” extremely literally and we haven’t had any sort of service for her since she passed away in October. We have no body to bury anyway, since she had it handed over to McGill University for research. She’s always said the body’s just a shell anyway and she’d like some future doctor to get some use out of her wrinkled hide. She didn’t want a traditional church funeral and somber burial service and all that, but I’m grumpy with the family because for some reason they’ve taken that to mean that we should do nothing at all to remember her life. You can bet your ass that she’d have been delighted to have us all over in her big old house, drinking tea and laughing over stories of that time she whipped her shirt off in the front garden when a junebug flew into her cleavage.
My family is way too practical to come up with something like that. Once someone is 18 and kicked out of the house nobody tries to tell them what to do while alive, let alone after death.
