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YOUR DIGITAL UNDERTAKER by Sharon  Hartung

YOUR DIGITAL UNDERTAKER

Exploring Death in the Digital Age in Canada

by Sharon Hartung

Pub Date: Feb. 22nd, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9994501-5-1
Publisher: FriesenPress

A practical guide to preparatory end-of-life and post-mortem care for Canadians.

Hartung’s insightful, personal approach to the somber realities of “deathcare” provides essential and motivational reading. In a heartfelt introduction, the author, a former aerospace engineer and IBM executive, notes that her life changed drastically after her mother died. The event “forced me to face grief in a way that I’d never experienced before and handed me a troubled project I was not expecting,” she candidly reveals, and she goes on to share the intimate details of her journey. Although she was dealing with crushing sadness, she ran through a checklist of tasks that were necessary for her mother’s proper cremation and her estate’s dispensation and settlement. The author writes that no one can ever be fully prepared for a death in the family; her mother’s death came during an exceptionally stressful period, she says, when her career was in flux, her home required a “long, muddy, messy and expensive drainage project,” and she’d recently undergone a cancer scare. Readers should keep in mind that laws differ from country to country, and Hartung’s text is specifically tailored toward Canadians. However, the author offers successive chapters of critical advice on estate administration, including the complexities of digital-age aspects of the process, and comprehensively examines the complexities of wills and executorship. Her linear explanations and thorough research ultimately take much of the guesswork out of interment, philanthropy, taxes, and probate laws. Charts, tables, and sidebars offer additional graphic elucidation. In a book about an industry that traditionally focuses on unsentimental legalities, Hartung infuses some much-needed humanity. Her perspective will be welcomed by readers in similar situations.

A durable course on the legal nuances of survivorship and the importance of preplanning.