My Uncle Died Without a Will – And It Was a Nightmare

Written by Hannah Logan   Publish date: June 4, 2021

What happens when a family member dies and doesn't leave a will? It's not pleasant, as one woman recounts. It's a frustrating exercise that underscores why everyone should have a legal will.

In April of 2017, my family got a call we never expected.

My father’s youngest brother had died suddenly in his home. My uncle Peter was a single man without children, so it fell upon my family to take care of his estate. While this is never a pleasant task for any family, our experience was made several times more difficult and stressful due to the fact that we were unable to find his legal will.

He was a former member of the Canadian Navy, based in Halifax. Upon receiving the news my parents flew out to Nova Scotia from our family home in Ontario to take care of everything.

At least, that was the plan. What happened was a frantic scavenger hunt that led us to dead-ends and an agonizing process with the government. Did I mention that we had to deal with this gong show while trying to process our grief of losing a loved one?

Since he had served in the navy, we all assumed Peter had a will. Despite hours of searching, there wasn’t one to be found. Instead of spending the time in Halifax to clear out his apartment and to distribute/sell his belongings, my parents were trying to find Peter’s will. After a week of searching, they gave up, put Peter’s stuff in storage, and flew home. They were still determined to look for a will from afar.

Over the next two months, we did everything we could to find his will, if one even existed at all. We contacted the Canadian military in hopes they might still have one on file. After all, he had only been out of the military for a few years before his death. Even if it wasn’t a recent will, it would have given us some understanding of his last wishes.

No luck. We reached out to every bank and lawyer office we could find in the Halifax area. Again, we came up empty-handed. So we rifled through boxes and boxes of my uncle’s papers that my parents had brought home. Perhaps somewhere in that pile, we’d find a will or clue about whether he had created one and with whom.

But it was all a lost cause. Grief-stricken and frustrated, we had to figure out our next steps of dealing with what the law calls dying “intestate”—meaning that a loved one hasn’t left any instructions as to how they’d like their property to be divided and distributed. It also meant his last wishes for burial were a guessing game.

Unfortunately, this is more common than you would think. Based on a poll conducted by the Angus Reid Institute in 2018, 51% of Canadians don’t have a will. One of the main reasons for this, according to the poll, is that people think they are too young to need one. The study showed that Canadians over the age of 55 are four times as likely to have a will as those aged 18-34, and twice as likely to have a will as those aged 35-54.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://youngandthrifty.ca/what-happens-if-you-die-without-a-will-in-canada/