So, the last few years my father has been increasingly aware he’s in the end stage of his life and doing the preliminaries of dynastic succession. Of course he’s not even Boomer – “Silent Generation” – and he fundamentally understands the universe as beginning and ending with him, so. He does a lot of estate planning, I can tell he’s making himself do the stuff he’s usually the heavy making his clients do to bring the heirs in.

Anyway, so I’ve been cutting out the middleman and dealing with the accountant re: taxes now. Though the handoff hasn’t been maximally smooth, in part because he’s accepting this now because his mind’s going and he just hands over responsibilities without keeping me fully up on what’s happening and what they are.

So just yesterday realized the accountant had wanted some sort of tax planner checklist from me and freaked out, when the dust settled it was clear they had all my information already anyway, that in fact the point of these sort of upper-class professional relationships is to offload these sorts of obligations, and by even noticing this I had already lifted myself above the mass of feckless heirs they exist to serve.