Planning to Die
In my faith, November is a time we remember our beloved dead. Whether or not you subscribe to my beliefs is irrelevant. It’s a good idea to remember them and tell their stories. In my house, we tell our stories. I suggest you do the same, especially the funny ones. They humanize not only the person, but the past as well.
I’m a fan of cemeteries. I like to wander about and speculate who lay beneath my feet. I imagine them in their time, what I know of it, anyway. When I was younger, my father used to take me to the small Lutheran cemetery in Brenham to visit our beloved dead. At the time I found it morbid, but now I think it’s beautiful.
There are dead Rogges there dating from the 1830s. I like to sit and wonder how like me they could have been. Which of them gave me the knock knees? The odd sense of humor? The affection for sauerkraut?
I don’t think I’m alone in trying to relate to my familial dead. It’s easier to do when you know their stories, so tell them, even if the subject isn’t a person of fame or infamy. Today, I give you snippets of a man’s life, a steady and oft quoted man who is dearly missed by his survivors, hoping that you’ll see in it some value for your own life.
Loren Kopp was my grandfather-in-law. He died in 2021 at the age of 95 and still holds the title of Chillest Man I’ve Ever Known ™. I met Loren in 1999 and I never heard him raise his voice. He was by all accounts a great husband, father, grandfather, small business owner, and perhaps most significantly, teacher.
He was a trucker turned owner, and as a child of the Depression, never wasted a scrap of metal or replaced things when they could be repaired. The result was an exceptionally handy man. I want to tell you more about him, like his lifetime service to the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, his trek from Oklahoma to Houston as a young man, his knack for farming and ranching, or his military service as prison guard in New York, guarding German captives.
I know very little about that last thing, save that the Germans were apparently amazing cooks. Must have been true for him to carry on about it so many decades later.
But that’s not today’s agenda. Today, we will talk about the land. Yes, the land. By anyone’s standards, Loren was a frugal man, needing nothing more than was required for himself and requiring very little. But for his family, his generosity ran deep. Land, it turned out, was an expression of that generosity.
He and Margaret, his wife, owned at least 6 separate properties that I know of. The most significant to his legacy is a 100+ acre working cattle farm near Waller, TX; a farm my children, his great-grandchildren know well.
Until recently, the “farm” as we call it, has been in the background for me, a place my husband and kids hunt, repair fence and bale hay. A few weeks ago, while paying a visit to his widow, and the horse we now keep out there, whose affection I’ve purchased with carrots and honeydew melon, Loren’s intentions for the place became clear.
I walked into the little house, hunting down a great grandma who was nowhere to be found. I found her in the bathroom, not in an indecent way, but standing on a stepping stool peering out the window that faces the horse pasture so she could watch my kids ride, and the oldest drive the tractor. What divine humor placed that window in the bathroom, I’ll never know, but her face as she watched was joyous. She turned to me and said with actual glee, “this is what grandpa wanted!”. We were both teary-eyed at the thought.
Grandpa Loren bought the place well before he would be called grandpa, much less great grandpa. He would celebrate his last birthday there surrounded by his daughter and son-in-law, two grandsons and their wives and six great-grandchildren. A fitting end, but not what was on his mind when he bought the place.
It wasn’t a place for him to die. It was a place for us to live. A place for him to teach his eager grandsons the way of the farmer and rancher, skills he didn’t want to perish with him. This was in his mind 50+ years ago, when his oldest child was barely a teenager, as he signed on the dotted line to buy “the farm”.
Loren had a vision that motivated him all of his very long life. It required planning, sacrifice, and no small amount of dreaming to get there. In doing it, however, he established his legacy, one designed for generations that, at the time, didn’t yet exist. How many of us think like that?
Yeah, we don’t like to talk about death, it’s a bummer. But consider what peace may come from planning a legacy rather than your death. Think about that as you work through your financial plan: what will you leave behind for your loved ones and why.
I can safely say that Loren left a lot. Land? Yes. Lessons? Yes. An enormous pile of scrap metal and spare parts that I will not see the end of in my lifetime? Also, yes. I’ll end here with my favorite grandpa quote, a response he often gave to being asked how he was doing:
Well, I woke up this morning, wiggled my toes and didn’t find any tags on ‘em, so I’m doing just fine.