In February of 2018, I was diagnosed with cancer and told I’d be lucky to live a month. That year, I spent 91 days in the hospital and my medical bills totaled more than $1.25 million, more than two-thirds of what I had earned in my previous 40 years as a development officer. That got me thinking about who I was and if I mattered.
For some of my peers, development is just a job. I feel sorry for them. The reality is that ours is a noble profession that allows people of lesser means to generate positive change by motivating people of greater means to provide resources to help bring about constructive change. There are talkers, listeners and doers. Development officers have to be all three, and recognize life’s about giving, not getting.
I know there’ a God because nothing makes sense without Him. He is a loving and generous Being that finds joy in both giving and forgiving … and He practices what He preached.
With that awareness, long ago I made a commitment to walk that path … to express my faith by giving back … not ten-percent … but everything, knowing that the legacy society I’d enter one day has perks that never expire.
Being a charitable estate planner, I know the tools to help me achieve that objective. There was a second-to-die life insurance policy; an outright gift of low-basis real estate, several gift annuities (including a QCD annuity), Charitable IRA Rollovers, education improvement tax credits, memorials, honorariums, annual gifts and beneficiary designations. Not surprisingly, it will be bequests that put me over the top.
We all experience something terminal. It’s called life. And while everybody succumbs to it, generous people are not defeated by it. Generosity is not only the best medicine, it’s the most satisfying.
I know. I’ve tasted it.
