But the reality of architecture is such that few new projects materialized. Several months later he laid off one employee, then another, in order to stay in fiscal balance. He looked into declaring himself disabled to avail himself of some disability insurance his insurance agent, John Bartram, had thankfully cornered him into buying several years earlier. He quickly learned about an important nuance. His firm's health insurance policy contained a common provision that required you to be working at least 20 hours a week to remain eligible for coverage. Fortunately, John was. But he realized then that he and his doctors would have to document that he was disabled enough to get the disability payment without being so disabled that he would be dropped from his health insurance plan that covered not just him but our entire family. We looked at disability insurance with fresh eyes, grateful nonetheless for the $1,500 it provided each month.
Vaguely stable, John began to see what he could do to create work for himself. It had always been part of his strategy for the new firm to dabble in real estate development. With his added health complications, creating his own projects became an even greater imperative, and thanks to some capital that looked like it would be forthcoming from both family and professional contacts, he was able to do so.
He threw himself into his work with gusto. An experimental drug he began taking as part of a clinical trial miraculously began causing his tumors to shrink. We tried to relax and enjoy life a bit more as a family. I was on the cusp of getting a full-time teaching position at Baruch College, which offered the prospect of greater professional stimulation and some welcome security. We indulged ourselves with a week at an upscale ranch in Arizona, followed by a visit to the Grand Canyon, a family pilgrimage that now seemed more urgent to make. Twelve months after his initial diagnosis, John's cancer was deemed to be in enough of a remission that his chemo treatments were suspended. Still, we were afraid to celebrate, since his doctors warned that it would only be a matter of time before the cancer would return.
Sadly, they were right. In the fall of 2002, new brain tumors appeared, forcing John to undergo "whole brain" radiation and instantly turning him into a bald man. He began to lose weight. Around that same time, a doctor who specializes in experimental treatments recommended that he see Dr. Thomas Nesselhut in Duderstadt, Germany, who had been having success boosting cancer patients' immune systems. The treatment required him to be overseas about 10 days a month, an intense regimen that John nonetheless threw himself into valiantly.
Those last few months were the most difficult for his employees. He began needing oxygen and pulled a portable tank around the office behind him. "It was only toward the end, when he was so physically debilitated, that it started to take a toll," recalls Jae. Roberta agrees: "It was hard to watch someone's demise." The weaker he became, the more urgently he focused on winding the business down. His earlier decision to shift almost completely away from client work to his own development initiatives made that process easier. In March, he let go of most of his staff, helping them find other jobs, but kept two on as freelancers to help him wrap up loose ends. He also frantically began seeking a tenant to take over his office, which was in the same building as our home. John's firm had paid us rent, and he didn't want that income to be disrupted.
John made five trips to Germany and enjoyed one brief moment where the treatments seemed to stop the disease in its tracks. However, eight days after getting home from his last trip in May 2003, John passed away in our home, a spent force at age 51. Only hours earlier, we had taken down the Studiopetrarca sign hanging in front of our building, in anticipation of the new tenant, another architectural firm.
You would think that with all this time to anticipate the impact of his death on our family's finances, he and I would have done so adequately. After all, I am a business journalist, supposedly savvy in matters of personal finance. And this was not a case of someone being hit by a bus. John did, of course, have a will. We had taken that step after our first child was born in 1992. But his approach to retirement savings had been classically entrepreneurial. He hoped that his business would someday generate enough profit to support him in his old age, so he rarely put money aside. When he did save, his investment approach was as iconoclastic as his attitude toward building his business. As a designer, he was completely dependent on his long line of Apple computers, so, in true Peter Lynch-style, that was the stock he bought. At the time of his death, thanks in part to Apple's ups and downs, his completely undiversified IRA amounted to a mere $29,000.
As for life insurance, well, that was just a horrible case of bad timing. In anticipation of his new firm, John decided to increase his life insurance from the $200,000 he had previously purchased. The week that the nurse was scheduled to come to John's office to conduct her medical exam was the week that John was diagnosed. "If only we'd had that conversation three months earlier," says Bartram, of New York Life Insurance Co. "This is the thing you never want to have happen if you're an agent." Needless to say, John was not able to raise his coverage.
Still, I felt fortunate to have $200,000, figuring it would help pay those dreaded college tuition bills. That was before I began getting hit with surprises. The first one came about three days after John's death, before the funeral had even taken place. I was sitting in my living room with some of John's family talking in general terms about my financial situation, when my brother-in-law Dan turned to me and said, "Well, you do know about the lien on your house, don't you?"
A frantic search through my husband's papers turned up a folder filled with depressing documents, one of which indicated there was indeed a lien on our house.
I was horrified. What lien on the house? He said John had told him about it on a trip to Germany, and he thought it wasn't too big, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars. A frantic search through my husband's papers turned up a folder filled with depressing documents, one of which indicated there was indeed a lien on the house from a contractor. Only it was a little more than Dan thought: $1.245 million, to be precise.
