As I get older I’m becoming more and more aware of death and my own mortality. This causes me great anxiety. It has been heightened by Ethan’s autism diagnosis and my fear of who will look after him when I am gone. It’s amazing how many people assumed we had another child just for this purpose. Autism made me learn to never put any pre-conceived expectations onto my children. If anything I would love Little E to embrace the world as much as she can. I wouldn’t want her to have a pre-determined role as her brother’s carer. She does look after him naturally without thinking but I wouldn’t want this to stop her future ambitions and dreams.
Reducing My Anxiety About My Sons Future
As much as I would love to pretend a future without me in it isn’t going to happen, I’m yet to find the fountain of youth! My biggest hope for our son’s future is to make him as independent as possible. This will take lots of time and lots of life lessons. This was one of the reasons we fought for our sons school placement. His school focuses on life lessons rather than exam results.
I’m assuming there will be a time when we will have to look into his housing options. We won’t know how his needs will have to be met until the time comes to discuss his options.
We will also have to look into finances, his and ours this is something we will have to take legal advice on. This type of thing can get complicated when special needs are involved.
What Should I Do About My Digital Legacy?
With the realisation that our son was autistic I needed an outlet and I started this blog. I used it as a way of sharing our journey and now I like to look of it as our family diary. It’s our online life and one that has helped me make new friends and get good advice during our autism journey. Our blog is also linked to many different social media channels and we have a growing YouTube channel too.
It feels very strange to think about considering your online life when you talk about death. We are the generation that first saw the Internet introduced. It was expensive to have, a luxury even. This meant it wasn’t something that was in every home. We had to listen to the dialling tone and wait for connection before you even had a chance of browsing the World Wide Web. Now nearly everyone has access to the Internet at his or her fingertips. Smart phones are part of our everyday life and there is an app for anything and everything.
What will happen to my online life when I am gone? Will Ethan or Little E want to take over our YouTube Channel? Will our children want to have access to our blog or continue to blog? These really are things I will have to consider. Things that the generations before us never even had to think about.
If you think this is something that you will also need to consider SunLife has some very useful information on securing your digital legacy.
DISCLOSURE – This post is in collaboration with SunLife.