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My heart is fine. At least, I think my heart is fine. It seems to beat with regularity. I've gone through life without it being severely broken; I have had heartaches, but thankfully never a heart attack.
And yet, it was my heart that made me get life insurance at the age of 34. I was a year younger than my brother when he was hospitalized during a routine physical to get an emergency stent placed in his heart. And I was nine years younger than my dad when he had a heart attack in the living room of my childhood home.
As I approached 35, people started asking me if I was freaked out about turning 40. It happened often enough that I began to feel stressed that I wasn't worried about getting older. But getting older did make me wonder if my heart had an expiration date.
While the results of heart scans and stress tests provided some immediate relief, it was fleeting. I'd stop worrying for a day, but soon enough I'd see big flashing warning signs in my head again. I needed a way to address the anxiety that I was feeling. And life insurance, of all things, provided the antidote.
Choosing my life insurance
My life is worth $1 million. At least, that's the deal I struck with a life insurance company seven years ago. It's weird that my life has a price tag. It's even weirder that I thought pretty carefully about that number.
Nobody gets excited about life insurance, in large part because it means that, if you have to use it, you're (unfortunately) dead. To be fair, there is someone in my life who got excited when I submitted an application for life insurance. And since this is not a procedural drama, it was not my wife.
"This is a great rate," wrote our insurance agent after getting back bids for a 30-year term policy. "I was really surprised by it."
For those who don't have life insurance or haven't looked into it, there are two big categories: term life insurance and whole life insurance.
Term life is good for a period of time - you'll pay an annual or monthly premium in exchange for the promise of a check being cut in the event that you die during that period of time.
Whole life insurance typically increases in value over time as you make payments and ends with a "death benefit" of a particular amount of money.
Both are depressing when you first hear about them. I am sorry if I am the one making you sad right now. This is why no one, other than insurance agents, gets excited about life insurance. Well, not exactly. In 2012, I'll admit that I was excited to get term life insurance.
The application process
Paperwork makes things concrete. And there's a mountain of paperwork that comes with life insurance. You lay bare your medical history: There was the arm I fractured while sledding, and the lung that collapsed because of a birth defect.
The paperwork was important because it crystallized my acknowledgment of aging. It made me admit that getting older and my own mortality are out of my control.
Life insurance isn't just paperwork, though. It's also sending your kids to daycare while you get blood work done to find out just how broken you are inside.
In my case, a nurse came to my house and sat me down at the dining room table. While my dog whined from the corner, the nurse tied off my arm and drew blood. My blood went in her case. She wished me a good day. I took the dog for a walk hoping it would burn off some of the adrenaline that left my hands shaking.
A few days later, our insurance agent sent over the estimates. I had expected to pay more because of my family history with heart disease. He told me it was a few hundred dollars a year - $700 to be exact - and I shouldn't wait to sign the paperwork.
Life insurance makes you think about a future where you're not present. It makes you imagine what life would be like for those you love after you're gone. And having to go through that exercise made me state out loud that my heart might stop and I could die. Once you name a thing, you can start to accept it.
Settling on a sum
And then, it was just a question of math.
What number felt big enough that my wife could afford child care and our mortgage and everything else that our two-income household needed if it suddenly and irreversibly became a one-income household? That number, for us, was $1 million. That's the price I put on my life.
I reasoned that if I lived out the entire term of my life insurance, I would be 64 years old and both my children would be out of college or working and living their own lives. But if I didn't make it, there was something that could help them financially.
I can't outrun my genes. Life insurance can't fix my heart. But it did slow my heartbeat.
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