I wrote my first will when I was 19.

I was serving with the Royal Military Police in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was 1976 and I’d just got married.

The very next time I left the relative safety of the patrol HQ and ran across the road into the Short Strand I felt a huge sense of responsibility and thought, ‘What if I die tonight?’

A week earlier I had seen a colleague, Ted, who had just joined the unit, flung to the ground after being hit in the face by a high velocity bullet from a sniper’s rifle. He survived and made a full recovery.

In fact, when I was knocked down by a lorry as I manned a Vehicle Check Point just 3 days after I got married I was admitted to the same ward in the Musgrave Park Hospital where Ted was recovering.

He saw me being wheeled in on a stretcher with blood all over my face and blood trickling from an ear and assumed I’d been shot too. When I was placed in a bed in the corner of the ward Ted told anyone that would listen that ‘That’s the bed they put you in if you’re not going to make it.’

My mind was shouting NOOOOOOOOOO, but I was in shock and couldn’t speak.

I made my first will a week later.

I would like to report that I updated my will regularly as the years passed, but I didn’t. I thought that will would be fine, despite the fact that by 2000, when we bought our first house, we had 2 teenage sons and many more possessions than we’d had in 1976 when Joyce and I eloped to get married.

Having bought our house we both made new wills.

I’d been a police officer since leaving the Army in 1984 and had the unenviable task of delivering the news, on a number of occasions, that someone’s nearest and dearest wouldn’t be coming home. I’d also had any number of brushes with death.

That’s the thing about death – it doesn’t always give you fair warning.

When I retired from the police in 2007 I was offered a job in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. How could I pass up such a chance?

I’d been there only 3 months when, as the result of a blood test for life insurance cover, I learned that I had a huge tumour in my stomach cavity. I almost lost my life again during the operation, and spent several days in intensive care. My mother is convinced that I was given the opportunity to go to KL because that tumour needed to be found and removed.

My Mum is 76. She knows she should make a will, but she doesn’t want to have to face her own mortality.

She is like the others among the 70% of the UK population that doesn’t have a will – she isn’t ill, she has all her wits about her, it can wait……..

I met a woman yesterday who has spent the last 2 years struggling with the bureaucracy that is probate, because her partner died unexpectedly and didn’t have a will.

Don’t put your loved ones through that. Make a will.

Set out on record what you want to happen after you die. Who is your estate to go to?

If you have young children, who is to look after them in the event that some catastrophe leaves them orphaned?

If your wife or husband were to remarry after your death and not make a new will (a will is automatically revoked upon marriage) your estate could be inherited by her new partner and his children – rather than yours.

If you’re divorced or separated your ex or estranged partner could inherit everything, or at least make a claim on your estate.

When you die, do you want to be buried or cremated? Someone has to make these decisions. If you don’t do it while you’re alive, you are leaving your survivors to make decisions at a time when they are struggling to overcome their grief.

After that often comes the bickering and ill feeling over who should get what. Often it’s not the big things – everyone usually agrees on an equitable arrangement. No, it’s the little things, the sentimental things that someone wants to keep, while someone else thinks they should go to the car boot sale.

Make it easy on them. MAKE A WILL.

©Kenn Coates, Probate Solutions (kenn.coates@probatesolutions.co.uk 01455 251348 / 07551 670408