Somehow that one is a bitter pill, since it represents a facet of one’s life work that should be held honestly and ethically, in the public trust, as it were. When a dear friend’s partner of fourteen years died in an accident two years ago, my friend and all who were loving and supporting her were thrust up against all these tough legal truths. They’d “married” in San Francisco earlier that year, yet my dear friend couldn’t: (a) be listed as a surviving spouse on the death certificate, (b) legally decide to release her partner’s body from the morgue to the funeral home (we had a very very hard wait for her partner’s estranged, religious conservative parents in Oregon to give their permission), (c) receive her partner’s Social Security benefits, which were legion, since she’d worked so hard for so many years, and (d) avoid having their damn home, which they’d bought a decade before, be re-evaluated at a higher property tax. All this official negation of their fourteen years together, amidst the shambles of shock and grief was nearly too much for her and all of us to take. As a parent, I keep immediately thinking of the benefits of legal parntership to my sense of legal security, vis-a-vis my kid(s). But there is so much to it all.

(Apologies for rattling on so! But when you said “I hope I can use the occasion of our marriage to spread some knowledge,” it opened up a vein. Thank you for sharing these thoughts, wise and insightful as ever.)