I’ve been planning my death for a while now. Decades actually. But then, you’re looking at

a guy who has had more imagined terminal illnesses than baseball cards over the span of a lifetime. And I had a lot of baseball cards — that is, until my parents, without asking, decided to throw them all out when I was in college.

Still, there’s important stuff to sort out.  Somewhere in the underwear drawer of our Cape Cod home are letters to Kathy, my partner and love (on most days) of 52 years, to my two daughters and to my three grandkids.  I write these whenever I fly alone.

Other than a standard will, however, I have not written down what should be given to each of my grandchildren when I keel over. And that could be any day now. I take nine prescription pills.  I could choke on one. Or on a cherry pit. Or accidentally drive into the ocean. The list of possibilities boggles the mind. What then? It would be a crisis.

Who would know what to do with my Yamaha keyboard, my two mediocre guitars, my beloved leather bomber jacket with a map of France on the lining, my grandmother’s toy village from Germany, the tiny ivory mice no one can buy because selling ivory is against the law these days.  And the beloved orchestra of German-made wooden angels we arrange on the sideboard each Christmas.

So, it’s with some urgency that I hereby attempt to set things straight, to draw up a list of bequests (is that the right word?) for my grandchildren Devon, 16, Dylan, 13, and Maddy, 10.

Mind you my problems pale next to those of the rich and famous. When real estate mogul Leona Helmsley died in 2007, the burden apparently was so great that she simply stiffed her grandchildren, instead leaving $12 million to her 8-year-old white Maltese dog, appropriately named Trouble.  (In the name of justice and grandchildren everywhere, a judge eventually stripped all but $2 million from Trouble, who apparently had to live in near penury during the last four years of his life.)

I consider my grandkids fortunate. I’ve decided to limit our yellow lab Lucky to an array of dog bones, antlers and rubber balls on the day of my passing.  Alas, I have already lost some of the more valuable gifts I might have left the kids.  There were those baseball cards, which Dylan, pitcher and third baseman, surely would have loved.  And my 1937 Rolls Royce, which simply got too rusty to keep in the driveway. And somehow, the matching solid gold goblets of my grandmother’s royal duchy of Lichtenstein got lost — along with the sunshine —- when we moved from California to Fayetteville, N.Y., 39 years ago.

Still, I do want to get things right. On the first round, I’ll give the keyboard to Devon, the leather bomber jacket to Dylan and the choice of a guitar to Maddy. But the German village, boxed through our last four moves … that’s tough one. No one has ever seen it. Same with the ivory mice.

The wooden Christmas angel orchestra could be the toughest, though. Devon loves it but Maddy does, too.

In the end, I guess, it probably won’t much matter. I just can’t imagine the kids fighting over my Greek sailor’s cap, though I think it’s pretty cool. And isn’t it the memories, the intangibles, that matter most? 

When my mom died at 83 on her Vermont hillside, my brother Dennis and I needed but a weekend to sort through the place, the aging furniture and boxes of letters and memorabilia from her and my dad’s lives. Our girls each got a piece or two of jewelry. What we couldn’t give them to hold onto, however, were the wisdom, love and advice mom always provided or the articles she’d clip from newspapers and magazines and stuff in an envelope every week or two (on pimples, exercise, boy trouble … she had it covered).

Back then, in 1999, Dennis and I split the angel orchestra, even though I’d played much more of a role each Christmas arranging it above the mantel. Some years later my brother’s wife, Erica,

handed me a box. It was their share of the angels.

Perhaps it was a sign that everything sorts itself out in the end. Except, of course, death itself.