Renewing a Business Lease Uncovered an Unwritten Burial Wish

The situation

Naomi had four business days left to sign a renewed lease on the second location of her cleaning company before the landlord released the space to another tenant. She had started the business eleven years earlier after leaving a job as a hotel front-desk supervisor, and had built it up steadily since, running it with two part-time staff and taking on contracts with a small hotel and two local offices. Losing the second unit would have meant laying people off and turning away work she had spent years lining up. She booked an appointment with our office to have the lease reviewed before she signed, in particular a personal guarantee clause that would follow her estate if she died before the term ended.

The lease appointment was routine. What came up alongside it was not. While we were going through the guarantee clause line by line, Naomi mentioned, almost as an aside, that she had never actually written down what she wanted done with her body when she died. She had a will, drafted years earlier when her son was still a teenager, and had assumed, the way most people do, that the will covered it.

It did not, at least not in any way that would help in the moment it actually mattered. A will is often not the first document anyone reads after a death, and it is rarely the fastest one to locate. Funeral homes and families usually have to make burial or cremation decisions within days, long before a will is located, read, or brought to a lawyer's office, let alone probated. If Naomi's wishes lived only inside that document, whoever was contacted first when she died would end up making the call, informed only by memory, grief, and assumption about what she would have wanted.

That was the real problem sitting underneath the lease. Naomi's partner Takeshi, a security guard she had lived with for six years but never married, believed she wanted cremation, plain and simple, and said she had told him so more than once. Her adult son Sanjay, from her first marriage, believed his mother would have wanted the same burial rites his late father had received, and felt strongly that as her son, not her boyfriend, he should be the one making that call. Neither of them was wrong to think what they thought. Neither of them had anything in writing to point to, and both were certain enough that a disagreement seemed likely.

Naomi had planned to deal with the lease that week and figure out the rest later, the way it usually gets put off. There was no later that actually worked for this. If something happened to her before the disagreement was sorted out on paper, Takeshi and Sanjay would be negotiating her burial in real time, with a funeral director on the phone waiting for an answer neither of them could give with confidence.

What was actually at stake

The lease and the burial question turned out to be tangled together in a way none of us expected walking in, which is the reason this file took longer than a routine lease review usually does. The lease's personal guarantee meant that if Naomi died while it was still in force, her estate would owe the balance of the remaining term unless a successor stepped in to run the business or the landlord agreed to release it. Naomi wanted Takeshi to be able to keep the business running if something happened to her, which meant he needed clear, documented authority over the company itself, not just her personal affairs.

Sanjay had no role in the business and no interest in one. His concern was entirely about the funeral and about being included. But because Naomi's estate plan had never been updated since her divorce more than a decade earlier, her old will still named her first husband's brother as alternate executor, a detail nobody had caught in the years since and that Naomi herself had forgotten was even in there. That created a second, separate problem sitting quietly underneath the first: if Naomi died, the person with legal authority to make decisions about her estate, and arguably about her remains, was not necessarily Takeshi at all, no matter what either of them assumed.

In Ontario, the person named as estate trustee in a will typically holds the authority to decide on burial or cremation once appointed, but that authority does not crystallize the moment someone dies. It takes effect once the will is located and someone applies to act on it, and that process can take weeks even when nothing is contested. In the meantime, whoever is present at the hospital or the funeral home and asserts themselves, often simply the next of kin physically on hand, tends to make the practical decisions regardless of what a will eventually says. Naomi could put that question beyond doubt during her lifetime by executing a written designation naming who she wanted to hold that authority, a document that is faster to find and act on than a will.

What was actually at stake, then, was not one problem but two arriving at the same appointment: an outdated estate plan that no longer matched her family situation nearly ten years later, and no accessible written record of her burial wishes at all. Fixing the lease without fixing either of those would have left Naomi walking out of our office believing she was covered when, in the way that matters most, she was not.

What we did

1. Finished the lease review on its own timeline first. We turned the guarantee clause around within the four business days Naomi had, confirming precisely what would trigger her estate's liability if she died mid-term and negotiating a narrower release condition with the landlord's counsel, so the business deadline did not get held hostage while the family question was worked out separately.
2. Pulled and reviewed Naomi's existing will in full. It was nine years old, predated her relationship with Takeshi entirely, and still named her first husband's brother as alternate executor, a leftover from her first marriage that had simply never been revisited. We flagged plainly that this document no longer reflected her actual intentions and could create real confusion about who held authority if she died before it was updated.
3. Drafted a written designation of authority for decisions about her remains. Ontario law allows a person to name, in a standalone document, who they want to make decisions about disposition of their body, separate from who eventually administers the estate. We prepared this specifically so it would not be buried inside a will that might not surface for days or weeks.
4. Brought Takeshi and Sanjay into a joint conversation, with Naomi present and directing it. Rather than letting the disagreement stay theoretical and untested until it mattered most, we asked Naomi to say plainly, in front of both of them, exactly what she wanted, and asked each man in turn what mattered most to him personally about how things would eventually go once she was gone.
5. Identified the actual point of disagreement underneath the surface one. Careful questioning showed Sanjay's real concern was not cremation itself but being meaningfully included in planning a memorial that reflected his late father's tradition. Takeshi, once he heard that clearly stated for the first time, had no objection at all once it was separated from the burial method decision itself.
6. Drafted a compromise instruction in writing and had Naomi execute it properly. The document named Takeshi as the person with final legal authority over disposition, specified cremation as Naomi's method, and separately directed that Sanjay be given a defined, guaranteed role in planning a memorial service that reflected the family's tradition on his late father's side of the family, so neither man was left relying only on memory of what had been agreed.
7. Updated Naomi's will and powers of attorney to match the new arrangement. We replaced the outdated executor designation entirely, named Takeshi as estate trustee with Sanjay as an alternate rather than being left out altogether, and made sure the business succession language lined up cleanly with what the newly signed lease now required of her estate going forward, closing the gap the old will had left open for nearly a decade.
8. Gave Naomi copies to place where they would actually be found quickly. We advised her to leave signed copies of the disposition designation with Takeshi, with Sanjay, and in a labelled folder at home, rather than filing the only copy away with the will, so that whoever was contacted first would have the answer in hand immediately, without waiting on anyone else.

The outcome

Naomi renewed the lease inside her four-day window with a guarantee clause that no longer put her whole estate on the hook automatically if she died mid-term, and the business kept both its locations without interruption. That part resolved cleanly and was never really in doubt once we had the document in hand. The burial question resolved less cleanly, which was the honest outcome available to a family with two people who genuinely disagreed. Takeshi got the legal authority he wanted, formally and in writing. Sanjay did not get to be the final decision-maker, which is what he had wanted going into the conversation.

What Sanjay got instead was a guaranteed, documented role in planning the memorial service and a written acknowledgment of his father's tradition, which turned out, once the actual conversation happened rather than the assumed one, to be closer to what he cared about than holding legal authority itself. Neither man left the process entirely satisfied. Sanjay would have preferred to hold the authority outright, and said so plainly at the time. But both signed off on the written arrangement, and both separately told us afterward that they preferred having the question settled on paper to leaving it open and unresolved for whoever eventually had to deal with it.

That is not a clean win, and we said so to Naomi directly rather than presenting it as one. A negotiated document that both sides can point to later, drafted while everyone was calm and thinking clearly, is still a meaningful result, even when it is not a full win for either party involved. Naomi has since referred two other business owners in Kapuskasing to our office, telling them, in her own words, that the lease was the reason she called but the burial designation was the reason she was glad she did. Her file is a reminder that estate planning gaps rarely show up labelled as such. They tend to arrive attached to something else entirely, and the something else is usually the reason anyone finally sits down and deals with both problems at once.

What you can learn from this