(The Post)

By Stan Hinden
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 20, 1999; Page Z17

Call it fear of flying. Or perhaps, fear of dying. But there's something about the prospect of taking a long trip that sends people scurrying into their attorneys' offices to write new wills or update their old ones.

In fact, reports lawyer Rhonda J. Macdonald of Vienna, April, May and June have become her busiest months of the year because so many clients, especially middle-aged ones, want to take care of their wills before they leave on summer trips.

"It's not unusual," Macdonald said, "for people to come in and sign their papers while they're on their way to Dulles to catch their flights."

Not everybody is quite that rushed. Robert F. Rosenbaum Sr., 67, and his wife, Judith A. Rosenbaum, 56, of McLean, went to Macdonald's office to update their wills several days before leaving on a week-long cruise to the Virgin Islands.

It was the first leg of the trip--a flight from Dulles to meet the cruise ship in San Juan--that prompted the Rosenbaums to update their 10-year-old wills. "Anytime you go by air," Robert Rosenbaum said, "your antenna goes up."

In any event, Rosenbaum said, he had been thinking about updating their wills, which were drafted when their two sons and daughter were teenagers. The recent trip helped him to focus on the need for new wills. "It seemed to be the perfect time to look at it," Rosenbaum said. And it was. Their children are now between the ages of 25 and 30, old enough to be named in the Rosenbaum wills as both executors and trustees.

Lynn Reilly of Arlington also visited Macdonald's office recently. A 56-year-old lawyer at the Federal Communications Commission, she signed her will just a few days before leaving on what she called a "relatively demanding" trek through Ecuador and Peru. (Previously, Reilly said, she had had only a handwritten will. "Lawyers are always the worst about these things," Reilly laughed.)

But she said her action was not a pre-vacation precaution. At this point in her life, Reilly said, flying no longer bothers her; she long ago became "fatalistic" about air travel.

Her decision to get a real will was motivated by the growth of her investments and by "the unnerving sense that if I didn't do something" about a will, her money wouldn't go where she wanted it to go.