Speakers at the Heckerling Institute’s upcoming estate planning conference say market turmoil has its benefits.

Cheryl Menken thought she knew everything about her husband, Morris. She knew he cheated on his first wife. She knew how he got caught. (They were in a car accident and Morris broke his leg.) And she knew that when he became terminally ill at 67, he wanted to remain in denial about his illness and continue to work for as long as he could. It wasn’t until after Morris died that Menken realized how much she didn’t know, particularly about their marital finances. She knew he had amassed at least $4 million and that some of it was invested with the Carlyle Group, but she couldn’t even access those accounts because he never gave her the passcode.

Grayson had a normal physical at age one, but months later was rushed to the emergency room and diagnosed with a brain tumor. A pediatric neurologist there told the parents his condition was life-threatening and that he needed to be taken immediately to either Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center or Yale New Haven hospital.

Everyone likes a hot, gooey cookie right out of the oven. Some will pay as much as $3,000 for one. Ask private chef Mike Foss. He got a call late one night from his boss, an actor filming a movie in Europe, asking if Foss would fly from Los Angeles to London to bake him a batch of his peanut butter macadamia and dried cherry cookies. “I figured out how to make them just right: crispy on the outside, soft on the inside,” Foss says. “I could have just baked them and sent them, but no—they wanted them hot out of the oven.”