jason collins signed his will a month after the diagnosis, and left part of it to the kids

via TMZ Sports, with Yahoo Sports, Attitude, and obituaries from NBA.com and NPR.

Jason Collins died on May 12 of this year, at 47, of stage 4 glioblastoma, eight months after his family said publicly that there was a tumor. This week his will surfaced in court records, and it turns out he sat down and signed it in October 2025. One month after the announcement. Seven months before the end.

There is something about that timing that keeps snagging. A man who spent thirteen seasons setting screens for other people, the most thankless job on a basketball floor, gets the worst news available and his response is to get the paperwork in order so nobody has to guess.

what the will actually says

More than $1.8 million in personal property, with more possibly sitting in private trusts that a probate filing would not show. It goes to his parents, his twin brother Jarron, a cousin, an aunt, and his husband, William Brunson Green, whom he married in Austin in May 2025. His aunt Teri is executor, with Green and Jarron named as alternates.

And then there is the detail that reads like him. The will points to a handwritten note kept in a safe-deposit box that sets out who gets the jewelry, the watches, the silverware, the clothes, the cars. He did not want the small things fought over. He wanted somebody to open a box and find a list.

the two names at the bottom

Two organizations are named alongside the family: Glisten, formerly GLSEN, and the Point Foundation. Both work with LGBTQ students, and neither of them is a name you pull off a chart of reputable charities on a bad afternoon.

GLSEN gave Collins its Courage Award in 2013, the year he came out and became the first openly gay active player in a major American men's league. He joined the Point Foundation's honorary board in 2014. He gave to the two groups that had been in his life since the week his life changed, and he gave to the ones that work with teenagers, which is a fairly specific choice for a man who was 34 when he finally said it out loud and had to do it in Sports Illustrated because there was nowhere else to do it.

what the year did

Married in May 2025. Diagnosis announced that September. Will signed in October. He wrote about the glioblastoma himself in an ESPN essay that December, which was characteristic, since he never seemed to think anything about his own life was too private to be useful to somebody else. Then May.

He got the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage at this year's ESPYs, posthumously, and Jarron went up to take it. The LGBTQ Sports Hall of Fame gave him the 2026 Glenn Burke Award. Both of those are lovely and neither is the point of this particular document, which is a much smaller and more ordinary thing: a man with a year left, a pen, and a list of everybody he meant to look after.

The leagues are still working out what they are willing to do for us in public, and mostly landing on less every season, which is why Dallas fans had to throw their own Pride Night this month after the Stars dropped theirs. Collins did not wait for anybody's calendar. He never really did.