Yeah. This is giving me flashbacks of when my Aunt was dying. I didn’t look after her for years, like in the OP. It was less than half a year. But she did have a similar request.
My Aunt had lived alone for most of her life, then had married someone just before she retired and moved more than 500 miles away. For maybe ten years or so before her troubles started, I’d see her for a few hours every December. She made sure that we went out somewhere because Bill didn’t like having strangers in the house.
He was older than she was. By about the third year I visited, he was in a wheelchair. I basically didn’t know him at all, and he wouldn’t have recognized me.
When she was hospitalized, I was the only person able to go help. She and Bill were both terribly hard of hearing, but both resisted hearing aids. He had become very weak and needed home care while she was gone, which I arranged.
She couldn’t keep track of anything and was terrified of the hospital. I stayed with her as much as possible. When things were stable enough, she was released to a care facility. There, she became set on two things: going home and rewarding me for my efforts by giving me her house. She didn’t like Bill’s son and didn’t want him to inherit it. I was supposed to talk to Bill and tell him that she said he was supposed to write a will leaving me the house.
Bill wasn’t taking her illness well. She had been the one who looked after him. He could barely hear and was easily confused. I was not going to scream at this white-haired, wheelchair-bound, palsied stranger that he was supposed to give me his house because his wife didn’t like his son. Not going to happen.
I did arrange for my Aunt to get hospice care at home once it was obvious that she wasn’t getting better. She didn’t talk about the will much once she was home. And she never mentioned it to Bill. She was leaving that as my job. I said I wasn’t helping her because I expected anything. Also that I understood what she wanted. And that everything would be fine.
I never said no, or are you crazy, because that would have set her off and she had enough to be unhappy about. Of course, she had no will. Bill lived for a year and a half after she died and their house went to his son. No one had to wonder what Bill intended, because he had a will. I never said a word. Trying to do what my dying Aunt wanted would have been wrong and it would have been futile.
It was sweet of her to think of me. But it wasn’t so sweet that she was prodding me to cause other people grief. Especially when it was grief that she wasn’t willing or able to deliver herself. Double especially when it had not the least shred of legality to back it.
