More inheritance for adult kids who looked after the infirm parents?

In My Humble Opinion
21

That’s just fine, just so you understand you’re not agreeing with me. I like the whole idea of bringing love into family relationships thing. As far as I’m concerned, they belong there to begin with. If Cheesesteak wants to cast the issue as a monetary fight between siblings, as you do, then you’re both welcome to the struggle and to whatever’s left of the proceeds. What I asked before still applies: if you think you’re entitled to something, why not ask for it from those who can still freely give it, rather than demanding it from people after they can no longer object? If you still, at long last, want recognition that you were always the best, the most worthy child, and think that your parents on their deathbed will be more amenable to granting you that distinction, perhaps you should be willing to pay for the privilege. Cheesesteak knows this – sometimes it’s not about your worth to a parent or sibling, it’s about how much more you’re worth than your brother or sister.

thirdwarning, you have too much humanity and too much sense to be allowed into this thread, but here you are anyway. I guess it really is your turn.

22

If you help your parents for the eventually payment, it’s wages. For wages your parents should get professional quality care. Now, the fact is that not everyone has a parent that deserves to be repaid with extended loving care. But, in the cases where extended loving care was what they gave their children, the estate should be entirely unrelated.

One of my sisters visited daily, and suffered under repeated manipulations by my mother for years, and as far as I was concerned could have had the house they lived in for her efforts. But, she also felt that the fact that I was able and willing to come for a month at a time, or even longer for emergencies, and give actual professional care twenty four seven, was much more important. In the end, we all just learned to be able to appreciate each other a bit more, there at the end. We are closer now than were were in the years when my parents were healthy and active, with their own activities to busy them.

Tris

23

My girlfriend took care of her father during his battle with liver cancer. He had homecare and she not only was taking care of him with help but has twins with Cystic Fibrosis.

One brother lives nearby and did help out, not to the extent that she did. The other brother lives out of state and could neither provide physical help or monetary assistance as he is perma-broke with 5 kids.

When her father died, the entire estate was divided into thirds. The out of state brother signed off on his share to give to his sister as a way of thanking her for everything she did for their dad.
I thought that was spectacularly classy.

24

I think so, too. But there’s a vast difference between having someone choosing to give up what they were given, because of a disparity in parental care, and saying it should be expected.

I agree with the other posters that one cannot make a blanket set of rules for this sort of situation.

My maternal grandmother spent her last years living about five miles from my parents, and maybe 150 from her son’s family. Simply because of the proximity, my mother (and to a lesser extent my father) ended up providing much of the assistance she needed in those years: shopping, being carted to doctor’s appointments, and advice, and simply talking. My grandmother also was fairly well-to-do, even then. And even after having paid for my grandfather’s care after he couldn’t care for himself due to Alzheimer’s.

But, AFAIK, there was never any attempt by anyone to change the distribution of the estate because of that dichotomy. Had my parents ended up in proximity to my grandmother, because of the need to care for her, that might have been different, but as it was, it was simply a series of unrelated coincidences that brought everything together. My father’s company bought out a Rochester business, and so they moved here. My grandparents, at that time, were still living about 60 miles away on the farm they’d owned since before WWII. When my grandfather got too infirm to be kept at the farm, he was moved into a facility here in Rochester rather than the closer city of Syracuse simply because that’s where my grandmother grew up, and she was going to be more comfortable here, than in any other city. I won’t say that all involved weren’t relieved by the proximity my parents had to my grandmother, but at no point was it a planned factor.

In general, my grandmother didn’t like having to depend on people for assistance, she knew she needed it, but it grated, a little. So she’d try to take people out to lunch, when they did take her places. And, while most of the time that was my mother doing it - my uncle did step up often enough that it wasn’t unusual for him to do the same thing.

It also helps that my father’s family offered at least one stunning example of the madness that can happen when people start focusing on estates (even relatively minor ones) and who will get what.

sigh I really ought to talk to my sister about this, soon. Dammit. My mother looks good for many more years. My father… less so. My parents are full heirs to each other’s estates, but better to talk about things ahead of time. No matter how much I’d rather forget the whole damned issue.

25

I think one reason why this sometimes blows up in families where you wouldn’t expect it to is that it is so hard to be the one that’s there and it is so hard to be the one that isn’t.

If you are the one that is there, you are dealing with a day-to-day down in the trenches reality where things often gradually build up until you turn around one day and find you are spending three or four hours a day dealing with a parent’s needs, neglecting your own kids and marriage and, in the midst of it, you have no idea how long it’s going to continue. At the same time, you have siblings calling from far away giving you all kinds of advice that is totally meaningless because they aren’t here, they don’t understand the situation–they don’t understand the parent’s current capabilities/mental state and they are way, way to eager to suggest you do things that will take additional time and energy because they don’t understand how carefully you are having to ration your time and energy to make sure you can keep doing this indefinitely. They also visit, and the visits are a special kind of hell because they see the parent changed and go through a whole emotional cascade that you worked through months ago and now they are upset and nostaligic and that seems like one more demand on you. It’s also disruptive when here you are compartmentalizing your grief because it’s the only way you can function in the day-to-day, and they can fly in for the weekend, indulge themselves emotionally, and then fly home. And, inevitably, those visits are filled with more advice which is annoying because you are there, you see things more clearly, who do they think they are telling you how to do a job they aren’t there helping you with?

It’s hard to be the one not there because, first and foremost, you feel guilty. It’s difficult to prioritize–do you take a week now and visit or should those days be needed later? The care of a parent is entrusted to someone else and you worry that not everything that needs doing is being done. Because you feel powerless and frustrated, you want to talk about it, so you call up your sibling and you want to talk about how the parent is doing and they seem dismissive of your ideas and cold toward you about it, which increases the guilt and frustration. You understand and sympathize with them, but get increasingly angry that they seem to be shutting you out and acting like this has nothing to do with you. You visit, and they seem cold or indifferent toward the parent’s decline, and when you reach out with your grief you get rebuffed for it. You see quite clearly that there are ways things could be better handled, but suggestions you make are rejected for spurious reasons. Choices–big choices–are made without your input or vote, and when people are confronted about that they act like you are the crazy one for thinking you have a voice in your parent’s care.

So it’s no shock that a long-term illness in a parent can drive a wedge between siblings. It’s unfortunate that those long-term illnesses are so often followed by all the estate bullshit, and so siblings are dealing with a potentially difficult topic (money) at a time when they are at a nadir of their relationship anyway.

26

There are a number of ways to divide an estate.

  1. Very evenly. Four children will each get 25% of the estate. If the oldest gets Mom’s wedding ring, the other three get something of equal financial and sentimental value. Although this is the way our estate is currently divided (with two minor children) this has the least appeal to me and seems the least “fair.”

  2. With an eye towards what has already been given. I have a friend who got excluded from Grandma’s will - she gave him his inheritance when he needed money to adopt. The other grandkids didn’t get a bunch of cash before she died, so got it when she died.

  3. With an eye towards care and affection shown. If one child moves out of state and makes no effort to come home and visit (I have an uncle who comes into town on business trips and does not bother to visit his mother WHEN HE IS IN TOWN. Now the woman has her own issues, and this may be a very valid decision he’s made for his own emotional health - don’t know - but if he doesn’t get his fair share, we’ll, I’m not sure if at this point he ‘deserves’ it. My father and my other uncle continue to put up with her and visit, fix things around her house, get lightbulbs changed, plant flower pots, but if we were going to give her (small) estate away based on what people are doing for her - her nieces - my second cousins - should get everything. And I really do hope that they get most of her “stuff” which has apparently been divided - and every time I’m asked I say that the nieces should get it, I don’t want any of it. If Leona Helmsley received more attention and love from her dogs than from her own children, its her money and she can give it to the dogs. I don’t think getting a larger share makes the job easier or that its getting paid for doing it, nor do I really think of it as compensation - I think its like a final “thank you” note left by the deceased - acknowledgment of the effort and sacrifices you made. Which does mean that it CAN BE (but is not always) a “fuck you” to the people who didn’t get a little extra.

  4. The communist way "to each according to his needs) - the other side of my family tends to this. Some of my aunts and uncles (and my parents) have done fairly well, some less well. I saw nothing of my grandmother’s estate except a cast iron pan (which was reallocated by my mother when one of my cousins needed it) and some other minor stuff of sentimental importance (a few Christmas ornaments I hang every year, that sort of thing). The struggling grandkids got $1,000 - which would have been a fairly meaningless amount of money in my life, but was a minor windfall in theirs.

  5. Some combination of the above.

Any of these ways is fair. You may not like it, but its their money to do with what they want.

The easiest way to dispose of an estate is to get rid of as much of it as possible before you die. Potentially years before you die. That leaves little doubt that you intended to give it to Bob but not to Kathy or that you really wanted Peggy to have all your good jewelry.

My family doesn’t have a lot of cash on either side. Certainly not enough to fight over. Its stuff - and I think for most families by the time an elderly parent dies - we are down to the fight over stuff. And its often complete crap - who gets the ten year old VCR. Some of it is sentimental, some of it has some value on eBay, and one of the big flights I’ve seen is when Joan who wants Grandma’s pin because she has fond memories of Grandma wearing it to church comes up against Kate who wants Grandma’s pin because that brand of costume jewelry will fetch $50 on eBay. (This was my ex-husbands family - a goddamn pack of screaming harpie vultures picking over a carcass that wasn’t worth anything to sell it - when my mother in law got home with her ‘share’ of fought over ‘sentimental treasures’ and had an estate sale - it didn’t pay for the UHaul to drag it all home). My family uses the masking tape method. Walk into any home where the residents are over 60, take a picture off the wall, turn it over, and there is a name on the back. That’s who gets it.

27

One of my siblings had a financial blow-up and another sibling started talk of how that was “her share of the estate.” I cringed. I really really really want the last of my mother’s money to be spent, by her, the day she dies.

But unless she’s kidnapped by aliens and held for a rather spectacular ransom that we then pay but she dies in a horrible transporter accident when they return her, it ain’t happening.

Each of us has been the beneficiary of our parents’ largess. To start acting as if the accounting starts now would be ridiculous to me.

28

If you don’t mind my sticking my nose in a smidge, if you haven’t already be sure to include language excluding the evil sister should you or the good sister pre-decease the other and specifying how you want your estate disbursed in that event.

29

Thanks, and yes, those arrangements have been made. Not that I expect to come up with anything, as I’m likeliest to be the first to die. Statistically speaking, that is.

30

I feel like you’re willfully misreading what I’m writing. It’s not a question of ‘this person loved their parent more’ or ‘the parent loved this person more’. But the person who does elder care makes a significant sacrifice in terms of personal time and energy and money and opportunities to do things in order to do that care, which hopefully they do with love and willingness in their heart. But having lovingly cared for their elderly relatives, it seems not unreasonable to me to also have the greater sacrifice of time and money recognized.

Should they demand it? Expect it? Sue if they don’t get it? Of course not. But reasonable siblings would be okay with an unequal but fair distribution of the estate in recognition of the greater sacrifices that were made.

31

I don’t see anything wrong with this thread; we’re discussing a reality that has or will affect any number of us (likely more in the future, as the bulging Boomers age).

32

I’m totally with you on this one. My SO and I are in the process of looking for a new house. One with the space/arrangements to allow my parents to live with us. They are reaching the point of wanting less work with their home and needing more care themselves. I’m really hoping that they manage to spend every last dime and enjoy themselves doing it. My only sibling lives thousands of miles away. While I’m sure there will be days that stress will leave me feeling that my parents “owe” me something, I don’t want there to be the slightest chance that an inheritance will come between my sister and I.

Looking at the potential pitfalls, and knowing myself, I can see so many potential problems. I can see myself stressed out and feeling slighted because my parents split everything evenly, while my SO and I cared for them and shared our home (all while kicking myself for feeling that way). I can see my sister being upset over a non-even division. If the issue ever comes up I’m going to push for an even split, and hope I’m still this rational when the time comes.

33

Ain’t that the truth!

Some people are greedy, of course. But I think others are so desperate to find something to fill the void their parents left that they try to pack it with money. I think it would be easy to fall into that trap.

34

Neither do I: you may recall, I thanked you for starting it. I merely complimented thirdwarning for a post that seemed to me much more humane than many others, for his/her simple but crucial recognition that the impulse for a human being to care for a parent should be so far removed from monetary considerations (or what some might euphemize as “recognition”) that the question shouldn’t seriously occur to us even as the situation arises in our lives.

Doesn’t mean it’s not a good thread, it just means that its real-life application should be confined to our own future decisions about our own estates, not a wiser allocation of our parent’s money than they could manage themselves.