Have YOU got a will? Or at least a letter laying out in general terms what you want to happen to your stuff in case you drop dead?
If not, go write one. RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT!
I know, I know. You don’t think you have enough money to bother with it. You think (in the minimal, ‘I don’t really want to think about this stuff’ way) that your possessions/money will just be distributed to your relatives in the ‘ordinary’ way, and that that’s close enough to what you would pick anyway.
Well, let me tell you, Sir or Madam as the case may be, YOU ARE BEING CRUEL.
Yes, cruel: come your death, your nearest and presumably dearest, who are already suffering from your loss, will now (best case scenario) stew and worry and ponder over what exactly Dear Old Departed wanted to happen with his semi-precious collection of antique guitar picks. In the worst case, we’re talking lawyers and battles inside and outside of courtrooms. <shudder>
And if your circumstances are ANYTHING outside of the ‘norm’, that is, you aren’t either half of a legally married couple or a live-alone single, you are setting your blood relatives up for tremendous hassles. Okay, they may have the hassles anyway, but if you at least WRITE THINGS DOWN they won’t have to worry and feel guilty that whatever they end up doing wasn’t what you would have wanted.
The rest of this is a long bitch about the mess my brother has caused because he didn’t leave any instructions – feel free to skip.
My eldest brother died in a car accident about six weeks ago. This was a shock, of course, but in truth he’d been semi-estranged from the rest of the family. He was your basic ‘drifter through life’ – never had any real ambition, sort of went along from one semi-skilled job to another, whatever he could find, living wherever and however he could afford. For the past four years he’s been living in a house my mother owns in another state. In theory he was suppposed to pay rent, in fact he never did. In theory he was supposed to tend to the general maintenance/yard work, in fact he would sometimes attempt repairs which inevitably ended up with us hiring a professional to fix/replace whatever his ‘repairs’ had made worse. I’m not saying this to blacken Eldest Brother, it’s just the way he was, sort of laid back, make do with whatever, don’t go out of your way. He had a great personality and was fun to be with, but he wasn’t cut out to be a success in a market economy.
So as next of kin, my mother was notified of his death. Well, my mother is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, so it really fell on the rest of her children: Middle Brother, Sister (me), Youngest Brother. We talked it over, and the one who could get away easiest was MB. He flew down to Mississippi to deal with having EB cremated, disposing of his household possessions, getting the house ready for a new occupant, finding an agent to take care of renting it, and so forth.
He arrived to find there was a woman living in the house.
She claims she is my brother’s “spiritual and common-law” wife, and so should be his next of kin. She claims she’d been living with my brother continuously for eight years.
Now, we weren’t on close terms with EB, but we spoke on the phone at various holiday times and he NEVER MENTIONED this woman. He never mentioned being married or shacked up or spiritually bound or whatever with anyone. The three of us have had a long conference phone call, and the only slightly applicable thing any of us can recall is that YB said once when he and EB were talking on the phone he heard a woman’s voice and asked, and EB had said something like, oh, that’s just a woman from my church, she was in a rough spot and I’m letting her stay for a couple of weeks while she figures out a new place to live. Now, that might have been a different woman entirely, but if so, why didn’t EB ever say anything about this wife-equivalent?
And, really, if they were together for seven years, why didn’t he just marry her? EB had been married (legally) and divorced twice before, so it’s not like he was unwilling to ‘commit.’
Naturally there is not a single piece of paper to indicate what EB thought the situation between him and this woman, and what he did or didn’t want he to get if he were to die. And she hasn’t got anything to show us - no loving letters between them, no marriage certificate, nothing to show the relationship was acknowledged in any way.
MB checked with the neighbors down there, and found one who said this woman had indeed been living in the house for ‘a couple of years,’ but she wasn’t sure how long exactly. She said they’d never seemed ‘lovey dovey’ and she’d thought the woman was just a house sharer. Anyway, she was positive that the woman moved in at some point AFTER my brother started living there, so um, let’s call her Mary, Mary is lying at least about how long she was with EB, and maybe about what the relationship really was.
I can believe it either way: maybe EB was gunshy after two failed marriages, and didn’t want to risk a third, but they were ‘involved’ long-term. Or maybe she was just someone who paid him money to share the house, and EB was never one to turn down easy money. Or even, she was a ‘friend’ who lived there free. I mean, how in the world am I to know?
So how the hell are we supposed to know what is right to do??? If EB indeed considered “Mary” to be his wife, then morally she has a claim to whatever a wife would have gotten in the event of his death. If she wasn’t, well, she’s pulling a scam and deserves no more than to be tossed out on her fanny. She wouldn’t be left on the street, btw: I don’t know what her financial resources are, but she’s a fifty year old woman, with three adult children from an earlier marriage – see, she wasn’t unwilling to marry legally, either – all of whom live in Mississippi, so she could stay with one of them until she got herself a new place. (She does have a job, I don’t know what or how well it pays.)
Mary wanted to have EB buried in a service from her church. Latter Day Saints, as it happened. MB went along with that – so far as we were aware, EB never was a believer in any religion, but maybe that had changed. Anyway, if he really had converted to Mormonism, fine, he should be buried that way, and if he was still a non-believer, well, what did it hurt?
EB really didn’t own much in the way of personal possessions – he had a car (a few years old) and a truck (rather older) and some not-at-all valuable furniture and less than a thousand bucks in the bank. None of this is a problem: none of the three of us want or need any of it, and we would be happy to let the woman take the entire lot, if she’d only take it and go.
The problem is the house. The woman wants to stay in it. We pointed out that it was never owned by EB, that it belongs to our mother, and that whoever lives there will have to pay rent. But she refuses: she says EB never paid rent (true) and so she, as surviving wife, should be allowed to live there on the same terms.
This is utterly unacceptible. My mother will, in the not very distant future, have to move to a care facility. She will need the income from renting that house – or from its sale – to help pay her way. In fact, once she’s used up her other assets, Medicaid will require that she sell the house and use the money. We pointed this out to the woman.
Her suggestion: mother should GIVE the house to her now. After all, she said, when mother died she would probably have left the house to EB anyway, and then Mary would have inherited it from EB.
Well, this might be true, IF mother had died before EB, and IF mother had died while still owning the house, and IF the relationship between EB and Mary was as she said. But Mom is still alive, and very likely will need the value of the house (about 80,000) to pay for her own care and living expenses. In which case EB would not have inherited the house, period.
And Mom can’t make those decisions any more. A few years back, when the first signs of AD showed up, she did the responsible thing and got all her papers in order: she has a will, her property is in a trust, and I have her power of attorney and the, uh, whatever the medical decision-making one is called.
So really it’s up to me. And I’ve been stewing over it, trying to decide what is right. And I just can’t see handing over a large chunk from Mom’s estate to a woman none of use knew existed before EB died. Which means I’m in the process of hiring a Mississippi lawyer long-distance, to see what can best be done. Ideally, I want Mary to just go away. Give her the car & truck & the EB’s other possessions, and have her move out. Then hire a team to clean out the house and get it marketable, and get it sold and gone.
Why am I sure it is not going to go that easily?
So…WRITE THAT DAMN WILL.
