Musings of the Night Nurse (11): Trust

A series on caretaking my mom as she nears the end while fighting off the entities who prey on the old

“I don’t want Jill inheriting this after I die,” your mother tells you. By “this” she means the acreage and homes on the property she bought in the Hudson Valley in 1968. You tell your mother that if Jill’s boyfriend Jack, who may inherit part of your mother’s property, decides to give it to Jill or her children…

“Her children are not getting this property,” your mother says; that Jack would never do that. You tell her that unless she plans on coming back from the dead and stopping Jack, there is not really much she can do.

It’s 2018 when she says this, three years before Jack and Jill conspire to take your mother’s social security checks; four years before Jack will forge your mother’s signature on a $5000 check; five years before the lawyer the check was given to creates a sham POA in order that Jack can…

That Jack can what? It’s always the question, has been the question since at least 1989, when your mother called and, though you were eight months pregnant, begged you to help Jack; she’d been unable to reach him. And when you get to Jack’s house, you find nearly all the windows busted out and the living room piled with trash and Jack, thirty pounds heavier than the last time you saw him and with a bushed-out beard. You sweep the glass and wash the dishes and drag a dozen Hefty bags past Jack, who sits in a chair glaring at you.

But now it is 2018 and your mother is worried again. You do not know a lot about protecting assets but suggest she talk to her financial advisor, that maybe he will have ways to make sure the property stays, per her wishes, in the lineal family. Her financial advisor tells her she can create a trust. Your mother asks you to help with this; numbers and legal contracts not being her long suit, and so you do, telling her, repeatedly, that she better let Jack know; that the trust will also affect him. She says, repeatedly, that she will but does not, so that when the trust goes through and Jack finds he has not been consulted, he goes ballistic and tries to get the trust obliterated. Failing at this, he makes it his mission to turn over every rock, looking for how he’s been wronged — by your mother, by her financial advisor, and most especially by you, boondoggles that eat everyone’s time and axiomatically unearth nothing because there is nothing to unearth.

And if that were all it was, so be it. It’s manageable, if completely unnecessary. But then, unable to find satisfaction, when every one of his gambits - or at least the ones you know about - fail to create the world Jack envisions, one where he is strong and victorious and in charge, he makes another move, one that proves catastrophic to your mother’s survival and which may kill her yet…