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I Should�ve Taken That Left Turn at Albuquerque |
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Hello and welcome. If you're new here, be a dear and Read my Disclaimer. My diary not good enough for you? Fine, be that way. Try these instead: plf
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2000-07-17 - 8:29 pm� Today was a weird day. Or at least a weird few hours... When I got home today I checked the mail, as I always do, and found a letter addressed to my mother from my Great Aunt Helen. This in itself is weird; Helen is my father's aunt, and she hasn't attempted any contact with my mom since the divorce 11 years ago. Up until recently most of my dad's family believed my mother was a somewhat evil woman who spent all my dad's hard earned money and then took off on him for no good reason. They've been realizing the holes in this story for a while... seeing as my dad proved no better with handling money after my mom left him. To their credit, they only thought he was blameless in the first place was because it is what my father always told them. Dear old dad isn't exactly great with taking responsibility for anything, and he isn't great with the truth either, unless the truth makes him look good. And the truth that he is an irresponsible, selfish, drunken, emotionally abusive bastard doesn't exactly make him look good. But I digress. I guess we should have been expecting to hear from Helen. We heard from my aunt Marilyn (dad's sister) about a month ago. She wanted to know if we had any idea what had happened to him, seeing as she hadn't heard from him in over a year. Apparantly he didn't want to tell her that while he was in alcohol rehab he lost the house, leaving me (and him) without a home 1 week before my final exams in my last year of University, and then lost his job a few months later. Go figure. I would have thought that was Christmas card material for sure. My mom spilled the beans to Marilyn about what dad had done. Marilyn felt terrible. Terrible for what he had done, terrible for what we all had to deal with because of him, and terrible for never telling my mom that she knew my father's troubles were not my mom's fault. She was very nice to my mom in this phone call. I think she felt guilty. She shouldn't really. My mom doesn't hold her responsible, why should she? Marilyn didn't do anything to us. She took her brother's word about the marriage over an "outsider's." It's understandable. Besides, Marilyn is a sweet woman with the best of intentions, but quite frankly, she is not the brightest woman in the world. Okay, maybe that's a little mean. She's naive. So the main reason Marilyn wanted to find out the whereabouts of her brother was because she, him, and one of my cousins were listed as co-executers of my Great aunt Helen's will. Helen is 91 years old, and her health is starting to fail. If Helen dies and no one can reach my father, her estate will be tied up indefinitely. She also wanted to inform my great aunt about what my dad had done. How he'd screwed us over, how he'd squandered away the money that my grandparents had left him (and then, to top it off, squandered away the money they left to my brother for school. Luckily for me, most of mine actually did get used on tuition before he could screw me over). After Marilyn talked with my mom, she talked to Helen and got my father removed as an executor. Helen apparantly felt quite guilty and horrible about this whole thing too. So she wrote my mom a rather cryptic and muddled letter, and enclosed with it a cheque for $5000.00. This sort of blew us away. We didn't know what to do. We didn't want to take the money under false pretenses. Helen was not quite clear on why she was giving us this money. She only said it was to "help us over this hurdle". What hurdle that was, we don't quite know. We are getting by okay financially. We're not rolling in money by any means, but we're doing ok at the moment. So we were afraid that Helen had gotten the idea that since my dad had become totally worthless financially (and well, just plain worthless all around), we were starving or something. The fact that the letter was nearly indecipherable also added to the feeling that if we accepted this money we would be taking money from a confused old woman who didn't know what she was doing. Today my mom, my brother and myself learned that we have a fairly strong sense of morality. We couldn't take this money. It didn't feel right. So mom called Marilyn again. Marilyn more or less convinced mom that Helen knew what she was doing, and that the money wasn't given to us out of a feeling of responsibility or guilt, but rather as a gift because she was able to do it, and she wanted to. So my mom is putting it in a savings bond and not touching it unless we have some sort of emergency. When it's time for my brother to go to college, she will give the money to him. We learned something else today too. Apparently, not only is dad no longer an executer, but he isn't really on the will as a receipient either. But my brother and myself are. This is really blow my mind kind of news. Helen is excedingly wealthy. She inherited a lot of money from her relatives, who owned a lot of property. Helen spent as little of this money throughout her life as possible. She has always been a miser. She always clipped coupons, shopped the sales, bought food from the reduced bins. She also did something that always mortified me when we would go out for meals with her. We would always, always go to buffets. She would eat her meal, then go back for seconds and *put them in her purse.* Roast beef, veggies, anything. She carried a bag around in her purse to scoop up anything she could. She'd ask for extra rolls, and snag those too, so she wouldn't have to by bread that week. She'd dump the little packets of sugar and jam into her purse, for christ's sake. Now I don't know exactly how much I will inherit. I can hardly even wrap my mind around the thought. It's sort of weird and creepy to think of benefitting from someone's death. This whole thing was sort of weird and creepy. My aunt's letter was so incoherent and just had sort of an ominous tone about it. The only way I can describe the way this whole thing has made me feel is that it reminds me of the "You will spend the night in a haunted house and if it works out you will be rewarded" mystery scenario. Does that make sense? It makes sense to me, so I guess that's good enough. This is sort of making me feel like we're "the poor relations" again, which of course, we are... it's not a nice feeling though. It makes me feel defensive and bitchy to think that anyone would look down upon me, or worse, feel sorry for me, because I don't have much money. I'd sort of prefer that my relatives just forgot about my existence like they do most of the time instead. It's easier that way, to be part of the woodwork... it doesn't make my brain throb like this. It's all terribly overwhelming.
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The big 3 0 - 2006-06-03 Hello again - 2006-05-03 Random stuff in place of an actual update - 2006-03-15 Pictures. Just Because. - 2006-02-23 Christmas 05 - 2005-12-26 Currently listening to: |
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