The real pain

A little twist.

Mom is clinging to life. She lapses in and out of lucidity – depending how much medication she is on.

Last night my wife and I visited her.

Mom grew quite agitated.

She kept writing about the will, asking us to shred it or burn it. She asked me to tell my father to contact their lawyer. She was also upset about her IRA and wanted something changed there.

(Remember, she is deaf, and has a tube down her throat, so all communication is in writing. And with her condition, her messages are often garbled.)

Then she added that she had been mad at me.

Ah. It made sense.

I guessed that in a moment of anger at me – a nearly constant state for the last 25 years for a wide variety of infractions (real and imagined) – she had written me out of the will and dropped me as the beneficiary of some or all of her investments. She had probably gotten dad to go along.

Sort of her way to slap me one final time even after death.

As we drove back home (she’s in a facility more than an hour away), I thought about this possibility.

I wouldn’t be surprised if she did do this.

This is a woman who one Christmas drove all the way to our house when we’d invited them for Christmas celebrations with us, then refused to get out of the car. She had my father carry the gifts for my wife, the girls, and me to the door, hand the gifts to me, then get back in the car and drive off. All because she was mad at me about something.

Merry Christmas.

So today I called dad. He asked me to come over to the home where he is.

Sure enough, I had been written out of the will.

I told him I had long suspected she would do something like that, so I had never expected anything anyway.

So it goes.

I’ll still make the drive back to the facility tomorrow.

I’ll smile, and kiss her.

If it gives her some peace, that’s okay by me.

After all, she's the one who's really being hurt in all this.