Class Act

Being hastily excised from both my mother’s life and her will cut deep. It was the most unfathomable betrayal. I didn’t see it coming. I probably should have. But I didn’t. For sisterhood is a sacred bond. At least that’s what I had always believed.

When I was a toddler, before I could walk, my sister would grab me by the arm and yank me up off the floor. She wanted a playmate and I was just the person to fill that role. Meanwhile, she shoved my twin brother down to the floor every time he attempted to stand or walk. It was me, and only me, she wanted.

We were sisters in every sense of the word. We shared a room. We slept in the same bed. I followed her around and hung onto her every word. Her hobbies and interests were my hobbies and interests. I didn’t have to be an extrovert; she did all the talking for both of us. We were a duo, a team.

As adults, we all moved to different parts of the country, but whenever our family got together, my sister and I spoke rapidly, in our special shorthand, laughing at our inside jokes. We just got each other and didn’t have to explain a thing. Everyone around us watched, shaking their heads, not understanding a word. We’d had this special bond our entire lives, even now from miles apart, and I couldn’t imagine that ever changing.

But then my father passed away, and suddenly everything changed.

My brother and I flew cross country, meeting up at the tiny little cemetery in the countryside near our father’s birthplace to bury him. No one else got on a plane. Not my mother. Not my sister. Not her husband. No one. Following the last few years of my father’s poor health, they appeared to have decided they were just done. Sadly, that should have been my first clue for what was about to commence.

My brother and I, just the two of us, tearfully said our goodbyes to the man who had raised us. Was he a perfect father? Of course not. But he cared about and respected each of his children. He'd worked hard his entire life to ensure he would leave behind a generous inheritance to be divided equally amongst his offspring after both he and our mother had passed. That was always the plan, and he mentioned it with pride many times over the years.

But as of that brisk, gray, and very windy November day in Wisconsin when my brother and I celebrated our father’s life, that was not to be. For while we were burying our father, and placing flowers on his grave, our sister quickly seized the opportunity to make a little life insurance change, adding her husband as a beneficiary on our mother’s policy. In the event of my mother’s passing, the proceeds would now be split four ways instead of three. She and her husband would get fifty percent. My father wasn’t even cold in his grave yet.

“We deserve it,” my sister said. “We’re the ones who take care of them.”

Sadly, the word that best describes how they took care of our parents would be negligently. My father often fell during the final years of his life. My sister and her husband lived a block away, yet never went to help lift him off the floor. One block. A 3-minute walk. A 30-second drive.

“I just call 911. It’s no problem!” my octogenarian mother would say, far too cheerily, not having a clue that EMTs might have more important calls to take. Especially when there were two perfectly able-bodied family members right down the street.

Our mother had already been showing all the classic signs of dementia for months. She recounted events from fifty years ago as if they happened just yesterday. She got paranoid whenever anyone came into her home that they had stolen one of her precious belongings. She’d repeat each story during a single phone call four or five times as if she were recounting it for the very first time. And she called my brother to scream at him, something she’d never done before in our entire lives. Her personality was rapidly changing and not in a good way.

I'd call my sister and express concern, inquiring about our mother’s well-being, and my sister’s oft-repeated mantra was, “I don’t know. Whatever. She’s crazy.” She and her husband were well aware they had to hurry along on implementing their master plan.

My calculating brother-in-law had already been grooming my mother for the past several years to win the status of favorite child in our mother’s heart and mind. Food was what brought her the most joy in life. All he had to do was bring her all the foods she craved. Her obesity and diabetes be damned. She would simply hand him her ATM card and PIN, and Shad would go retrieve buckets of greasy fried chicken and boxes of chocolate-covered ice cream bars for her. I started envisioning him at the store with her bank card, “One box for her, three boxes for me…one can for her, a case for me…”

Within weeks of my father’s death, my mother called me out of the blue one day, abruptly announcing, “I’m going to put Shad’s name on my bank account so he can help manage my finances.” I could hear him in her home shuffling around in the background. They were testing me to see how I’d respond. I said nothing. There was nothing left to say. I knew exactly where this was heading.

Dementia aside, my brother and I always sort of innately knew our sister was our mother’s favorite. And there’s a reason. Not a good one, but it’s a reason. She expressed over the years just how much her life was ruined when she suddenly had three small children in diapers all at once and didn’t have a car or driver’s license, so she was perpetually stuck at home with babies. And since her twins were the source of said life-ruining, she would simply always bear some resentment toward our very existence.

With that, within months of our father’s death, my sister and her husband didn’t have to work all that hard to convince her to write everyone but themselves out of her will. They followed that act by promptly moving her into their home so no one else could access her, or get a single penny from her, ever again.

Their betrayal cut so much more deeply than the loss of a future inheritance for me and my brother. They destroyed what my father had worked hard for his entire life. His one daughter and her husband, who had already received tens of thousands of dollars of handouts by claiming poverty and desperation after not working full-time jobs in years, would reap 100% of the rewards of our father’s decades of hard work and diligent savings intended for all three of his children.

But worse than that was the betrayal. My sister. Our unit. It was annihilated. Over money. And it was now abundantly clear this had been her plan for years. Wait for Dad to die. Then roll over Mom.

I had, clearly mistakenly, always thought our family was classier than this.

Apparently, it was only my father who was the class act.