Caregiving and Money

If your estranged daughter goes first, you might not find out for weeks, and if you go first, she might not come to the funeral. Before either happens there’s a will to sort out and a letter you might be tempted to write, and the letter only helps if it’s about her.

The family dates it to one argument, because the argument is the part they watched. The years before it happened in phone calls nobody else was on and in home health hours one sister paid for by herself, and none of it was ever said to the sister on the other end, which is how a person can lose a forty-year relationship and honestly believe it ended over a scheduling dispute.

Five siblings sounds like help, and people hear the number and do the math right there in front of you, six adults, so the appointments split six ways. One of them takes the first one because she lives 20 minutes from the clinic, she takes the follow-up because she heard what the doctor said, and by the third nobody's dividing anything up. Counting your siblings one at a time gets you further than counting how many there are.

Estrangement stays a private matter for a while, and then money brings other people into it, at points anyone could predict, when somebody gets sick, when somebody dies, when a form needs a signature. Relatives raise the will first and they raise it with everybody, a mother hears that changing it will send a message, a daughter hears what her mother has done at a funeral or through an aunt, and neither piece of advice comes with the part where a document produces a conversation, because it doesn't.