How to start a war, part 1

In January 2025, my mother lay dying.¹ She was mostly asleep, but when she was awake and willing to speak, her mind was all there. She doesn’t remember any of it because her IQ was doing the heavy lifting. That’s how brilliant she is.

She went in on a Saturday. Sunday evening, she asked me to come back to the hospital so she could give me her final wishes, as I’m her DPOA, POA for healthcare decisions, and executor. It was a rehash of everything she’d ever pounded into me, but I recorded the whole thing.

One thing Mom (81) told me, very clearly, was not to let the house that she co-owned with her sister, Susie (79), go for anything less than $400,000. It was 3000 ft² on 5 acres with a barn. She and Susie lived there with her other sister, Millie (83), and had for 13 years. They could barely take care of themselves, much less each other or a property that big. The ward did most of the work of keeping it up.

So, yeah, the house would have to be sold. It would have had to be no matter which sister went first. Don’t worry, Mom. I’m savvier than to let it go for less, but I had no reason to worry about it. I knew my Aunt Susie would do the right thing and sell the house because half of it didn’t belong to her and honorable people don’t keep what’s not theirs.

My brothers arrived from Orlando and Seattle, respectively, and we worked like a well-oiled machine to get shit done. The usual stuff. You know. Funeral. Interment. Estate settlement.

But before I tell you what kind of family drama went down in a family I didn’t think could have family-rending drama,² I need to explain how my brothers and I were reared with the concept of death and why.³

My father’s family is/was prone to heart disease and early dying. My grandfather died at 63. Heart attack. My father’s first cousin died at 42. Heart attack. My dad died at 51. Heart attack.

He knew this would happen. But you know, I was born in the first wave of GenX to the last gasp of Silent Gen parents, who were the children of the Greatest Generation. My parents’ families were old when I was born, we kept company with them frequently, and then they started dying. By the time I was ten, I’d been to more funerals than I could count, seen more well-casketed dead bodies than I’d seen babies, and I liked collecting flowers at their grave sites to remember them a little longer. I was well versed in death.

My dad made sure of it.

It was a part of life. An inevitability. A furtherance of one’s eternal progression (although he never couched it in those terms; my child’s mind took it to its next logical step). Nothing to fear.

He talked about life insurance, last wishes, mortgage insurance, getting twenty years in with the city so my mom would have his pension, and the business of taking care of business when someone died. He often joked that we were a family of late bloomers and early diers.⁴

Why was this such a frequent topic of dinner-table conversation?

Because his father refused to speak of it at all, much less prepare for it, and left his mother pretty much destitute.

Then … his cousin Bill died. At 42. My dad bought life insurance. Then he went to the doctor. (In that order.) Learned what he expected to learn. And waited.

Waited for the day he’d call in sick because he didn’t feel quite right, then keel over in the back yard. At 51.

Well, we got through it with the acceptance and pragmatism we’d been taught. We grieved. We cried. It didn’t hurt any less for being prepared and having a solid understanding of the afterlife. At that point, my mom made me her DPOA and healthcare POA and executor. She explicitly recorded, with a notary and everything, that she was a DNR and drilled it into me that I was to make sure it was respected.

When my mom lay dying, we children, who had been reared to deal with death in an accepting, pragmatic, and forthright manner, dealt with it in an accepting, pragmatic, and forthright manner.

And that’s where the fights started: with her PCP,⁵ her sisters, and about half the members of the ward—all of whom were so terrified of death that they refused to accept that my mom was dying, but I and my brothers were going to make sure her DNR was respected.

Her PCP and her sisters hounded her relentlessly to do this, that, and some other thing to extend her life even though they could clearly see she was in agony, knew that she had been wanting to die for a while. My brothers and I fought them. We argued. We yelled. They ignored us and her legal documents and got in her ear and bullied her until she acquiesced to dialysis which she had explicitly stated she did not want in front of a notary and everything.

They called us “ghouls” and “greedy” and that we were “trying to kill her so they can get her money.”

They would not listen to us:

• These are Mom’s wishes.
• This is what we’ve been reared to believe, think, and do.

But my brothers and I listened to Susie’s and Millie’s desperate arguments and it slowly dawned on us they didn’t give two shits what Mom wanted—even though they knew as well as we did. They wanted what they wanted, and what they wanted was to not have to give up their living situation and all go on as if they were all going to live forever.

Mom did not die.

At the point we all realized this, we had to start thinking about long-term care. One place we were sent quoted us $13,000 a month. We were shitting bricks. How were we going to pay for this?

She had one asset: Her portion of the house.

Cool-headed Brother 1 (Paul) went to Aunt Susie with hot-headed Brother 2 (Nick) and politely asked her how we could liquidate Mom’s portion of the house, and Susie said, “I’m not selling this house! This is MY house!”

That was not what Paul asked. My brothers didn’t quite know what to do with that, so they left.

The next day, Nick called them up again. Harsh words were said.⁶ To me, this is the important part:

Two days later, we filed suit to force the sale of the property.