Life after Mother

A new monthly column explores navigating probate and estate issues from personal experience

My mother left me utterly alone with her complicated estate, although her death was not sudden. For many years she resisted all pleading — from me, from my father, from phone solicitors —to make out a will or trust or anything remotely resembling one. Like my father, my mother died intestate. Unlike my father, her estate is greater than $166,250 and is therefore subject to probate and all its complications.

Her death was a kind one, compared to what victims of COVID-19 and their families must be undergoing, but any death is hard, and the situation she created made it harder. One year ago, in June, I found her on her bathroom floor, no longer capable of understanding the situation. First responders rushed her to the hospital, and on medical advice, she was placed in a memory care facility.

Barely more than a month later, she was taken to the emergency room for puffiness in her ankles — edema — a sign of lacking oxygen. She was put on a respirator and died within hours.

Dementia had already haunted her for two years, as her secretiveness and hostility mounted. She never gave up insisting she remain independent. Like many in a similar situation, she clung to a foolish notion that she could just die in her house, alone, end of discussion. Her life just didn’t go according to that kind of plan and I venture no one’s life does. My first attempts to place her in board-and-care and/or find a live-in caregiver were not for the squeamish.

She had a lifelong habit of being secretive — to the point of dysfunction. When she was married to an alcoholic husband, it was understandable, but the secrets continued long after she divorced him. In her final years any attempt by me or anyone else to discuss her finances was met with hysteria and “None of your business!” and outright denial, even though her situation wasn’t that big a mystery. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen much of what she possessed with my own eyes, heard about it with my own ears, during six decades of life with her.

So, like so many families facing a death that wasn’t planned for — a situation made more common by the COVID-19 pandemic — I must go through probate and arrange disposition for her possessions. It’s up to me to care for the house, the furniture, the valuables, the bank and credit union accounts, the stocks and bonds, and feed the cats, too, without knowing the full extent of what I’m dealing with. Navigating my life after my mother’s death resembles an anthropological expedition. I’m constantly reshaping my own life as I go and I invite others to accompany me and discover what I find and learn, month by month.