Imploding

I both love and hate confrontation.

I love it because I am standing up for myself.

I hate it because it makes me feel uncomfortable things I don’t normally feel and don’t want to feel. It is an area of life in which I require considerably more finessing.

I am accustomed to deceit and trickery in social relations, and most frequently in family relations. Whether members of my family practiced deceit and trickery deliberately is almost beside the point. I remember the sickening sloshing about of unwelcome emotions in me as I stumbled upon one sad realization after another.

In many confrontations, I always hold out hope that I am about to discover someone made an “honest mistake.” For this mistake, they would rush in rapidly to own up and correct it. That’s funny, not funny.

If the transgressor’s intention was benign, they would have thought through and been aware of how their actions were going to hurt and undermine you. If their intentions were honorable and honest, they would not have let it happen in the first place.

When my father died, I repeatedly encountered this. My youngest sister was the sole executor. She had a “fiduciary” duty to treat her sisters – the two other beneficiaries – with an even hand. I knew what was going to happen from the minute I heard that Dad chose her as his representative.

She had treated me with disdain and disrespect for the previous 30 years. She hid this fact from my father. When he asked about our relationship, she lied to him and presented us as “best buds.” Her lying and deceit didn’t end there.

As the estate inexorably made its way through the legal system in a protracted start-stop process over the next 13 years, my sister made sure she profited handily from the arrangement. She loaned herself money from the estate while denying the same privilege to my sister and me.

She seconded all of my father’s personal effects without offering to share or allow access to select favored items for ourselves. Not even items that we had given Dad as gifts. She lied blithely to the estate attorney, the judges, and to me.

Any of my attempts at asking for parity or “fair dealing” were treated like so much dust and air. Even the most inconsequential of items – Dad’s old computer or special furnishings like a wooden coat rack – were withheld in the same manner as Aesop’s fable about the dog in the manger who hoarded hay he couldn’t eat.

In campaigning to become Dad’s executor in the years leading up to his death, she presented him with a special book as a Christmas gift: You Can’t Take It With You. It carefully detailed all of the horrors that could ensue without a proper estate plan and the “right” representative in place. Perhaps I see that more cynically than others might.

As it turned out, she disappeared on a Caribbean vacation in the days leading up to his death. She could not be reached by anyone for four days after he died. She swears she put her contact numbers on a Post-It note on her computer screen. It seems she forgot to tell anyone.

She left my father’s law books in a place where they went moldy and had to be trashed. She put all of his office furniture into a dumpster refusing all pleas from me to hold them. The buyers of the business building said they would happily have held on to those items for me “had they but known.” Having lost their parents themselves, they knew the sentimental value of the items my sister got rid of.

There were many confrontations in the aftermath of my father’s death. Mostly useless. The courts and society treat power with the same even hand. In spite of the evidence, no one would call out my sister for her shifty management of Dad’s funds and property.

I did learn one thing from that sad situation. In the end, Dad’s things didn’t really matter all that much. I grieved them and got over it. Less clutter to deal with.

It was the deeper wounds of treachery, deceit, and cruelty that hurt and caused the most longlasting damage. Mostly, the dissolution of any future facade of family. Permanent estrangement from both sisters was the final consequence. That is not said with bitterness but sadness. It was a preventable tragedy.

I had to walk away for my own self-protection and the preservation of my mental health. When I hear the stories of pettiness and fighting that still goes on among them, I sigh with relief. I no longer want to live or choose to live like that. Hurt people hurt people they say.

I also walked away with certainty about one thing. Whatever else underpinned the cruelty, deceitfulness, envy, and greed in the family situation, it was not solely my fault as my youngest sister was desperate to believe.

It is sad when families learn – like the stranded crew on Apollo 13 who struggled to maintain their cool in a life threatening situation – that after any degree of the fighting and conflict, we end up back in the same place. It is well to remember that in the aftermath of such conflict, our relationships might not make it intact.