INHERIT-DANCE: God Bless The Child That's Got It's Own

THURSDAY, APRIL 05, 2008:
In Celebration Of Cesia's Life And In Honour Of The Sixth Anniversary Of Her Death

'GOD BLESS THE CHILD THAT'S GOT ITS OWN'

"Photographs Don't Know How to Lie"

Those with narcissistic personality disorders, and even just the hopelessly self absorbed, often refuse to grasp the simple truism above, especially once their parents pass on, at which point some, (though not all), siblings may set about attempting to rewrite their own family history, painting it in a new and more personally favourable light.
Place the average family album next to the average challenged estate’s legal documentation.
Then compare the pictures to the the legal accusations.
Pull back from any distracting emotive facade.
Ignore anything from whining to righteous arrogance.
All of this tends to surround estate litigation procedures, despite the inherent clichés about same which abound.
If any potential inheritor decides to have a closer look, and if they are even remotely perceptive, they will soon find that there is often a distinct discrepancy between some of the verbal "he said/she said" historical revisions and any actual underlying story which is readily revealed by a decade or two of documentation, specifically and especially through family photos, that quintessentially undeniable record of family history and accurate indicator of the degree of health or dysfunction of certain family relationships.
Observe which family member tends to invariably be self possessed, and calm or even relaxed and smiling in virtually every photo. Then observe which person in the many photographs more often than not looks sullen or insecure, or both.
Take a moment to perceive which participants in various family photos appear to be gregarious by nature versus those members who appear withdrawn.
Note who it is who seems to glow or looks healthily integrated within the family structure, or, who is clearly doted upon as the darling baby of the family, or, who is held the closest, who is strong and sturdy, or who may by the one with little or no real connection or contact or reciprocity, or even if touched at all may yet appear as if disconnected from the rest.
Sometimes this scene will replay over and over again in picture after picture, until a theme soon emerges for those willing to invest the time to be analytical.
The entire story of any family is all right there for the asking, right in plain sight in most any family photo album. Given even only the most amateur knack for photoanalysis, the truth of the family pecking order soon readily surfaces, all on its own.
Words can lie, since certain people, especially those who are all too quick to righteously go on the offensive, can and do try to legally revise the truth in their own favour, particularly after the fact, for instance when a particular deceased parent or parents can then no longer set the record straight.
Nevertheless, countless dozens of well taken pictures which have been faithfully recorded over the course of many years will serve as a living document, one which cannot successfully hide the truth of any family's real dynamics, dysfunctional or otherwise.
Rarely, however, is any immediate or even any extended family all that interested in learning this truth.
Family secrets, no matter how terrifying or ugly or squalid, are apparently supposed to implicitly stay just that, secrets.
In fact, the truth of any family matter is usually the first item to suffer the ravages of attrition, especially as soon as any estate battle ensues.
These days, it would seem, so entangled with their own self image are so many growing numbers of ageing narcissists, so often so righteous and dogmatic even while so lacking in perception and empathy are they about anyone other than themselves, that the more self centred the family member is the more often they usually ignore the rest, unable or unwilling to comprehend or to care about anything except, perhaps, finally being recognised at long last as the star of the show, as the "only child", perhaps deserving of special recognition, the chance to restore the mantel as the "first born" or the "baby", either who was for far too brief a time an only child, or who colelcted all the dotage by being the last to arrive, and in either case who therefore feels they are now deserving of extra entitlement, if only after the fact of death itself.
In these situations, everything which is said by those who were spawned during the parent indulging "me generation", and everything which such narcissist prone types tend to do, seems to be driven exclusively by sheer self indulgent, and certainly wilful projection, rather than, just for example, being shaped by any real capacity for perception or any desire or motivation to facilitate revelation of any less than attractive truths.

Even the closest of families will soon be smashed to smithereens once things go legal in ensuing battles over wills and estates.
And if a given family was never close in the first place, the existing divide all too soon becomes a yawning, unbreachable and horrifically costly chasm.
The rule of thumb is this, that lawyers are the only real winners, defendants never win, they only lose by measurable degrees, and even the winnings of plaintiffs are often pyrrhic in nature.
The game, by design, is meant only for those with very deep pockets.
Pyrrhic victory, by definition, is a victory won at too great a cost.
Therein lies human tragedy, coiled at the root of the all too human condition, as Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain and so many others have amply illustrated.
And few learn such lessons the easy way.

Once, a few years ago, I was sent a link for a site called Family Fight.

http://www.familyfight.com/canadian/email_us.htm

After perusing the countless variations on a theme which tend to repeat themselves throughout family estate battle stories posted on that eye opening site, one thing did become abundantly clear.
In the average family group, running the gamut from the mildly conflict ridden to the hopelessly dysfunctional, meaning any family comprised of more than one potential inheritor, one thing tends to hold true most of the time: Whomever it is who assumes the often complex, arduous, even relentlessly exhausting and often thankless task of serving as the caregiver for elderly parents, or whomever it is who is delegated by the others less willing the primary responsibility for that family's ageing parents, in whatever manner, the following almost seems to be a given: This will be the very same person who often later becomes the target of fellow inheritors, specifically those who may have considered hands on care of their parents to be a low priority, either not at all or usually not until either a year or so before, or sometimes only just before, or even only after their parents’ deaths.
Invariably those who had choices, yet who also abdicated responsibility during most or all of the later years of those same parents, will be precisely the first ones to deflect from their own lifetime of selfish demands or non involvement.
At that point revisionist history kicks in. Then and only then they tend to distract from their own selfishness by going on the legal offensive, either before, during, or right after the will reading time draws nigh. Count on it, no matter how fairly and evenly drawn up that same will may be.
If lifetime bequests have been given to those same ones who go on the offensive, such that in the end all receive equally, this too will be conveniently forgotten and those who have received years before will go after any chance of additional gravy.
If everything from years on end of support checks throughout adulthood to parental payment of repeat tuitions for career shcolars was gifted, or even loaned and never repaid, all of this parental philanthropy (or guilt) may later be redefined as being rationalised as entitlement, rewritten as the very least that the parents could have done and having no bearing whatsoever on the estate division.

Conversely, and perhaps in inverse ratio, it would seem, those who do NOT involve themselves directly in day in and day out care for (and occasionally those who do not even care about) their declining parent or parents, particularly those who are conspicuously absent except for the bi-annual visits, even if only until just before the parents' final decline, will often suddenly appear to have a burning desire to express a sudden renewed interest in their parents well being, usually not long before any approaching "deathwatch" ensues.
After the final one of both parent dies, such absent potential beneficiaries will then proceed to try everything in their power to wrench away any fair share of any inheritance or estate from the those whom they nevertheless expected to selflessly bear the protracted burden of parental caregiving as if it had been the obligation of one child alone.
Then too, the parent may be astute enough to only trust one of their children to do the job well or at all. As for later, parents too can be selfish and may prioritise the importance of their own carefar above any later legal or sibling dilemma which settles upon of those whom they ask to care for them
Only the very exceptional parent knows each one of their children well enough to effectively anticipate the potential for this grasping scenario after their death.
Only the most shrewd and savvy parent is realistic enough to take it in hand legally and strategically, while they are still able to do so.
Such an insightful parent may well clarify their final wishes in detail, theoretically making everything indisputably clear. They may well leave with their lawyer all necessary records of intent, documented in unequivocal and legally sound terms, and may well have a record of all anticipated problems placed on file well ahead of that inevitable day of final departure.
However, even if such a parent is exceptionally perceptive and even if they do take care of estate business extraordinarily well, such preventive actions will still do little to prevent what is effectively a later reenactment of rivalrous resentment in the form of a harassment suit, often as not an attempt by other siblings after the memorials are said and done to shift deceirful debate out of any public arena and into a more private, judicial forum, in an attempt to threaten and to to dead-end sibling opposition.
After the death of a final parent, a legal action may then be initiated with the conscious intent to break both the will and the wallet of the targeted sibling, meaning the defendant(s), even if this action is admittedly undertaken as an unsubstantiated bluff.
This whole process tends to then rapidly become an exceedingly ugly, often deeply harmful war zone, one in which the actual target, even if this is never admitted, is the revision after the fact of that family's own true history, and even if the actual agenda which fuels the greed of a given plaintiff(s) may be a neurotic, desperate need to rewrite their own now starring role in the family play, to completely revise and reinvent that family history itself, - if only after the fact.

I call it "She/he loved ME more".

And make no mistake, this chapter in itself can become sibling rivalry’s final death struggle.
It can be an all too lethal, deadly war, as indiscriminate in its intended damage as a nuclear bomb dropped from a great height.
If such an attack does not actually kill the defendant(s), it usually is designed and intended, at very least, to threaten and to permanently maim the target.
Worse yet, those who attack may disguise their true intentions and may often deflect whkle they whine to all in sundry, telling lie after lie, all the lies now very believable, even to themselves.
If this legal agenda later fails, ironically, the entire process, while gruelling, may occasionally even strengthen the defendant(s), with the plaintiff who intitiates the litigation threat sometimes achieving only the all too slim, grim satisfaction of maiming without self gain, even if inadvertently.

Still, there are no real winners in this kind of replay of childhood history, unless winning is about learning life’s lessons through pain.
Every conceivable underlying residual resentment will often be reenacted at great soap operatic length, no matter how foolish, wilful, lie filled, deluded, fanatical or malicious is the position of the one(s) initiating such action. Defendants will learn the hard way that the law often has as little taste for the truth as does the litigant, that documentation can be irrelevant, that proof means little, that to have attacked first might well have been the only way to avoid later being libelled without recourse.

All of this hate fest will unfold while the meter ticks away at $250 to $400 legal dollars for every single professional hour involved. Remember to double that figure when one considers the cost is the only real equality, the same for each side, whther willing involved or involved by force. Whether or not each of the participants is willing or unwilling, more often than not the seige continues for many years on end, including endless detentes and expensive legally technical moves and counter moves, as nauseum.

And lest you think that this is a deadly serious game indulged in only by those who can afford to play, think again.

On top of that, many a plantiff may have spent half a lifetime wheedling, whining and and begging parents, may have even coerced and abused a guilt ridden parent who felt alienated into giving the one they least cared for endless advances on their own "living" inheritance. Or, conversely, they may have doted on one, feared another, and asked the one they favour to pay the ultimate price by taking care of them.

Many a plaintiff may have failed to admit or will "forget" that they borrowed heavily against their parents’ estate all their lives. Yet they will later conveniently leave out this same fact, once they are later faced with the reality of receiving after death what they now may righteously deem to be "too small" an inheritance, when that which is left from the remainder of that same estate they earlier savaged now is their remaining due.

In some instances, the battle itself may be carried out over who thinks who else deserves a few sentimental mementos, with or without the cash reward included.
Nevertheless such litigants often seem more than willing to spend far more than they would ever have inherited on their all too eager lawyers who know they will be the only real beneficiaries of these ugly, greed driven attacks by the self sentred against their own siblings.
The story is as old as Cain and Abel.
It goes without saying that encouraging the participants to engage in a protracted fight, showing them how to attack one another and reduce the estate like wild Mexican curs snarling over a tiny piece of meat, still works wonders for any lawyer's bank account, even if done on a contingency basis.
Some plaintiffs do not care.
These ones tend to be relentless and may be unashamed that they have engaged in a spite suit. They may even say " Better that my lawyer gets her money, rather than my sister (or brother) benefiting". And they may well really mean this, no matter how petty and childish this sounds.

Perhaps such litigation may be intended to get back at an life long envied sibling rival, perhaps aimed at one who received what the envying one deemed to be undeserved, finite attention.

Often such litigation will be carried out over what is tantamount to pocket change, or less.

If, as is common, a certificate of pending litigation is first placed on the title of the home of the defendant(s), this too effectively give3s the appearance of threatening a folow through lawsuit which the plaintiff often knows full well from the start will never materialise. Still, this action will sometimes be how the plaintiff's bluff is carried out for years on end, no matter what the cost.

Why is this kind of tragic, greed driven destruction so prevalent?
T’was ever thus.
An ancient ego driven destructive streak has always led one or more offspring, etc., to devour in this manner a third sibling, for example, seemingly over money, but more likely it will be over festering sibling rivalry, unresolvable inatiable envy, and just plain greed.

Often legal action may be brought on solely for base, venal reasons.
Or perhaps a plaintiff, even one who has suffered a lifetime of wilful alienation from a rejected parent, may be suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder which tends to spin wildly out of control.

Still, one has to ask at some point, what kind of profligate, credit card driven, debt ridden, overextended existence does it take to feed that kind of self justified desperation and transform it into such damaging aggression against some soon to become "former" family member?

How many sound, long lasting marriages and/or the health of defendants so attacked are then destroyed by protracted legal battles, often beyond all hope of repair, by just such actions from those who themselves may have been the author of a succession of their own financial failures, even though they were the cause of their own undoing, or such a lawsuit threat may be precipitated by those who may have failed to hang on to even one successful marriage themselves?

How many loved ones of defendants suffer such acute distress that it results in a heart attack, - or worse?

What does this kind of conflict do to the long term health of defendants? Do the plaintiffs as litigants even care? Or does the mercenary count the cost?

How is spending more money in the pursuit of less money any kind of logical way to live?
And if so, what in hell is the question?

More to the point, what kind of pathetic fool so little understands the nature of the law itself that they obstinately implement what is often tantamount to a self defeating spite suit?
The proof that the agenda is one of spite, not justice, may often be as simple as this:
In many cases, (for instance on familyfights.com), the players invariably seem all too willing to destroy not only all any good will and hope of future trust but any and all hope of future communication. Additionally, as mentioned, the other proof of spite is that the plaintiff(s) often appear more than willing to forfeit a greater sum than the amount of any final inheritance they would have ever hoped to gain, had they not given in to arrogance and self righteousness in the first place.
Sometimes, it only seems as if they get swept away, while in reality they may simply be dogmatically intent on winning at any cost.
They may be pretending to the world that they, and they alone, are miraculously in a position to second guess the original written intent of their own deceased parent(s), after the fact, parents whom they may suddenly proclaim to have been intimate with, a lifetime of historical evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

"Fighting over the sugar bowl" is now a thriving legal industry, mostly driven by boomers, with or without benefit of a sustainable bank account to fund it.
Worse yet, in B.C. which is one of the most notorious for the ease of so doing, under the Wills Variations Act absolutely anyone can become easily empowered and is effectively encouraged to second guess the original intent of their own provably compis mentis parents, sometimes by arguing that what the parent(s) said and wrote in detail is somehow not at all what they really meant, or that even if they did so knowingly it must be because they were coerced, or abused, (though, of course, never by the righteous plaintiff(s)) or both ... or whatever.
Not all that amusingly, what becomes most evident as the years of legal harassment continue on is that there is a distinct pattern the repeats itself wherein the more coercive and/or parentally abusive such plaintiffs tend to have been toward their parents and even toward a sibling while they were still alive, the more likely they will be to protest too much, to later argue that their parents were, for example, the abuse victims of arguably non abusive, caregiving siblings, those who actually did the looking after of the parent(s), those who sacrificed to do so, sometimes during many prime years when the plaintiffs were often conspicuous by their absence, rarely visiting their parents for most of the time for all those interim years prior to that parent's death.

B.C. law itself is so intentionally equivocally written and so non definitive that it is rife with expense generating technicalities which line lawyers pockets, through time extensions, settlement fees, variations for altering the intent and extent of various liens, countless mounting fees for everything from paperwork to changed dates, for endless appeals and counter appeals.
It is the main business of the law to cater to these kinds of idle threats, to encourage protracted and costly delays, irrational detentes, and conflict ridden escalations. All of this is intended to make rich bread and fat butter for many a litigation lawyer who is more than willing to step in and become the only real inheritors of sibling rivalry fuelled estates. In fact, it is not ever lost on the legal profession that the more dysfunctional the litigant the more the lawyer(s) stands to gain.
If one were, instead, to make it compulsory beforehand to measure the emotional I.Q.s involved in being plaintiffs who make empty but expensive years of pending threats of a lawsuit against a sibling, one might well find that this kind of common sense, practical intelligence is woefully lacking.
Yet this is happening more and more often on behalf of the same generation which thinks itself so exceptional, so superior, and brilliant beyond all measure.
How 'smart" is that, really?
If all of this cannot serve the reader as a well meant example, then let it at very least serve as a terrible warning.
As for the up side?
It is a an expensive but occasionally offers relief as a satisfying way to rid oneself of oppressive family members. At very least, such actin certainly can give fresh new meaning to that legally reassuring fallback, a restraining order,
the most expensive yet often necessary final wrap up document of all.