No Will, No Way

Life After Mother

My mother and father both made what they considered wills and no one could tell them otherwise. What they did was print out simple statements on their home computers, signed the papers and that was all they bothered to do about their hard-earned property. My father never stopped his profane tirades about lawyers and money and how he didn’t have to do all that. At least his signed and dated printout listed his accounts and such.

My mother, a lifelong procrastinator, simply evaded the subject until her mind was incapable of handling it. Only after her death did I find she’d made a printout, too, dated 2013. She never shared or discussed it, not with me anyway — maybe it went down her mind’s memory hole. The first sentence said she’d leave everything to me, provided I take care of — she named her cats, without explaining they were her cats.

“If she does not wish to do this the estate should be held in trustee to pay for their care” was the second and last sentence. Who would hold the “trustee” and disburse the money and care for the cats wasn’t explained.

You can’t set up a “trustee” that way. Under California law, if you want to write, sign and date what you call a will and stash it away, to be valid it has to be handwritten entirely by you, not even marked by a witness and not altered by so much as a staple pull. My parents couldn’t even get their acts together that basically.

If my father had written his so-called will in his own hand, I might have been able to stop some women from plundering his property while he lay dying. When I tried to recover the property after his death, I learned that, lacking any valid will, I had no case.

My father left perhaps $35,000, counting up every car, every item of value, most of it in two credit union accounts, minus what those women took. I just had to deal with the credit unions and dispose of his personal property.

My mother left a house real estate agents beg for, its rooms crammed with valuables (and/ or junk). She also left a number of accounts — banks, credit unions, common stocks, dividend stocks and I’m not sure if that exhausts the inventory. There could be bonds or insurance — somewhere. I’m still discovering various financial accounts, each of which has to be dealt with separately, all because she didn’t write out by hand and sign what she wanted for me — and her cats.