How being cut out of a will poisons your life for ever
LAST week, three women candidly told the Daily Mail why they had decided to leave one child more than the other in their wills. The article generated a fierce and passionate response from our readers, telling of callous parents, estranged children and families torn apart. Here, we print a selection of your heart-rending stories. I’VE NEVER GOT OVER THEIR BETRAYAL
Fiona MacMillan, 65, from aberdeen, says: My father Alexander had cancer for four years before he died, and I spent that time looking after him in the family home — the house in which I’d been born and had lived all my life. I was just 28, and my mother had died three years before his diagnosis.
And yet, when father finally passed away in 1978, that house was given to my brother and I was left with nothing. In fact, I was given precisely four weeks to get out of it, despite having nowhere else to go and no money.
It turned out that father’s will was changed just days before he went into a coma from which he never awoke. This was when he was very close to death, and I later discovered that it was his sister’s doing.
Going through my father’s things, I found a letter from her in which she urged him to amend the will and cut me out. She also arranged for a solicitor to visit father in hospital and make the changes.
Why she did this I’ll never know for sure — I barely knew her, and she’s dead now, too — but I think it may have been jealousy and anger at my decision to go to university.
I was the first in the family to do so, and she certainly seemed to disapprove of it, even though I was given compassionate leave after just three months to come back and look after father. But that act — the change of my father’s will to disinherit me — has had a profound effect on my life.
To be honest, I’ve never really got over it. I cared for him at his most frail and vulnerable, and yet I was cast aside at the end. In his last days my father signed a will that effectively made me homeless.
for my own peace of mind, I can’t believe that he did it voluntarily. It may have been that he didn’t even know what he was signing: I have seen his signature on the will and it’s the hand of a very ill man.
When he was at the hospital, shortly before he went into that coma, a nurse asked him to nod his head if he knew that I was there, sitting at his bedside. He nodded, and for the first time in my life I saw tears roll down his cheeks.
Sometimes I think he was crying because he was confused — did he know that he’d done something wrong, or that he’d been forced to make changes to his will against his wishes by his overbearing sister?
Worse, it completely ruined the relationship I had with my brother, and we haven’t spoken to each other ever since.
I strongly believe that all families should sit down together and talk about what’s in a will before a person gets sick, and certainly before death. It’s very important that everyone hears those last wishes and understands them.
The worst thing of all is to be left in a state of shock — emotionally and financially — without ever being able to ask for an explanation. Because that’s the kind of trauma that echoes down a life.
MEMORIES OF HIS MUM ARE TAINTED
Veronica SutcliFFe, 72, who is married to Bill Sutcliffe, 74, from nottingham, says: WHeN my mother-in-law Dorothy died in May this year at the age of 95, my husband Bill and I discovered to our astonishment that she’d left the family home in Derbyshire to his three siblings (an elder brother and two younger sisters), and had effectively cut him out of her estate.
There was an immediate flurry of feelings — of rejection, injustice and deep, lasting sadness.
We were also baffled by the explanation provided by the three children who were beneficiaries. They told us they’d all given money towards the house when their parents bought it under the right-to-buy scheme in 1989, and that the house, now worth £110,000, was, therefore, theirs.
yet my husband, back then a manager with the royal Mail, knew nothing of this arrangement and wasn’t ever asked if he wanted to contribute.
The terms of my mother-in-law’s will might be easier to understand if my husband had been estranged from her. But, on the contrary, he was always a good and loyal son. We did all
the normal things that families do — included her in our celebrations, took her on days out, helped her sort out dental problems.
We find it really difficult to understand why we’ve been airbrushed out of that side of the family, as if my husband had never existed.
We can’t afford to contest the will, so we’ve had to let it go. And, anyway, my husband isn’t a money-oriented sort of person.
But the distress it has caused him has been painful to watch, because he is so visibly upset. I’m sorry to say that the memory of his mother has been tainted for ever.
EMOTIONAL SNUB WAS FAR WORSE
Shirley Swaine, 62, from Bridport, Dorset, says: From as far back in my childhood as I can remember, my mother favoured my younger brother and made no attempt to conceal it. A friend once commented that while my brother, who is three years younger than me, was waited on hand and foot, my mother, a housewife who lived in Sunderland, seemed to value me only for the housework I did.
I couldn’t disagree with that assessment. When, in my late 20s, she flounced out of my life for ever, after a trivial argument about the washing-up, I felt no sense of loss.
It was a relief to be free of her constant criticism and her unfavourable comparisons of me with other women’s daughters. I had a good job and I provided for myself, but nothing I ever did was right.
At the time of the argument, I felt she was being utterly childish; by the time I reached the age she’d been back then, I found it hard to comprehend how a mature woman could have been so petty.
I always knew that if she outlived my father, an engineer, which she did, she’d find a way of leaving the lion’s share of the estate to my brother.
But, as it happened, she left the whole thing to him and nothing at all to me. I’d had 40 years to prepare myself for it and thought I could cope with it, but seeing in black and white the words ‘I have deliberately excluded my daughter’ still cut very deeply indeed.
It hurt not because there was no money coming my way, but because it conveyed the unequivocal message that I had never meant anything at all to my own mother.
DAD FRACTURED OUR FAMILY
Caroline MaCKay, 49, from aberdeen, says: I’d Been estranged from my father for various reasons for many years, but nothing prepared me for his final wishes. He died this summer, and in his will he left his house and its contents to my brother. To my brothers’ two sons, he left all the money he had in investments, divided equally between them.
And me, the only other child? I got ten per cent of whatever was in his remaining estate, a sum that was likely to be very little indeed.
I found out about these last wishes days before he died. The hurt was incredible, and it meant there was very little room for grieving.
His last actions have fractured the family. They were always meant to leave a legacy of emotional turmoil, and that’s exactly what they’ve done.
The people in your original article spoke of favouring one child over another for various reasons, but they need to remember that it sends a devastatingly clear message. They are saying that they do not care how much hurt they heap on to you when they die.
These actions are final, and cannot be undone. Parents who use disinheritance to punish a child are saying that they didn’t love that child unconditionally.
I HAVE TO BE CRUEL TO BE KIND
Jean wilSon, 69, from london, says: my Son and daughter are 32 and 35, and yet I may as well have only one child. my daughter, who the last I heard was a children’s nurse, and I have been estranged for more than a decade — ever since she took up with a man who I feel controls and isolates her. Sadly, there is now no semblance left of the confident, caring girl I raised.
I don’t know much about my two grandchildren either. I haven’t seen my eight-year-old grandson since he was a baby, and I have never met my granddaughter — I’m not even certain how old she is.
I’ve tried everything to get my daughter away from this man, who as far as I’m concerned has brainwashed her and cut her off from her family and friends. But she refuses to leave, or is too frightened to.
I want both my children to benefit equally from my estate, which will be worth about £450,000 owing to the London house I bought years ago following my divorce.
I still love my daughter as much as I ever did. But the last thing I want is for a man I regard as deeply unpleasant to get his hands on my hard-earned money.
At the moment my will leaves equal amounts to the children only if my daughter is no longer with him. But since this will be hard to prove, I am about to change it to leave a token amount to her and the lion’s share to my son, who has five children. He has always been good to me and tried his best with his sister.
I hope that my daughter will leave this man and come back to us with her children. nothing would give me greater joy than to be able to split my assets equally. But in the current circumstances, I just can’t do it.
SoMe names have been changed.