@Mik Thanks.
Yes, you'd think it would be simple enough.
My theory is there's something primal to survivorship and in a family when one person passes on (and in the course of nature that person might easily happen to be an elder, with the most money, the most power, who by necessity had separate and different relationships with the survivors).
I remember this kind of event when I was 17. My Jewish grandmother passed on and had made a verbal promise to her daughter, my favorite aunt, that the dowager matriarch's attached apartment, and its bespoke cherry wood furniture would become my aunt's. There is no doubt in my mind that this was promised. You'd have to have known my aunt but she would never have lied.
She and my uncle got into a shouting match late at night. My uncle's blunt reply to my aunt was-- "You can look at the deed."
I was crying and my other aunt put her arms around me and said- "Don't worry. This always happens."
It was greeed. He wanted the apartment to be a rental. He continued to rent it out the entire time my aunt was living in the house
33 years later dying of cancer.
At some point, she could no longer walk up the stairs. She was then moved to the screen porch. You can't make this up.
The formal living room was connected to the porch with French doors. The living room could have been turned into a bedroom. It never entered my uncle's mind to make this accommodation for his sister.
By this point, my uncle had five rental apartments and had amassed a small fortune.
He could have used NYS law or if there wasn't one (there was one in HI), he could have paid the tenants in the attached apartment to move out before my father and other aunt went to LA to bring my aunt home.
I received no condolences when my grandmother died from anyone even my own mother, because her three children couldn't accept the fact she had left me "an unconscionable" percentage of a single $15,000 POD account with six beneficiaries. She had given him me 50k six months before she died. "The family" (from which I was excluded) demanded I renounce whatever was mine from the 15k.
My grandmother died after unsuccessful open heart surgery. There wasn't anything wrong with her mind at all. I couldn't and so refused to supplant her decision for theirs. What a terrible thing to demand of a loved one.
Then my aunt left me $1,500. The paperwork was complicated and her brother was the executer. He was apoplectic his children didn't receive anything.
I'm the only one of my generation who was close to my aunt. I'm the only one who called her and exchanged gifts with her, or sent her cards, or ever visited her in LA (3 times). Why should he have been surprised?
Then my mother died. My father (I don't want to speak I'll of the dead, but, yes, this happened) and his brother paid their lawyer to insert a gratuitous "I leave nothing to my son for reasons best known to me." clause in her will.
I wasn't a beneficiary in the first place. He needed a letter signed by his children saying we wouldn't contest the will so it could avoid probate (I was told at the time; I've since learned it did go through probate).
I was always going to sign it because he was my father and because I had decided long ago we would never be estranged.
But to "respond" to his inclusion of this insulting clause, I literally made him wait six months, until he called me fully convinced I wasn't going to do it, and then promptly told him of course I would sign, I didn't want to make trouble for him, yadda, yadda.
This might not have been my finest hour but I extracted a price for how he behaved both after my grandmother and my mother had died.
I had no feeling of mercy about it.
We always maintained a relationship and got very close after my sister died as I've written.
I miss him a lot. It's not that I'm in grief per se. He died last October. It's that I feel a kind of empty feeling. I don't know. Maybe I am still grieving.
I've become close with my brother's ex-wife who along with the child she and my brother had before their divorce had always been close to my mother and sister.
My brother has Stage IV bone cancer.
His ex-wife (we've met) and I have become friends and allies. My mother and sister were very fond of her and now I see why.
She's the one who told me the cancer is Stage 4. She's confirmed my brother has gone so far as to his child that he gets our father's entire estate.
She made sure "they" found me. They didn't even know I was still in touch with my father but he had told her.
My father never said one word about my brother's health. My brother did tell me he had to have chemotherapy for 6 days a week for 5 weeks in NYC.
But none of this changed his mind that he would and did try to gaslight me into thinking he had inherited everything. This was in bad faith clearly and by now he's lied to me several times to try to keep up with his story.
My cousin and I have a good working relationship now but at one point she sent me a long text that was so judgemental and so moralistic (she's 11 years younger than me, fwiw), that I had to put her in her place.
Everything's been fine since then.
But, yes, what an emotional minefield it can be when someone dies.
