The good, the bad, and the irrational . There is one other mistake to discuss, however, namely believing almost anything mother said to me in the years since 2008. What makes this even worse was how, at the end, I gave her every possible benefit of the doubt. Yes, she had terrible faults but I had not forgotten the good things she did for me, some as late as the early 2000s. Especially her actions to make sure I had a place to live following my double bypass heart surgery in 1999. . This is a long story but basically my brother needed a shelter for his assets -at a time when he still had money of his own that mother did not impound for her own use. The solution was to purchase a condominium. He still lived in mother's house and this meant the condo was unoccupied. When I returned to Oregon from Arizona, basically with no financial resources, that was my residence for the next three years. Mother furnished the abode and, all things considered, it was comfortable and had every amenity I could want. Indeed, because of that very important-to-me kindness, my feelings of thankfulness continued for quite some time, long after I should have known better. . Let me note that I did have the opportunity to partly repay her kindness in 2003 when she had medical problems that temporarily limited her mobility and made it risky for her to do even simple chores around the house, such as preparing meals. For more than a month I stayed at the house and served her needs by cooking and bringing her things she might need. Robert took over these responsibilities on weekends. At any rate, I did everything asked of me during that time as mother slowly recovered her health and gradually was able to walk again. . It is not clear exactly when she began to "revert to form." For certain it was no later than 2006. By then I had saved up enough money for a short trip to San Francisco to visit my oldest sister Rita at her home on Twin Peaks. More accurately, I was on my way toward affording the trip by the Spring and thought that there should be enough money by late Summer. So I made plans for the visit. However, mother decided to pre-empt me. My brother, in all the years he had lived with mother in Oregon to that point, had never made the trip before. Mother would never have approved. But that year, when my plans were well along, most of the needed money in hand, suddenly Robert was to travel to the Bay Area before me, during the week of my birthday. . Not that mother's motivation wasn't transparent and essentially petty but I basically shrugged it off as her way to assert some sort of priority in family matters despite her record -for all to see- of treating Robert like a child even though he was a grown man. Robert, at any rate, acquiesced in the arrangement he had with her and, given the debt of gratitude I still felt at that stage of things, I was not about to object. Besides, his trip did not effect my own travel plans in any way. . I wasn't interested in mother's motivations for such things. Without any question, I was never "playing for points" in a family game of oneupmanship the way that mother habitually did. That would have been the last thing on my mind; for me that sort of thing means nothing. No-one in the family has or had any idea of the real nature of my life, nor of my frame of reference, national news and major political scandal, that kind of thing was totally beyond their comprehension. All they could see were immediate family issues with no greater implications; within that environment with its very limited horizons they lived the drama of their lives. . But mother's arrangement with Robert, his trip to San Francisco in 2006, did set in motion the start of doubts about what she was really was trying to do, manipulating siblings for her benefit. In that case she wanted everyone in the family outside of me to think that the visits were all her idea and everyone should regard her blessings for these travels as an example of her magnanimity. . Unfortunately, still thinking about how much of a debt of gratitude I owed mother, my doubts did not go very far, they simply became a sub rosa theme in my mind, and I dismissed them as much as possible at the time and for the next year. . Then came 2008. Actually the nationwide financial meltdown began in 2007 but it did not effect the "main street economy" that year. However, there was one other event of that time, although I cannot remember exactly when, the last visit of my youngest sister, Ramona, to see mother at her house. This will be discussed momentarily but the important point here is that mother's interpretation of that visit and mine were worlds apart. Rita, my oldest sister, next to me in age, continued to make visits from California regularly, sometimes twice in a year, every year until mother's death. . Ramona was different. . . But first it is necessary to mention the financial collapse during the height of the 2008 election campaign. This would have major repercussions for mother and start her slide toward self-chosen financial ruin. This was because Rita, a smart and savvy woman in most ways, had done something incredibly stupid in the years before the meltdown. As intelligent as she could be, she was nonetheless capable of monumental blunders. . About the meltdown, for the record, I had seen it coming -not at all exactly the way it took form, and only vaguely, but in the essentials, foreseeing a drop in real estate values. Everything looked like a bubble to me, which it was, and I advised Rita to sell her home while prices were sky high -comparable units in her neighborhood were going for in excess of $900,000. Her reaction was to insist that house values in San Francisco were stable and could only go up. . She had reasons to want this to be true and that is what she bet on. So, since this was true as far as she was concerned, she felt little compunction about using her home as an ATM, drawing thousands of dollars out every so often for various purposes, including paying mother a de facto stipend, a figure I never knew exactly, but certainly several hundred dollars a month, and probably more. That money was what kept mother solvent. . Rita also, in those years, paid for the start of major remodeling of the lower level of mother's house, more-or-less a basement but with attractive views from near the top of the hill overlooking the city of Eugene; and there was a large back yard that Rita contracted with a professional landscaper to design and turn into a mini park During a two year period Rita sank about $25,000 into this project only to be forced to abandon everything, half completed. All of that had turned into another costly and needless mistake . At least Rita had the good sense to cut her losses. Mother never had that kind of intelligence. . Of course, Rita had newfound motivation. For the sake of her own survival Rita had to end her handouts; she had no choice. Which begs the question about why Rita would allow herself to be suckered into becoming mother's 'cash cow' and why she didn't argue strongly for mother to sell a deluxe house that had become completely unaffordable long before 2008 and find accommodations she could actually manage on a realistic budget. . About 2008 and the election, I remember vividly mother's initial reaction to the impending nomination of Barack Obama to become the candidate for the presidency of the Democratic Party. Mother was utterly dismayed. She felt trapped, betrayed by the party, and was very unhappy. Those feelings lasted for maybe a week or two. Then, in true yellow dog fashion, she became a convert to "Obama-ism." Which is not too strong of a word; like many other Democrats who have no actual religion the party was her God, there was no other, and she must worship its leader as an incarnation of the divine. . "Worship" is also not too strong of a word. Obviously she had "given her heart to the lord," and was thereafter thrilled at his prospects for election success -especially since John McCain was such an inept campaigner and, if the economic disaster bode ill for mother's real life situation, it virtually guaranteed a Democratic landslide in November. . How far this had gone in mother's head was not completely clear to me in 2008, even if there wasn't much doubt. But the reality of how far things had progressed didn't become totally manifest to me until 2012. At that time I happened to be in the same room when mother received a long distance telephone call from Rita some time that October. Mother, soon enough, began to emote rapturously about Barack Hussein. Not her exact words but reasonably close, she said: "Isn't it wonderful? Obama is like Jesus, he is like a revelation from above," and on and on, in this vein. She was gushing with the enthusiasm of a religious believer. . All of which, in 2012 as in 2008, made me sick. I regarded Obama as an incompetent from the outset, as someone with no solid preparation for the White House, someone who basically didn't know what he was talking about, and was a phony. I tried not to say all that much on the subject since, among other things, the alternative was also bad news, but my views were unmistakable. Which, for a true believer like mother, was heresy. . Worse, however, was mother's rapidly deteriorating financial condition. This was only discussed in guarded comments she sometimes made but which could not be completely hidden from me because Robert's finances also took a direct hit and he let me know about it. He no longer would have discretionary money left over from his paycheck; mother commandeered it all except a tiny allowance for Robert's basic needs. When Robert needed a sounding board for his grievances I learned parts of the story of mother's financial troubles. . This made it possible for me to somewhat piece together what was really happening. Which was the best that was possible inasmuch as mother, on subjects like this, was pathologically secretive. She not only could not admit her mistakes, and talking candidly about her problems with anyone but Robert or Rita was out of the question, but she could not face what, for her, was worse, loss of perceived status. She identified so much with the Kennedys that I think she imagined herself as one of them, at least by proxy. She never (ever) actually did anything Kennedy-like, the opposite was true, but she was incapable of recognizing the contradiction. . Why she felt it was necessary to maintain this pretense never became clear to me. It wasn't as if there was a constant stream of upper echelon visitors to the house. No-one who breathed a rarified atmosphere ever appeared at her door. In fact there were very few visitors of any kind. Mother was almost reclusive; she simply did not want to be bothered with guests. She did not cultivate friendships, and certainly not after the death of her last lady friend in the early 2000s. Therefore, so what if she needed to relocate to a "lesser" residence? Even with losses from selling her house in a declining market there would still be plenty of money for a nice home in a less exclusive neighborhood. Which even mother recognized, she did talk about doing exactly that, but talk was as far as things ever got. Her decision in actual fact was to go down with the ship. . All of this is the necessary background for discussion of mother's death this past July and the disclosure of the terms of her last will and testament not long after that. Her will was signed in August 2009 and was never amended. An explanation of why she set the terms she did must therefore follow from events in her life in the year or so prior to that Summer. This means that her vindictiveness toward me as expressed in the will was at least partly an effect of my political views -which were almost the exact opposite of hers. . There was also the factor of economic pressure which, it can reasonably be surmised, turned her brain into a pressure cooker as she desperately sought some solution to her insoluble problems. Possibly a factor in her thinking about disposition of her assets was her seeing me as a failure in terms of career and status in the world; the considerable potential I still had was something that was impossible for her to fathom; all (all) of her judgements about such things were based on conformity to what may be called establishment values, conformism generally, and a strictly bourgeois outlook on life. She could not begin to understand me and never tried. What was important was the fact that because I was not a success as she understood success, I was not in a position to bail her out financially and, so I take it, must be punished accordingly . However, over and above these factors, and clearly most important to her, was my relationship with my youngest sister, Ramona. . . This is the time to discuss something that I never wanted to talk about in a public venue while mother was alive. There simply were too many complications, and as far as I was concerned it was pointless to attempt to reason with mother about much of anything, least of all Ramona's psychopathology. Far better to let the clock run out and only then bring this to public attention. In July 2015 the clock finally did run out on mother's life. . There were problems to work through emotionally first, however, loss of a mother through death is traumatic for anyone, and I was not an exception. It doesn't matter if you have mostly negative feelings about her, she is the one mother in your life and you must deal with her departure from Earth as best you can. . In my case I was nearing the end of writing a book, When the Truth is Found to be Lies, approximately 3/4ths completed, when mother died unexpectedly. The surprise -to me- was the seriousness of her actual condition that I was not told about until after she had passed away. It isn't only mother who was morbidly secretive; Robert, living with her for 30 years, had absorbed her penchant for hyper-secrecy as if this was a necessary 'virtue.' Hence other secrets he never told me about that I only learned later, inadvertently, from other people. . It proved to be impossible for me to continue writing the book. My heart was no longer in it. True, for a week I resumed writing and maybe typed out another 20 pages of text, but writing the book had suddenly become a major chore; the bottom had dropped out of my motivation. Yes, my intention is to return to the task as soon as possible, the book ought to be important nationally, among other things it provides documentary proof of what I had been saying for many years that Alvin Toffler had been a member of the Communist Party in the Stalin era, but since there was zero reaction to that news on the part of people who were given advance copies of chapter material, there was also no inspiration to continue by way of replying to criticisms or to encouragement. There wasn't any. So, the book was set aside for an indefinite time. . There were emotions to work through, as well.. My feelings were, to use idiom, "all over the map." Regret and sense of loss, anger at particulars of mother's life, uncertainty about a different set of particulars, and so forth. . . Part of the story involves the fact that I had seen mother in person several weeks before her death and at that time she was talking as if she would be around for many more months, if not at least a few more years, and she was very assertive -irrational and demanding- about what she intended to do in the coming days, weeks, and longer. I was to agree with all of her orders, question nothing, and go along with her program. Which I was not about to do because everything she said sounded ill-considered and completely unrealistic. Finally, after listening to her diatribe for about three hours, when a social service person arrived for an appointment, I walked out. . Which, of course, mother had not thought I would do, regardless of anything else, because I had no transportation home. I do not own a car, her house is near the crest of a very high hill, there are no bus routes in the immediate vicinity, and my visits to her home were almost always thanks to Robert giving me ride in his car, or mother's car that she could no longer drive. . It was a long walk to the closest bus stop, about a mile, and I'm not exactly a young man any more, but that alternative was better than listening to even more of her ranting. So I went; that was the last time I saw her alive. Unknown to me, her doctor had told her that there essentially was no hope for her health, it was a matter of time, there were no interventions he could offer. There was to be one more round of tests, to make sure, but that was the situation even if I was unaware of it. Mother, instead of facing the facts and being realistic, decided to reassert her authority and make demands as if that was some date in the 1950s and she was in perfect health and could order any of her offspring to do her bidding and expect compliance. What she was saying basically disgusted me. . There was one other thing. At some point before that day, in the month of May, I had visited the house and gotten into a conversation with mother about her finances. By that time I understood a number of basics about her problems and tried to offer what seemed to me to be reasonable suggestions for what she might do at that 11th hour. Her reply? "You aren't worth enough money." She blurted it out, this insult came naturally to her. . In the context of the conversation the full translation was: You aren't worth enough money because I am worth a lot of money and why should I listen to someone who lives on a near-poverty level income?" . This was said by someone who had spent the past five years burning through several hundred thousand dollars in assets to maintain her unsustainable lifestyle. By May of 2015 mother was "worth" almost nothing. Had her life continued longer it is anyone's guess how she could have survived. She was perpetually strapped for cash by then, and she did absolutely nothing to economize -nor was economizing a consideration. . To give one example out of many others, on another occasion when I spent time at the house helping out, this was a day during the Summer, she was running the air conditioning full blast. You don't really need air conditioning in Oregon, where Summer temperatures, except for a few days a year, are fairly mild, rarely above 85 degrees, usually in the upper 70s. But mother insisted on running the AC and used it almost constantly except in the dead of Winter. Including running her car's air conditioning when all that was necessary if she felt a little stuffy would have been simply opening the window. On that occasion the house was positively cold -in August. I told mother about this and she agreed that the temperature ought to be warmer. OK, the obvious solution would have been to turn off the air conditioner and let the place warm up naturally. But that was not how she saw things. Her solution to the problem was to keep the AC operating as before but to turn on the central heating. In the Winter her discomfort at cold temperatures led her to keep the house as warm (hot) as possible at all times. You don't need to guess that her utility bills were astronomical, month after month, often in excess of $500, about which she complained bitterly. Suggesting that she change her behavior and adjust to temperatures the way that normal people do, was always met with dismissiveness. She would not think of changing anything about her pattern of energy use (mostly energy waste) and there was nothing else to say; she would never listen. . Her one (dubious) advantage was that she had taken out a reverse mortgage and could stay on the premises until her death. She had already spent all of the money she could that came her was as part of the "deal." She had also liquidated her stock portfolio and, to make ends meet, ran up over $20,000 in credit card debt which she no longer could repay. Basically the walls were closing in on her -entirely because of the bad choices -mistakes- she had made starting in 2008. Mistakes she could never admit to making. . On top of this there were her stupid blunders -and they were very stupid, despite her previous capacity for intelligent thinking. . This does not count her extravagances prior to the meltdown of 2008. The new $1000 kitchen floor, the numerous objets d'art that made the interior of the house resemble a museum, or her back porch (which was very large) arboretum. Not that an interest in plant life is "bad" in any sense, but that sort of thing costs a lot of money: $50 for this exotic flower, $25 for that pretty foliage, $75 for another lovely plant, and so forth for the 40 or 50 flower pots lined up along the railings. Add it up; and most of these were yearly expenses. Mother never took an interest in learning one damned thing about botany. Apparently she never read even one book on the subject. Her plants were pretty; end of story. Hence she had little or no knowledge of perennials, or choices in native Oregon vegetation, or much of anything else. Instead, each year after the predictable die-off took place, she went and bought 25 or 30 new flower pots filled with plants to replace the ones that had not survived the Winter . There was also the deluxe stainless steel refrigerator she could not live without. Granted it looked terrific. Who would not want a refrigerator that was as classy-looking? But there was nothing functionally wrong with her existing refrigerator except that its capacity was not as great as she desired. Mother had become her own kind of gourmet cook and was forever adding foods of various kinds to the foods she already had in stock. Often these foods -salad dressings of many kinds, for example- would be used once or twice and then be forgotten until they had to be thrown out months later. So she wanted more refrigerated storage space. . The problem with the new stainless steel unit was that it turned out to be mechanically inferior. It broke down in 2014. Of course, a refrigerator can be repaired, but that thought did not occur to mother. Instead she gave it away to Goodwill. Even if she had some sort of animus against the refrigerator she could at least have sold it for a few hundred dollars, for the value of the stainless steel cabinet alone. And money was very tight for her by then. But that is not what she did, she gave it away and bought another fancy refrigerator for about $1000. On credit, of course, which meant interest payments. . This was one of her blunders. . There was also her Cadillac. By about 2010 or so, the car was already old, it was manufactured some time in the 1990s. But it could have been sold for maybe $500, money that mother could have put to good use. What she actually did was to place a tiny want-ad in the newspaper which ran for three days. There was one phone call expressing interest. That did not pan out. Therefore, what to do? Give the car away to Goodwill, of course. The thought that sales may take a little time, that it might be smart to run an ad for perhaps a couple of weeks, simply did not register. Hence another blunder. . Not that she had needed the Cadillac; several years before she had purchased a nearly new Chrysler van, a very nice machine. But she held onto the Cadillac for the prestige value in being able to boast that she owned one. . Still another blunder concerned Robert's classy roll-top desk. It was maybe 40 years old by then, but it was in near-perfect condition. If you wanted to buy an equivalent new the price tag would be somewhere in the $800 to $1000 range. Even used, this type of desk should sell for somewhere around $300 or $400. But mother decided that she did not like how it looked in the TV room where she spent most of her time. . Maybe she would have had some sort of case to make if she had the desk removed to the basement -and there was plenty of free space there for the purpose. Robert would then still have his desk -it was his, not hers- and all would be more-or-less well. That is not what she did. Can you guess her course of action? Correct; she gave it away to Goodwill. . It did not help that Robert took this outrage like a wimp, suffering in silence, sulking about it, but I was not about to do nothing. I exploded. For most of the next year, part of 2012 into 2013, I refused to have any contact with mother. I had nothing but contempt for her action, which consisted of outright theft of her son's property. . I took it as hard as I did for another reason. Years before the same thing had happened to me; my desk, which meant a great deal to me since I had it since age 12 and had customized the drawers into nice compartments I had made myself when I was about 22 -and there were compartments for every kind of art supply or drafting instrument I use in my work, plus slots for pens and paper supplies. And the desk, which was mahogany, was quality furniture. This is a story unto itself, but the gist is that my sister Rita had it in storage in her basement in San Francisco against the day when I would finally retrieve it. For some years I was on the road, no permanent address, and was unable to claim it. . Rita had asked at one point during a visit of mine, which of the several items she had stored for me downstairs, meant the most to me, that if she had to get rid of anything because of the crowding, she should be certain to keep. "The desk," I said, making a point of it that could not be misunderstood. . Unfortunately, she was living with her parasite "sweetheart," and Richard had no sense of anything but satisfying his personal needs. He had managed to alienate and anger everyone in the family over the years -Robert, Ramona, mother, my niece Kimberly, and I was next in line. Hence it happened some time in the late 1990s that Richard's estranged son paid a visit to San Francisco. . Richard wanted some way to appease his wayward offspring and when the son remarked that he liked the desk, Richard was quick to offer it to him, free, which he could do because Rita would never turn him down for much of anything. And, hell, why not? The desk wasn't Richard's, it would not cost him anything either. So, Rita gave it away: The one more-or-less heirloom piece of furniture that ever meant anything to me. . Mother's theft of Robert's desk brought the pain of the loss of my own desk back to life from my subconscious in full fury. . There will be more to say about Richard soon enough, but to broach the subject of this worthless unencumbered-by-any-semblance-of-a-personality sad excuse for a human being here is a start... . Why Rita subsidized mother's utter waste of resources is not a question I can answer. She was close to mother, talked with her on the phone on a regular basis, often several times a week. About what? What in the hell can there possibly be to talk about with one's mother??? Even if there was occasional "news" about each other's lives to reflect upon, how often could that be? Maybe once or twice a month, but probably not even that. Most lives in families are fairly predicable; there simply isn't any significant family news. Therefore, why bother? It makes no sense and wastes time. . To be sure, had mother gotten interested in computers, say, things would have been quite different. Then there would have been plenty to talk about. I have had a computer since 2004 and if I had a friend who was a certified geek, for sure, if he (or she) could tolerate my endless curiosity, there would be one question after another, week by week. There is so much to learn, there are so many possibilities for things to do. Something similar would prevail if we were discussing serious interest in a subject, maybe psychology or literature. There would also be endless things to talk about. Conversations would have a point; do I really understand what Maslow said about the hierarchy of human needs? Are you sure about Hemingway's purpose in For Whom the Bell Tolls? . Throughout my schooling I knew many people who were obsessed with such topics and studied them "for fun," you might say. Their conversations were always "content rich." They took pride in learning, and in knowing about various subjects in depth. . This is not to exclude uncommon times when frequent communication may be a very good idea. Periods of time during the spread of juicy gossip qualifies, for instance. But how often are these kinds of occasions? Not very. Much the same can be said about times when someone is ill or recovering from surgery. By definition these are good times to talk, but also by definition they are unusual times. . Sure, there are days when all you want is simply to hear someone's voice. Perfectly understandable if we are talking about lovers, or a husband and wife. But child and parent year in and year out? What is that? I don't see it as anything but a psychological problem, arrested emotional development. . Some parent-child interaction is more than understandable given any normal situation. A father might want to talk with a grown son who is in the military and stationed some place in the Caribbean, for instance, or the South Pacific. But also by definition such conversations would be uncommon, whenever there was scarce opportunity, such as leave time from military duty. Or a mother might want to talk with a grown daughter living her own life in another state, across the country, just to stay in touch from time to time, as during the holidays. But almost literally day in and day out? That isn't normal, it is sick. . But I digress. . Let us return to the theme which began this discussion, mother's death and her last will and testament. . Another reason for waiting before saying more, was the approach of Thanksgiving and Christmas. By early November, maybe even some point in October, I had sorted things out in my head as best I could. Still a few details to try and resolve, but it would have been possible to have discussed mother's will and the part Ramona played in it (not at all by Ramona's instigation, this was mother's doing entirely), but I did not feel like becoming the "grinch that stole Christmas" -or Thanksgiving. The story could keep until after December 25th. Sure enough, Christmas 2015 has passed and now is the time to say what needs to be said. . This centers on the provisions of mother's will and that, in turn, can only be interpreted in the light of events that supply essential background. This has just been provided. So, let us commence..... . .
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