Current mood:	surprised
Entry tags:	family

It seems my sister has actually done it.
I don't know if I talked about my grandma's will in the past and I have no idea how to do a long-term search for a particular tag. So...

About a year or two ago my dad died (yay) and we were expecting to receive some inheritance from my late grandmother through him. My grandmother was pretty loaded - at least at the time my granddad died. She lived in a luxurious senior citizen home. My mother said she and her my grandfather owned a few tracts of land and so on.

It turned out, however, that my aunt D - my father's sister - tricked the old lady into changing her will in such a way that D would come to inherit everything as soon as my father was dead. I'm not sure if D did so directly or if it was her son's lawyer (at whose law office the will was made) took care of the dirty business. They wrote the will on two pages, on the first of which it said basically that the two children (D and my father) would get equal shares of the profit. But on the second page it says that my father cannot access the money and property directly, only enjoy the profits on them, and that if he dies, the whole lot reverts to his sister D.

At the time, my father was living alone, without much contact from the family, and he changed his own will to give all he had to his thieving helper, who scraped all his pension money off him anyway. My aunt would have it very neat - when he died, which was bound to happen sooner rather than later, as he had MS and was a heavy smoker and was generally neglected, she'd get all the money. The helper would not start a legal war against her because her own claim to the money would be shaky and it would be obvious that my grandmother's wish was not for her money to go into the hands of a stranger.

But then one of the distant relatives heard about my father, picked him up and moved him to a decent home, and got some of his stuff back from the thieving helper. He also had the old man change his will back to benefit his daughters - we were still three at that time.

My grandmother did die, shortly after my other sister died. But now my living sister was my father's guardian, and she was amazed to hear about the will (which none of us would have known about if my dad continued without a guardian). She sued my grandmother's estate for his keep, because it seemed that my aunt didn't even intend to follow the letter of the will and give him half the profits on the estate. But a few days after my sister filed that suit, my father died.

At this point my sister sent a letter to my aunt, trying to talk some conscience into her. My aunt ignored it. The will was iron-clad, it seemed. Who was to prove that the old lady didn't actually read and understand the second part of the will, where it said that her son would actually not benefit?

Then that same relative who got my dad out of his squalor decided he wanted revenge, and talked my sister into it as well. They found a lawyer who was willing to gamble on the case - for 30% of the profit if any would be made. I didn't want to have anything to do with it. I was sick of listening to my sister's tirades about my aunt and other relatives, and besides, I don't equate revenge with justice, and I figured that justice will not be served anyway. My sister went ahead with the suit and I removed myself from the proceedings. But my sister insisted that if she earned anything by it she would share it with me. I thought that was just words.

Anyway, the trial actually started about a week ago. Surprisingly, the lawyer managed to undermine the credibility of the witnesses who signed the will (they didn't recognise my grandmother in a photo). The judge recommended that the two sides settle. My aunt's side offered a ridiculous sum, and my sister's lawyer declined. Today, the judge called both sides before proceeding with the trial, and said that she recommends that a sum three times as large would be agreed upon, with a raised eyebrow to both sides indicating that they should think very carefully if they want to go against her advice. My sister agreed at the advice of her lawyer. She actually managed to get some money out of the old dragon.

Well, a third of it will go to the lawyer. Another portion will go to cover the expenses of the trial and I think my father's debts as well. She says she'll share what's left with me. It's nothing even close to "several tracts of land" - more like enough money to cover a nice vacation in Japan is all. We'll probably never know what happened to all my grandmother's assets - we suspect that dear aunt D leeched a lot of it while grandma was still alive. Some of it might also have been lost simply because the brains in the family was my granddad and my grandma simply didn't know about some of them after he died.

Nevertheless, it's sort of like winning a little sum in the lottery. Might be nice, and I didn't have to dirty my own hands in the family feuds. You wouldn't believe some of the things my aunt said of my sister in her deposition to court - even down to an insulting remark about my nephew's dodging military service and the fact that my sister's second husband is not a Jew, heaven help us. Yuck. And if my sister decides not to share it with me after all? Oh well, it wasn't mine to begin with - I was the one who asked to sign a waiver, and I knew the consequences.