A Torn Legacy & Misplaced Trust

The notion of trust wandered through my mind a lot as I was writing this story. My dad trusted the person who betrayed him, but as it turned out, there was very little that was trustworthy about that person.  I admit that I’m too trusting. My dad was nothing like me in that regard; he was very cautious trusting others.  But, as far as the person who betrayed him was concerned, Alzheimer’s took care of that little problem, and subsequently my dad’s legacy was torn to shreds.

Excerpt from A Life Well Stolen

Preface continued

Nothing could have been done to stop his sickness, but my siblings and I did not sit idly by while everything was being stolen from him.  When we discovered the appalling truth of what had happened, we acted instinctively to aid our dad.  He could no longer remember who we were, but we remembered who he was and what he had been to us and we would not allow him to become victimized without a fight. We owed him that, but that wasn’t why we went to battle for him. He was our dad, but he was no longer the man who had raised us. His mind ravaged by Alzheimer’s, he could no longer defend himself. We were all that he had.

So we hired lawyers and spent our money.  We let ourselves be deposed.  We went to court.  We listened and we cringed when the other side called us greedy children and accused us of not loving our dad, accused us of initiating a frivolous lawsuit because we were only interested in his money, as if we were the ones who had stolen it. Don't worry what they say, we had to tell ourselves. We're protecting our father. It's what anyone would do. So we ignored it all as best we could and fought on even as the other side made us out to be the criminals and praised the person who had actually taken advantage of our dad, a man with advanced Alzheimer's who was not even able to understand what was happening to him.

We fought for our dad to the best of our ability, for months, for years, but in the end it wasn't enough. We could not completely reclaim that which had been taken from him. We just had no idea how bloody a battle it would be.  A predator had sunk its teeth into our dad’s life and it was unwilling to let go. It was a tug of war to the bitter end. We were unwilling to allow it to take our dad, it would not release its hold, and in the end all that was left were pieces of our dad’s life.

Those pieces were better than nothing and we all knew that. But they came at great cost, both emotionally and financially, and it was not how my dad had intended his legacy, to be torn apart and ripped to shreds.

And it was all because of misplaced trust.

Unlike my dad, as my wife would tell you, I'm too trusting. I'm not saying I'm naïve.  I know there are people out there biding their time, watching and waiting for a sign of weakness so that they can attack.  I know also that there are opportunists who may not always be on the prowl or even consider the possibility until one presents itself to them.  I am not naïve, but neither is it easy for me to accept malefactors within my own circle of friends and family. If that is a weakness, then I am guilty; I have always been too trusting in others. 

My dad did not have that same failing; he was always skeptical about the motives of others.  That strength served him well his entire life, but in the end it was not sufficient to protect him. He was always vigilant of those outside, and careful of those around him, but still he didn't give sufficient credibility to the possibility that he would be betrayed. I guess it is just too difficult a thing to dissuade yourself from believing in those who are your supposed allies, the ones you should be able to rely on not defend against.

Alzheimer’s stole my dad’s memories and his cognitive abilities and in the end it was what killed him.  That I can accept, however reluctantly. But someone he trusted robbed him of everything he had worked for and on one day selfishly betrayed him and completely negated everything he had accomplished in his long life. That is what I can't accept. That is what makes me the angriest, that boils my blood and makes me want to lash out at someone or something.  I feel that same anger at times when I see one of my children being mistreated by another.  Yet with my children I am able to intercede and guard them from harm. With my dad, however, I could not intervene, and I realize now that even if I had known what was transpiring at the time it was happening, there still would have been nothing I could have done to stop it.  And that, after my anger has run its course, leaves me feeling discouraged, frustrated, and completely powerless.

Waking Up on Thanksgiving Day 2009

We battled in court for five years to reclaim our dad's stolen life. From the moment we discovered the treachery that had transpired I wanted to tell the world. But I couldn't; none of us could. Our lawyers kept us quiet. When this whole awful mess finally reached its conclusion, I couldn't wait to sit down in front of the computer and begin. There were other people suffering, others that would become victimized. Our story needed to be told! 

But when I finally opened up the word processor, I had no idea where to start. Should I talk about how an apparent man of God might not be what he claims to be? Should I share the bitterness that developed between family members? Should I relate how two of us turned on each other and how that ultimately played into my dad’s betrayal?  How much of the court battle should I tell? I had no idea, and like so many who have taken this task to hand, I had to delete many of my first attempts. There was so much to tell, but I couldn't figure out how to bring it all together.

As I thought it through, in my mind I kept going back to the previous Thanksgiving. That had been for me the lowest point in this whole struggle, when I felt certain that everything that we'd been through, everything we had done, and the thousands upon thousands of dollars we had spent up to that point was for nothing. Everything about our dad's life had been taken from him, and there was nothing we could do about it.

     

Excerpt from A Life Well Stolen

Preface

I woke up in the early morning hours thinking about my dad and how unjust it was that his life had been stolen from him. I lay there as sleep eluded me, pondering how it had all been so greedily yet effortlessly taken away from him by illness, by betrayal, and I thought, Why do I feel so resigned to helplessness?   Why can't we fix this?

I sat up in bed, considered getting up but didn’t.

It was Thanksgiving, 2009.

This would be the second Thanksgiving my dad would miss, though it seemed like the first.  He had passed away barely a year before, from Alzheimer’s disease, at the age of 81.  It took the disease thirteen years to run its course, and it was an agonizingly slow and cruel process. First, it took away his mind’s ability to form memories.  Next, it robbed him of the memories he already had. Then it removed his capacity to function coherently. And finally, it killed him.

That was one of the ways his life was stolen.

But it wasn't the only way.

Over the course of his illness, I saw firsthand how the disease affects a person’s mind and body, but I also discovered how it affects the people around them. For some, there is heartache, depression, sadness.  For others, there is denial and a need to escape the awful reality of this disease.  And for a very few, unfortunately, there is opportunity, the chance to prey upon the vulnerabilities of the victim, like the carnivore that senses the weakness of its potential prey.

As the disease progressed it left my dad vulnerable, and in his weakness someone stepped in and took advantage of him and robbed him of everything that he had worked for in his life—his entire life savings. It was as if the illness pushed him down and left him unable to move.  Then, seeing him there, helpless, someone who should have come to offer a hand to lift him back up, instead reached into his pocket and took his wallet and everything else he had of value.

At the time that this happened, my dad could not always remember his children’s names, his marriage to his wife, or whether his own siblings were alive.  He couldn't remember all the decades of hard work, the sacrifices he'd made, or the careful planning that he'd done over the years. And he couldn’t remember that he’d already chosen heirs and beneficiaries for his multimillion dollar estate.

He couldn’t remember any of that, but someone else could.

It happened on one day, July 3^rd, 2002, a few years after he developed the disease. On that day, he was driven to a lawyer’s office where a new will and a new power of attorney had been drawn up, awaiting his signature.  Then he was driven to his financial manager’s office, where he signed a change of beneficiary form for an IRA that was valued at nearly a million dollars. All of this didn't take long because the arrangements and the paperwork had been prepared in advance by someone else. In perhaps less than an hour, my dad signed over total control of his estate to one person. 

Lacking the ability to form memories, my dad didn’t know that at his death one person would now receive 90% of his estate and would be given control to decide what to do with the remaining 10%.  But the person who stole it from him knew and would later attempt to hide that information from us, his children, and to deceive us into thinking our dad had no money left, when he in fact had everything we thought he had, and more.

We should not have doubted that, but we did, if only a little. Like so many others, we were fooled at first. We shouldn’t have been. Our dad had planned for his future in such a way that no one, least of all his own family, should have been fooled into thinking he’d somehow lost it all.

My dad was born during The Great Depression, and his parents had been dirt poor. He had clawed his way out of that existence, and throughout his life made so many sacrifices to ensure that he and his family never returned to that poverty he had known in his childhood. He climbed his way up the ladder and into upper management where he worked ten to twelve hour days for decades. He lived frugally on the essentials only, saved his money, invested his funds wisely, and meticulously planned his retirement.  After retiring, when we all thought he would finally start enjoying the fruits of his labor, he continued to live as sparingly as before, if not more so.  He rarely traveled, did not spend money unnecessarily, saved on gas by buying economical cars, and moved into a simple home with a little acreage. As the years past, like many retirees he became more conservative with his investments, not wanting to risk losing what had taken him so long to accumulate.  He established a living trust to protect his assets and his estate for his beneficiaries should he become incapacitated or die. 

Then he got sick. And despite all of his careful planning, as a result of his weakness, it was all stolen from him in the end.

By someone close to him.

That was the other way his life was stolen, and that is what makes the thievery so complete.  Not only did my dad lose his memories and sense of self, but he also lost everything that he had lived and worked for. Almost everything that gave meaning to his time in this world was taken from him.