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 3rd, 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.
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