I remember this day so well. It was Thanksgiving morning and I should have been looking forward to the day, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t think of anything other than how bleak our future seemed. I was mad at the injustice of my dad’s situation and frustrated at our inability to do anything about it, and I was missing Dad. But beyond that, I was tormented with feelings of remorse, rocked with guilt that was palpable. You see, my thirst for vengeance was causing undue hardship to my own family. I started thinking that our fight wasn’t worth it, because the wrong people were getting hurt. Sometimes the price you pay for justice is just too high. Sometimes the guilty go free so that the innocent don’t suffer unnecessarily.
Excerpt from A Life Well Stolen
Preface Continued
As I sat in bed in the early hours of that morning, my wife asleep beside me, my kids in their beds, and it still dark outside, I worried about their well-being. Having spent so much on legal fees, we had found ourselves on the brink of bankruptcy. What of their futures? My daughter was only nine years old, my son seven. What had they done to deserve this? They had nothing to do with all of this treachery, yet they would suffer just the same. Their grandfather had wanted them to benefit from his hard work, yet instead they were going without and suffering as I used our money to pay for the services of the attorneys we had hired to reclaim that which had been taken from him.
And it was only going to get worse. Our lawyers had just informed us that they needed more money to keep this going, and my share was going to be over $10,000.00. And then if we lost the fight, we would soon have to pay so much more.
And we were losing, I thought to myself then. Not only had my dad lost his estate, but we were going to lose the battle to get it back and in the process we might also lose everything that we had as well.
That person had laughed about it and bragged, “They don’t have enough money to fight me. They can’t do it. They’ll give up.”
The money part was close to right, but that didn’t make us give up. Instead, we had found the resources and fought on, spending tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees in the process. Our lawyers had recently told us we could potentially spend over a hundred thousand dollars more. Did we want to continue? Could we afford to continue? I had brashly said that I didn’t care what it cost. We had been told that we could easily spend more than what our dad had intended to be our inheritance, but I still didn’t care. It wasn’t about the money, I had said to anyone that would listen. That was the truth. It never had been about the money. It had always been about justice for my dad and what was right. And it wasn’t right that a man with advanced Alzheimer’s could become victimized, as was my dad, and lose everything.
It just wasn’t right.
But what is right and wrong too often doesn’t factor in to real life. I knew that then and I know that now. That morning, I couldn’t keep away the sense of foreboding that we were probably not going to win, and that I had spent all that money and would spend more for nothing. We were broke and it was my fault, I told myself. I should not have risked my family’s future for my dad’s sake or for my desire for justice that at that moment seemed unattainable. What did justice mean to my family when they had no roof over their heads or food on the table?
It meant nothing.
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