A memory from four years ago that popped up on Facebook today was a post I made in response to my younger sister's passive aggressive message that had been sent that morning.
To put it into perspective, Mom had moved in with her in March of that year. In addition to her realizing that I had been telling the truth that taking care of Mom was more of a job than it was a joy, she was also dealing with the "unforeseeable emergency" that everything that wasn't dealt with at Mom's house when it might have been, had to be dealt with then when there were other things that needed to also be dealt with, like taking care of Mom.
It was an unfortunate situation for my younger sister, but she was only dealing with the consequences of her complacency and procrastination. Mom approved of that because it meant she could live in the old family home that was becoming more impractical for her by the month.
I liked the idea of keeping the house when Dad died, but it was clear after a year or two that it was no longer the family gathering place. It was easier for each of us to take her to our family gatherings than it was to gather all the family at her house. About that time, I had begun trying to get the family to persuade Mom to sell both houses and buy a duplex that would be more practical for her and our oldest sister as they aged. There was no family meeting about it. Any discussion about it was done behind the scenes and did not include my input. The news that everyone agreed to not discuss it was always delivered by one of my sisters, and it always did not match up with conversations I had individually with my siblings.
My younger sister was the person who told me that the plans to move Mom into her home when she no longer could live in her own home had already been made. What does that mean? At that time, she already couldn't live in her own home! It wasn't a plan; it was complacency and procrastination.
Moving Mom in only served to put more solvent on any glue keeping the family stuck together. Rather than picking up the phone and inviting family members to visit Mom, she and her daughter in New York began a barrage of passive aggressive posts about how much regret people have when they don't visit people who eventually die.
The memory on Facebook was from the last day of November in 2018, which was about eight months after Mom moved in with her. Several of us in the family received a message from my younger sister that morning telling us to let her know what days during December we want to help mom, and to also let her know if we didn't want to help. She didn't provide a schedule of things she knew Mom needed help with, nor did she provide dates that she wanted to do something and needed help with Mom. December is a hectic month just because of Christmas, but Mom also made it a tradition to visit the cemetery on the anniversaries of David's birth and Dad's death.
I understood that my sister might need help, but, if so, the least she should have done is tell us when and with what she needed help. When the caregiving situation was reversed and I needed help, I made the calls necessary to cover the help I needed. Mom made her own dates with my sister back then, and she made her own dates with me when the message was sent by my sister that day. This was not going to be a new way for my sister to communicate with me.
Here is an excerpt from my reply to my sister:
"If you need a break that I can accommodate, please let me know. I can generally be available at home to accept her if you can get her here, and I can arrange to pick her up at times when that is inconvenient for you.
I will be arranging times as I can to get mom to functions within my group in the family. That is generally what happened when she lived in her home; you all came and picked her up, but stopping in for visits were rare. It has always been noticeable; she has always noticed it."
I called Mom shortly after replying to my sister. We had a really nice talk. I asked her if she needed me to take her to the cemetery on either of the anniversaries or to any upcoming appointments. She asked my sister. I heard my sister tell Mom to tell me that she has both dates and all her appointments covered and didn't need my help.
Mom was more polite in conveying the message to me. I was a bit surprised that my sister snapped. I had hoped that she had read my reply and would let me know through Mom the dates and events she wanted help covering. I thought that she would want me to cover one or both of the anniversaries, or maybe a date she wanted to deal with her own December issues. Instead, she chose to get pissed off rather than to communicate reasonably.
Mom was delighted to accept my invitation to take her to the cemetery again on her wedding anniversary. We followed that by having lunch with my children and doing some shopping. Mom and I genuinely enjoyed the day, and I hope my sister was able to take advantage of the time to deal with things she needed to deal with in her own life. Regardless, she got the message loudly and clearly that I would never require her permission to spend quality time with Mom.
They say that families fall apart when the glue in the family dies. If that is true, then Dad was the glue in the family. He would never have allowed me to remain in charge if he didn't trust me, nor would he ever have participated with my sister in sabotaging his business interests. Dad would have called everyone to the table. He would have put the problem on the table so we could each discuss possible solutions, and either we would have agreed upon a solution, or he would have imposed one.
When I learned since Mom's death that the problem I thought was being resolved when she changed from a will to a trust had been resolved fifteen years earlier, it became clear that my sister had been sabotaging the office for at least its last three years. Mom's decisions to retain unproductive family members over our only productive employee despite losing revenue sources makes more sense when I consider that my sister's drunken phone calls to discuss business were sabotage and not sincere calls.
My sister knew of my concern over Mom's decisions and so did Mom. Mom knew that my sister was calling me when she was drunk and the contents of our conversations regarding the business. If they both had been honest, Mom would either have told me that she didn't trust me, or she would have told my sister that we needed to proceed with the plan to close the business because she did trust me. Now that I can reflect on those conversations knowing that my sister was lying to me and sabotaging what I was putting on the table that needed to be done, I wish I had handled it differently.
I wish that instead of turning down the offer to run the CUSO because they would not give anything to Mom for her business, that I had accepted it and taken Mom to the CPA so we could explain to her that she would be thousands of dollars richer to let me take the accounts and to close the business at the end of that month. She would have gotten nothing then instead of nothing a couple of years later, and I would have had the opportunity to run a CUSO. I had tried a couple of times to convert the business into a CUSO before that, and here was one being offered to me that was backed by a billion-dollar corporation. It would have hurt Mom's feelings if I had done that, but it would have been better to hurt her feelings that way than it would have been to devastate her business with the CUSO.
It was four years ago today that I responded to a passive aggressive message from my sister telling her that my intentions were to work out with Mom the time I spent with her. At that point, I did not know that she had sabotaged the office by lying to me, and that she was the catalyst behind Mom's peculiar decisions. Also at that point, no one in the family had told me that they knew I was a leech for more than twenty years, but they never found the time over those twenty years to confront me about it. Heck, if they thought that, imagine how derelict they were when they declined my invitations to meet and discuss options to deal with problems so we all could move forward.
I certainly am not perfect, nor am I without fault for Mom losing trust in me. However, the best evidence that she had been paid back and the issue resolved was that she never brought it up to me, and there was no reference to it in her trust. The best evidence that a twenty-year-old issue became a topic again because of my sister is that it never came up until after Mom died, and then it was brought up by several family members who had no business knowing the company's problems.
Dad and I protected their personal assets against business losses by incorporating. Mom only stood to lose personal assets if she tried to save the business. It had lost two-thirds of its revenue sources, and it was a challenge to compete with agencies that had many times the resources the family business had when it had all three revenue sources.
Perhaps, the truth is that her lying began before her drunken calls intended to sabotage the company without understanding what it was facing. Who knows? When Dad died, I involved the entire family as Dad would have wanted. When Mom died, my sister made the decision to have two cemetery workers in coveralls be pall bearers rather than having some of her grandchildren do it, even if all of her grandchildren could not attend. Dad would have loved his service. Mom would have hated hers.
Lying, sabotaging, and communicating passive aggressively is not as good a plan for family unity as would have been putting problems on the table, determining the best resolution, and moving on with the problem behind us, as Dad would have done. However, that glue died with him, as did the family unity.
