Saturday, June 20

Today I am grateful for:

Another warm sunny day that helped dry things out a bit.

My husband was helping our friend do more house tear down, and I'm glad we're a little bit closer to being able to move the dirt.

Unfortunately, my sweetie slipped and fell, luckily just as he was walking, so not from a height. He is quite sore on the side where he landed. He doesn't think it's anything broken, just sore, but maybe we'll get it checked out.

Today was more talking with sisters. My trainwreck sister seemed in a pretty good mood. Her friend was helping her mow her yard, so she was likely happy about that.

The other sister I talked to is one of my very responsible siblings (I will refer to her as S) and we had a distressing conversation about my brother. My brother now has the family farm, and has done a lot to care for Mom. Recently though, it seems like he's taking over a lot of Mom's care, but in a very oddly controlling way. He's declared himself "the sole caregiver for Mom, in total charge of all of her medical decisions", which is not a legal statement as nothing has been done with a lawyer, he's just declaring this. No one knows if this means he's going to call the shots for deciding if Mom should be in a care home, or in an end of life scenario.

Mom was supposed to be signing papers with her lawyer in private about her living will, meaning no other family was welcome at this meeting. THEN, my brother ended up at this meeting, that was supposed to be a private meeting, and somehow Mom ended up signing papers that gave my brother different powers of attorney than he had before. Apparently now my brother can have access to all of Mom's finances, we wouldn't have the legal ability to force him to show us the finances, and he doesn't need my responsible sister S as co-power of attorney to access my Mom's accounts anymore. He was sneaky and evasive in showing up to this meeting that no one was supposed to attend, to allow my Mom privacy. She ended up not even making a living will, which was supposed to be the reason for the meeting, and ended up signing something different. How did she end up signing different papers?

The reason why we know all of this happened, is that S, who also has POA, called the lawyer and talked with her about that meeting and asked to see the papers.

My sister S spoke with Mom, and Mom doesn't really know what she signed. So, my Mom may not really be competent anymore to make changes like this to her guardianship or her will.

My sister spoke with the lawyer, told the lawyer that my Mom doesn't know what happened, and this lawyer at least seems to understand that our brother may be manipulating our Mom into something.

So, now our whole family is upset about this, because it would seem that our brother is up to something. Mom does still own some land and cattle that are not part of the family farm, they are her property. She also owns a modest home. Would our brother actually be enough of a piece of shit to claim some kind of ownership of Mom's property by saying she is his ward? My brother and his wife are both not working right now because of Covid, (they both have jobs outside of the farm), and that strengthens the thought that there are financial motives for his actions.

We are all very angry right now, and we're not sure where to begin in challenging all of this, or even what it means as far as what powers my brother has. To me, it also seems like a horrible conflict of interest that my brother is angling for total power over her assets and her health. As in, he benefits from her death perhaps?

This is all a great shock to me. I have always liked and trusted this brother. I would NEVER have thought he was capable of anything like this. Never.

I was so angry and upset, and felt like I had so little control over anything in this world that I spent the next couple of hours moving a giant pile of lumber onto a trailer to be hauled away.

Then, I watched more Game of Thrones, because somehow that seems less awful than my family right now.