My mother\u2019s next argument was about Nana herself.<\/p>\n
Not the document.<\/p>\n
Not the witnesses.<\/p>\n
Not the instructions that had been changed.<\/p>\n
Nana.<\/p>\n
She claimed my grandmother had been too ill to understand what she was signing.<\/p>\n
I remember how quickly the accusation came.<\/p>\n
There was no hesitation.<\/p>\n
No quiet question about her condition.<\/p>\n
My mother spoke as though the matter had already been settled.<\/p>\n
Nana had been dying.<\/p>\n
Therefore, according to my mother, the amendment could not be trusted.<\/p>\n
I understood one part of what she was saying.<\/p>\n
Nana had signed the document near the end of her life.<\/p>\n
Three days before her death was not a detail anyone could ignore.<\/p>\n
But I also understood that being close to death did not automatically mean someone had lost the ability to make decisions.<\/p>\n
Those were two different things.<\/p>\n
My mother was treating them as though they were the same.<\/p>\n
Mr. Caldwell did not.<\/p>\n
He allowed her to make her objection.<\/p>\n
Then he answered it.<\/p>\n
He explained that Nana\u2019s doctor had assessed her ability to make decisions.<\/p>\n
The doctor had provided written confirmation.<\/p>\n
Nana had been mentally capable when she signed.<\/p>\n
That was the answer.<\/p>\n
Quiet.<\/p>\n
Direct.<\/p>\n
And very difficult to dismiss with another angry interruption.<\/p>\n
I looked at my mother.<\/p>\n
She had been so certain.<\/p>\n
A moment earlier, she had acted as though Nana\u2019s final illness was enough to invalidate the amendment.<\/p>\n
Now Mr. Caldwell was telling her that the question had already been addressed.<\/p>\n
Not by a family member.<\/p>\n
Not by someone trying to defend an inheritance.<\/p>\n
By Nana\u2019s attending physician.<\/p>\n
And not merely through a conversation that someone remembered differently afterward.<\/p>\n
There was written confirmation.<\/p>\n
That mattered to me.<\/p>\n
I kept coming back to the same thought.<\/p>\n
Nana\u2019s condition had not been ignored.<\/p>\n
Someone had considered it when the amendment was made.<\/p>\n
Someone had put that assessment in writing.<\/p>\n
The lawyer had just explained that the document was witnessed and notarized.<\/p>\n
Now he was telling us that there was medical confirmation of Nana\u2019s competence.<\/p>\n
Each answer made the amendment harder to dismiss.<\/p>\n
My mother had challenged its existence.<\/p>\n
He had given her the date.<\/p>\n
She had challenged how it was signed.<\/p>\n
He had explained the witnesses and notarization.<\/p>\n
She had challenged Nana\u2019s state of mind.<\/p>\n
He had answered that too.<\/p>\n
I was beginning to understand that Mr. Caldwell had not come to the reading with an unsupported last-minute claim.<\/p>\n
He was referring to a formal document.<\/p>\n
A document that carried Nana\u2019s signature.<\/p>\n
I still did not know what it said about the estate.<\/p>\n
That was the part I wanted to hear.<\/p>\n
And it bothered me that we had not reached it.<\/p>\n
My mother was arguing about whether Nana could make the decision.<\/p>\n
I was waiting to learn what decision she had made.<\/p>\n
I thought that was a reasonable thing to want.<\/p>\n
It was her will.<\/p>\n
Her estate.<\/p>\n
Her amendment.<\/p>\n
Nobody had yet given us a reason to believe those instructions were anything other than her own.<\/p>\n
My mother\u2019s certainty started to trouble me.<\/p>\n
Not because I had discovered some secret.<\/p>\n
I had not.<\/p>\n
And not because Mr. Caldwell\u2019s explanation told me who was right about every possible legal question.<\/p>\n
It did not.<\/p>\n
What troubled me was the way my mother seemed to need Nana\u2019s last decision to be meaningless.<\/p>\n
She had heard that the amendment was signed.<\/p>\n
She had heard about the witnesses.<\/p>\n
She had heard about the notary.<\/p>\n
And now she had heard about the doctor.<\/p>\n
Yet none of those facts appeared to be what she wanted.<\/p>\n
She wanted the amendment rejected.<\/p>\n
I could see that much.<\/p>\n
I could not see why.<\/p>\n
For a moment, I caught myself thinking about what I would have done if the situation were reversed.<\/p>\n
What if I had been disappointed by Nana\u2019s final instructions?<\/p>\n
What if those instructions left me with less than I expected?<\/p>\n
Would I have questioned her ability to understand what she was doing?<\/p>\n
I wanted to believe I would not.<\/p>\n
But looking back at myself, I could not claim to know exactly how I would react to words I had not yet heard.<\/p>\n
I could only judge what was happening in front of me.<\/p>\n
And what was happening did not feel right.<\/p>\n
My mother was speaking for Nana.<\/p>\n
Mr. Caldwell was presenting what Nana had signed.<\/p>\n
Those were not the same thing.<\/p>\n
There was another detail I could not ignore.<\/p>\n
My father.<\/p>\n
While my mother challenged the amendment, he had not joined her argument.<\/p>\n
At first, I thought perhaps he was allowing her to speak for both of them.<\/p>\n
Then I looked at his face again.<\/p>\n
It was not the face of someone merely waiting for his turn.<\/p>\n
I had seen him angry before.<\/p>\n
I knew what his anger looked like.<\/p>\n
This was different.<\/p>\n
He looked afraid.<\/p>\n
I kept watching him, trying to decide whether I had misunderstood.<\/p>\n
He did not need to say anything for me to notice the change.<\/p>\n
It was there.<\/p>\n
And it frightened me more than my mother\u2019s shouting.<\/p>\n
Anger could mean disappointment.<\/p>\n
Anger could mean frustration.<\/p>\n
Anger could mean someone believed they had been treated unfairly.<\/p>\n
But fear suggested something else.<\/p>\n
I did not know what it suggested yet.<\/p>\n
I only knew that my father appeared to be reacting to more than the possibility of an altered inheritance.<\/p>\n
I looked from him to my mother.<\/p>\n
Then to Mr. Caldwell.<\/p>\n
The lawyer had answered the questions about the amendment\u2019s execution and Nana\u2019s mental condition.<\/p>\n
There was no reason for us to remain stuck on whether she had signed it.<\/p>\n
I wanted him to move forward.<\/p>\n
I wanted the words Nana had left behind to be heard.<\/p>\n
For the first time during the reading, my mother\u2019s objections no longer felt like something I should simply sit through.<\/p>\n
I was beginning to feel that allowing her to control the conversation might mean never learning what Nana had actually decided.<\/p>\n
And that was something I was no longer willing to accept.<\/p>\n
My mother\u2019s next argument was about Nana herself. Not the document. Not the witnesses. Not the instructions that had been changed. Nana. She claimed my grandmother had been too ill … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39596,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39576\/revisions\/39596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}