My Three Kids Voted to Put Me in Memory Care. They Didn’t Know I Still Owned the House.

Part 2: The Trust

Susan came to the house the next morning with a leather folder and a box of pastries from the bakery on Ogden, which is how I knew she was worried.

I have not been worried about Susan Klein in twenty years. Susan has been worried about me since Bill’s diagnosis, and she has expressed that worry the same way every time. Danish.

She spread the papers out on my dining room table. The good table, the one Rachel had already told me would need to be sold because it wouldn’t fit in a memory care unit.

“Marlene, do you remember what we did in November 2014.”

“I remember signing a lot of things.”

“Do you remember why.”

I did remember. I remembered it in pieces, the way you remember the worst months of your life. Bill had six weeks left. He was on the couch under the green afghan his mother had made him. And he had said, in the voice that was already not quite his voice, Marlene, promise me the kids don’t do to you what my sisters did to my mother.

Bill’s mother had been moved into a facility in Rockford in 1998 by her three daughters, over her objection, and had died there fourteen months later of what the death certificate called pneumonia and what Bill called a broken heart. Her house had been sold. The money had been divided. Bill’s youngest sister had used her share for a boat.

Bill had watched all of it. And when he was dying, the thing that scared him was not death. It was me, alone, at the mercy of three grown children who loved me but who had also been raised in a culture that treated old women as problems to be solved.

“We set up a trust,” I said.

“We set up a trust,” Susan agreed. “In which the house on Elmhurst is not owned by you personally. It is owned by the Marlene J. Whitaker Revocable Living Trust, of which you are the sole trustee and sole beneficiary during your lifetime. Your children are contingent beneficiaries only. They cannot access, sell, or make decisions about this house without your written consent. Not with power of attorney. Not without.”

“They think it’s in my name.”

“It was in your name from 1978 to November 2014. Then we moved it. Very quietly. At Bill’s request.”

“Do they know.”

Susan looked at me over her reading glasses.

“Marlene. I don’t gossip about my clients’ estate planning. What your children know is what you told them. What did you tell them.”

I thought back. I had told them, after Bill’s funeral, that everything was taken care of. That they didn’t need to worry about me. That I would be fine.

I had not, specifically, said the words the house is in a trust and you have no claim to it.

I had assumed they knew, because their father had assumed they knew, because when you have been married to someone for forty-one years you sometimes forget which conversations happened out loud and which happened only inside the marriage.

“They don’t know,” I said.

“Then they’re operating on a very expensive misunderstanding.”

Susan slid another paper across the table. My health care power of attorney. My financial power of attorney. Both of them naming, at Bill’s insistence, not any of our children.

Naming Susan.

“They can go to a lawyer,” Susan said, “and try to get themselves named as your POA. They will fail, because a valid POA already exists, and because you are demonstrably competent. I can have a geriatric psychiatrist evaluate you next week and put it in writing. Any judge in DuPage County will laugh them out of chambers.”

“Susan.”

“Yes.”

“What do I do.”

She closed the leather folder.

“Marlene, that is not a legal question. Legally, you do nothing. You already did it eleven years ago. The question you’re actually asking me is a different question.”

“Which is.”

“Which is what you want to do to three people who love you and who just tried to sell your house out from under you.”

I sat with that for a long time.

Susan ate a Danish. She’s known me since I was fifty-six and she does not fill silence.

Finally I said, “I want to know why.”

“Why what.”

“Why they did it. Rachel makes $180,000 a year at the bank. Danny is a partner at his firm. Marcus just bought a lake house. None of them needs my $612,000. Why did they do this.”

Susan tilted her head. “You want the legal answer or the human answer.”

“The human answer.”

“The human answer is that grown children get scared of their aging parents and they hide the fear inside logistics. It’s easier to have a spreadsheet meeting about Willowbrook than to sit with the fact that you’re going to die someday. The spreadsheet gives them something to do.”

“That’s generous of you.”

“I said it was the human answer. I didn’t say it was the flattering one.”

I looked out the kitchen window at the crabapple tree Bill had planted the year Marcus was born. Forty-three years old. Twisted at the trunk. Still flowering every May.

“Susan.”

“Yes.”

“I want to have them over for dinner.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“All three of them. And their spouses. Rachel’s husband Ted, and Danny’s wife whatever her name is this year, and Marcus’s fiancée. I want them in this house, at that table, and I want to serve them my pot roast.”

“Marlene.”

“And then I want to hand them each an envelope.”

Susan set down her Danish.

“What’s in the envelopes.”

I told her.

She looked at me for a long moment, and then she did something I have not seen Susan Klein do in twenty years of professional relationship.

She smiled.

“When do you want to do this.”

“The Saturday they were planning to move me. Let them come to the house expecting boxes. Let them find a roast.”

“Marlene.”

“Yes.”

“I want to be there.”

“Susan, this is a family dinner.”

“I’ll bring wine.”

I laughed for the first time in forty-eight hours. It sounded rusty. But it was mine.

Then the doorbell rang.

Through the front window I could see a woman in a blazer holding a clipboard, and behind her, in the driveway, a car with a magnetic sign on the door.

Kathy Realty. Coldwell Banker.

She was here to measure my house.

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