"Disniheritance Provision: Not for any lack of love or affection, I hereby provide no provision herein for my daughter, ISA H. ERICKSON or my son, RICHARD C. OLLERMAN, JR., nor for any of their respective surviving issue."
I quote the above from the will of my mother, who literally dropped dead in July. She went golfing, had drinks and dinner with friends, went out to her car and collapsed. The only thing they could find was a low potassium level and while she had no stroke or heart attack, she did suffer an event to her heart and by the time rescue people got it beating again, her brain was long gone.
Despite the fact that she had a living will that said she did not want to be kept alive by machines, two of my siblings did exactly that, just so that a husband and their own friends could come and see her. With a ventilator down her throat and looking like she was exactly in the condition in which she was. The husband left town on vacation after my mother went down, and didn't come back until a few days later. But, the other sibling said, he and my mother had a "special relationship" so they were going to wait. And wait longer for that sibling's best friend to come by.
My cousin told me that my mother had been in his life since he was seven and he would go to the funeral but not the hospital because, he said, as well as he knew her he didn't think my mother would want anyone to see her like that. And I completely agree. When I popped into the hospital years and years ago when my father's mother died, she kicked me out of there so fast I was amazed until I understood her words: "I don't want anyone to see me like this." It made me sad that I couldn't spend time with her and that she was all alone in her hospital room, but that was what she wanted. I used to stop by her house unannounced all the time, sometimes with my friends, but under those circumstances, I knew that was the last I would ever see her.
When they finally unplugged my mother, they didn't even let me know.
To be clear, I wasn't planning to go; who wants to see anybody choke out their last breaths, let alone your own mother? But the first thing I was asked when I got to the hospital, before we knew she was gone, the sibling with the husband asked me four times, "How did you find out?"
Well, little did I know that my little sister and I had been disinherited in my mother's will filed three months after my father's death. Two siblings, the two that inherited everything, knew, because they are the executors of the will. It is characteristically cowardly that none of the people, including my mother, let me or my sister know.
Yes, the reason for this is completely inexplicable. My wife is shocked, and said she was physically ill when I finally got a copy of the will after my brother stopped trying to keep it hidden (I understand by law he can't, but he did anyway). My wife said my relationship with my parents had been great. They moved to Florida to be near my family. We spent every Thanksgiving with them, either at their house or sometimes at ours. After Hurricane Charlie I climbed up their steep as hell broken clay tiled roof to survey the damage. I did some wiring in the ceiling of their house. They babysat my kids, the same ones my mother also disinherited.
My father wanted to make my son a set of golf clubs but he wasn't really well enough to do it. He'd give my son and daughter rides on his golf cart and golf with my son, who is named after him, in their backyard. My son is a golfer today because of my father. These are only two of the kids that my mother disinherited from her estate, the one which is only worth anything because my dad made it. The fact that he left everything to my mother just tells me he left it to her to do the right thing and split everything four ways. My father was the smartest man I've ever met but in some ways he was almost naive. He trusted my mother to be a person who was perhaps better than she was.
I worked for the man for fifteen years and he wanted me to take over his business, the reason for his living as far as I could tell when I was a kid, but I didn't want it. My brother took it instead and has never had to work for anything in his life. Everything was given to him. Regardless, a crooked bookkeeper forged checks and stole every penny from the company. She bought a house, gave money to her sister, etc., all right from under the nose of my brother. (The bookkeeper eventually went to jail, her husband divorced her, and her life presumably changed for the worse.)
My dad, fearing for the continued existence of his life's work, covered what he told me was probably close to a million dollars from his own personal wealth, which was never an amount I was familiar with. He was well off, that I knew from being as close to him as I was in the years that I was working for him, but I didn't know then and don't know now how well off.
I'll stop here. This will be the subject of a longer piece when I get to writing it. I started it after the death of my father, wondering as to the nature of love when my mother would not visit him in the hospital for longer than fifteen minutes only on most days of his final time. Wondering as to the nature of love of a daughter who moved her mother to Minnesota from California and then told her not to buy a winter coat, installed her in an all-white apartment that was impossible to be non-sunglassed during the daylight hours due to the glare off the snow, and who told the women at my dad's company that she wouldn't take any of her calls.
A cousin of mine took her out and bought her a winter coat. I measured her windows and had custom blinds and curtains made so she could see in her apartment. I would take her to different malls (she'd never driven on snow) so she could get out of the apartment and walk around. When the roads were clear, I put my life in her hands and taught her how to drive on the freeway for the first time ever. She told me two things early on. One, that she was heading back to California as soon as her lease was up, and two, that if it weren't for her and my deceased grandfather (who had spent World War II in Germany as refugees), my mother would have grown up farming potatoes in the Soviet Union.
When my grandmother, who has lent her name to my daughter's middle name, was dying, I flew out there and spent weeks not getting paid, first setting up the surgery she thought was coming but wasn't until the doctor and the insurance company did whatever they needed to do, and then as she lay in the hospital, never to go out again. Where was my mother, who didn't worry about money and who could have been out there every second of this ordeal?
I had no idea. One day she waltzed in with my father and she hung around at the very end, much she did with my dad.
The last time I saw my mother was at my father's funeral. She was upbeat and handling things surprisingly well, and she was trying her damndest to get me and my wife to go with her over to my brother's house. I had just been told how my older sister and brother did not allow my younger sister to sit with the family during the service and I didn't say anything to my mom but I wasn't going to my brother's after that. It was unlikely that I would have gone in any event, but still.
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At the Noir @ the Bar event in Austin that took place the week after Bouchercon, a woman came up to me and read something I'd written about this dysfunctional family and said she was very gratified to know that she "wasn't the only one." But like I said, a longer piece will be coming, when my writing commitments are fewer.
So this went on too long, so I'll wrap it up as quickly as I can from here. I just learned that Ed Gorman passed away two days ago. He'd been fighting multiple myeloma, an incurable form of cancer, for fourteen damn years. I never met him in person and I kick myself that I never made it happen. We communicated over e-mail and it was Ed that gave me encouragement when my first two books came out, a cover blurb I didn't know was coming for my third book ("This one has the power to hurt you"), and was the first to suggest all my non-fiction pieces be collected into their own volume. This is happening, and guess who it will be dedicated to? Rest in peace, Ed. The number of people that will miss the support, counsel, and of course your own writing, are more numerous than you could ever know.
Doing a signing in Minneapolis on November 5th. I'll do another blog post about that. I did get a three star review from someone who didn't like the characters in TRUTH ALWAYS KILLS but the majority of readers, at least the ones that have communicated to me, have said they'd like to see a sequel because they like the characters so much. My publisher, though, has asked for a sequel to MAD DOG BARKED so that will be the next novel. He wants it for an October, 2017 release so I'll have to find a way to write it for him.
And there's the anthology honoring the late Gary Shulze, the collection of letters between John D. MacDonald and his wife, the true crime book, and my own collection of essays. Next month I have two stories appearing in anthologies. One is in WINDWARD: THE BEST CRIME WRITING OF NEW ENGLAND 2017 and the other is in a collection titled WAITING TO BE FORGOTTEN, which are stories based on or inspired by the music of The Replacements, a band that came to prominence around the same time as Prince, which also happened to be the years around my time at the University of Minnesota. And you know college students and their irrational passion for music.
Where did all that wisdom go? I assume we all just grew up and realized our younger selves had been full of some sort of pretentious inert gas. And got haircuts.
I'll post again very soon, I promise.
