One of the things that I discovered after I left Portsmouth was that my father disinherited me in his last will.
At first, that sounds horrible. I initially took it at face value, as a final growl.
It later started to puzzle me, though, why on earth a guy who had only debts when he passed away would have gone to the trouble of doing that.
After his death, one of my siblings contacted me, to my utter surprise. To warn me. She said that she too had eventually cut off contact with my dad, that he had been living in some kind of home, and that I should reject the inheritance because she had already been contacted by some of my dad’s creditors. The idea of me needing to formally “reject” the inheritance struck me as bonkers, for various reasons.
She said that he had fallen ill with pneumonia, that lung cancer had been diagnosed a month later and that he died the month after that.
She didn’t want to tell me how she knew and someone else later told me that my sister had likely been contacted by Dutch police, on the basis of her experiences with the passing of one of her brothers. (Oh, wait. The creditors! She must have asked them for information and then made some calls.)
I later also discovered that my dad had not been “living in some kind of home” (as a psychiatric patient) but in a so-called “aanleunwoning”. There’s no grave. He’s been cremated.
In addition, I discovered that a large number of people, including my two siblings, had taken the trouble of filing a formal rejection of my dad’s inheritance with the court. That must have cost them.
But the announcement of his death in the newspaper oddly enough seems to suggest that he had been living with my sibling at the time of his passing.
In 2010, my other sibling told me that my dad had done well on the stock market, had enthusiastically been treating at least one of my siblings to meals out, and had given both of my siblings a substantial sum of money. And he felt that I should get that same sum too, she said. He assumed that I would stubbornly refuse it. (Yes, I can be like that. I actually did something like that regarding my aunt’s inheritance because I didn’t want to have to deal with the relatives over this, but she then called me in tears so I gave in.) He had been considering a small test payment to see what would happen, she said. I can’t be sure of all the things that were going through his mind, but next, he apparently wanted me to come home first, move back to the Netherlands. (I couldn’t even travel at the time, so the point was moot.)
I have been unable to find out what happened between then and the time when he passed away, but I did find that the place where he was living when he passed away, had positive online reviews at the time. (Slightly less positive later.)
Notably my middle sister has always been a bit of a materialistic tendency. Her big dream was always to have a fancy car in the driveway. She likes hanging out with people who have money, fancy cars and fancy homes. When the money or the glamour disappears, does she too, maybe?
So, holy excrement. It just dawned on me that maybe… my dad was trying to protect me from his creditors.
He’s done strange things before, for sure, but he always had a strong sense of fairness.
I’d contacted the notary a while ago because what he had done was so weird, in retrospect. My youngest sister hadn’t been in contact with him either, she says. So it’s not that. I thought that maybe the notary could shed some light on it, but then I decided that it didn’t really matter and let it go.
A few minutes ago it dawned on me that this is actually the only explanation that makes sense. That he was trying to protect me. My sibling clearly didn’t know about the will, otherwise she would not have contacted me. So when he had it drawn up, he was no longer in contact with her, otherwise he would have told her.
He probably had no idea where I was. But when that El Al plane crashed in Amsterdam, he contacted one of my siblings to ask where exactly in Amsterdam I was.
It’s my mother’s side of the family that has always had a tendency to play stupid power games with money. When I was younger, I didn’t believe my dad when he said such things (such as my mother’s inheritance somehow having been funneled elsewhere), but I later found out that he had actually been correct.
When my mother had just passed away, when two of them came over, they quibbled with him over what the announcement in the paper had said, a phrase in it. We were outside at the time, in the front garden. He got upset and ran away, onto the moors. I gave those relatives a mouthful – “What on earth do you think you are doing? That man has just lost his wife!” – and ran after my dad to retrieve him.
One of my dad’s favorite sayings had been that there aren’t any pockets in one’s last suit.
(One of mine has been that you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. Life’s too short. You never know. Today might be your last day. Growing up with several deaths in the family has made me very aware of this, which is part of the reason why I was so furious over what was being done to me in Portsmouth.)
