When Life Turns Upside Down

As the eldest of three siblings, I have all the traits of the "eldest child." I've always been the caretaker, the problem-solver, the perfect child. I can't say that is a role I have always relished, but it's the role I have forever played. I've never doubted my ability to fulfill that role; in fact I've often prided myself in being the one who solved all the problems. I was the stable one with all the answers. Yes - I am woman, hear me roar!

It all changed one day four years ago when life as my siblings and I knew it ceased to exist and we found ourselves on a fast track to hell with no brakes. Allow me to give you the framework of our trip into the recesses of hell. My brother, Mike, and I were raised by the same father and mother. My sister, Kathy, was given up for adoption when she was born. Mike and I never even knew about her until we were all in our twenties. But by the time my father died suddenly and unexpectedly in February of 2005, Mike, Kathy and I were as close, or closer, than siblings who were all raised together. We all had the same mother, but each of us had a different father. Mine and Kathy's biological fathers were long gone, although I had sporadic contact with mine. I considered Mike's natural father to be my dad as well, since he had raised me and actually adopted me when I was twelve-years-old.

Our mother divorced my dad after twenty-eight years of marriage, when I was thirty. Dad was so hurt by the divorce that I never expected him to marry again. He surprised us all when he announced, eight years later, that he was getting married again. I was happy he had found someone. Until I met her.

Dad's second wife, Pearl, is someone none of us ever felt any connection with. By the time she married my dad; she had been a widow twice already and lived a comfortable lifestyle financed by her dead husbands' estates. I was concerned when I learned of her history, especially since my dad met Pearl when she sold him a house after he moved his successful manufacturing business to her home town. Dad seemed happy, though, so I convinced myself that I was worrying unnecessarily. But I could never shake the feeling that something wasn't right about her.

Dad was never one to share what was going on in his life, so even though I talked to him regularly on the telephone, he never let on that things weren't as blissful as Pearl would have everyone believe. Living six-hundred miles away in Houston, I relied on my brother for infomation about Dad. Mike lived in the same town as Dad, only a few blocks away, in fact. Mike saw the tension that had developed between Dad and Pearl after 10 years of marriage. The marriage was going south and Dad had long since stopped generously sharing his money with her.

Once, when visiting my dad, I questioned him about a double row of various tablets and capsules that were laid out for him on a paper towel on the kitchen counter. "Oh, those are vitamins that Pearl has me taking."

My eyebrows shot up in surprise as I eyed the assortment of pills. "Vitamins? What kind of vitamins?" I wanted to know.

"Oh, I don't know, just some stuff Pearl ordered off the internet. I don't know what they're all for," he told me as he scooped them up and washed them down with orange juice. Two years later, when I was once again at Dad's house, I noticed that the "vitamins" Pearl doled out for Dad never left the counter. Several times over the course of the next few days, I heard Pearl admonish Dad to take his vitamins, but he just shook his head and the "vitamins" stayed where they were. By this time, Dad's health had begun to decline noticeably. He was only sixty-five and had always been in good health, despite the unfiltered cigarettes he had smoked since he was twelve-years-old. Dad was accustomed to working long hours in a fabrication shop; something he continued to do even as an owner. During that visit, it was obvious that Dad had lost weight and his skin and hair had a gray tinge to it.

I returned to Houston uneasy about the situation in West Texas. I began calling Dad more often at different times of the day just to check on him. He always assured me he was fine and would quickly divert the conversation to something else. Dad never spoke to me about any problems he might be having with Pearl.

But my brother and his wife were there to witness it first-hand. They not only saw the increasing discord between my dad and Pearl, but were also the recipients of many of Pearl's unhappy tirades. For the better part of a year before my Dad died, Pearl's main topic of conversation with anyone who would listen was the new will that she had encouraged my Dad to have made and the fact that he had yet to sign it.

Shortly before he died, he was life-flighted to a hospital better able to care for him. None of us were allowed to ride in the helicopter with him. Mike drove Pearl to the hospital two hours away. He listened to her rage nearly the whole time about the "new will your dad hasn't signed yet." He finally told her it wasn't the proper time to be talking about that and asked her to shut up. Dad did make it out of the hospital, but was very ill and unable to care for himself at all.

Pearl promptly left on a cruise saying she couldn't very well be expected to lose all the money she had spent on the cruise, could she? Mike was Dad's constant caretaker during those few days, as well as taking over all responsibilities at Dad's manufacturing business. One day, Dad felt well enough to leave the house with Mike to get soup from a nearby restaurant. Dad even insisted on driving. Mike was encourage by this apparent improvement in Dad's condition. When they arrived back at Dad's home, Mike settled Dad in with his lunch and left for the shop with a promise to be back soon to check on him.

He arrived back a short time later to find Dad slumped in the bathroom. The paramedics were called, but he was gone. Mike made the unbearable call to me. I called my sister, Kathy and we immediately made arrangements to fly to West Texas to be with Mike. Pearl was unreachable for several days. She had left no contact number. We were shattered. Dad was only 66.

Somehow, we all made it through the next few days. We made it through the funeral and even made it through the spectacle of my step-mother at the service parading around the front of the church telling everyone about the diamonds my dad bought her while they were married. We only thought we were in hell at that time. That was soon to come.

We never found a will. The notebook in Dad's office marked "Will and Pre-Marital Agreement" was empty. The file folder in Dad's filing cabinet flagged "Last Will and Testament" was empty. The fire safe where my dad had told me years earlier that he kept a copy of his will contained a lot of things, but no will. Pearl made a point of taking me to her bank and showing me the inside of the safe deposit box that she shared with Dad - no will. Pearl's will was there, but not my dad's. Mike and I searched pointlessly for several months to no avail. No will ever showed up.

In the meantime, my brother continued running Dad's business, continued doing business with the same people, the same bank, everything the same as when Dad was alive and he and Dad were running the business together. Business was booming, Mike had no time to grieve. But he and I comforted ourselves with how proud Dad must be of how Mike was not just handling, but prospering the business. It was a small measure of comfort.

Pearl told Mike and me over and over again that there was no need for any of us to hire lawyers. She reasoned that we shouldn't give our money to lawyers when we could all just agree how the estate was to be divided. She begged, she cajoled, she insisted - no lawyers. Foolishly, we listened. She hired a lawyer. She was appointed administrator of the estate. Mike and I scrambled to find a lawyer and somehow managed to choose the worst lawyer ever to practice estate law in West Texas.

Mike's wife developed a brain tumor. She fought for her life; Mike held on by his fingernails; and Pearl and her lawyer continued to work their plan. Mike's wife had surgery, the tumor was successfully removed. She lost her hearing, but her life was spared.

The bank that the business used (Pearl's bank) began to find new and inventive ways to make it difficult for Mike to do business. Coincidentally, Dad's former business partner decided he too would like to build the same kind of tanks Dad's business built. All he needed was the shop, the equipment, the materials and the shop personnel with the know-how and his company too could make the money Mike was making with Dad's business. After all, the business was tied up in probate. It would be a community service to provide another company that could ease the burden of all that business that fell on Mike's shoulders. As luck would have it, they too were customers of the same bank. The banker was surprisingly accommodating.

In June of that year, another blow. Mike's wife's mother died suddenly. I flew up for the funeral. It was too soon, too reminiscent. My big, strong brother fell to his knees at the back of the church and almost couldn't go on. Somehow, we got through it.

Mike continued running the business, fighting the bank, fighting off the would-be hostile takeovers from former business partners while at the same time consoling his grieving wife who was still recovering from a brain tumor. Pearl meanwhile paid no estate bills, filed no inventory, and met suspiciously with the banker on a nearly daily basis. Suddenly, at the height of one of the busiest times of the year for the business, a severe cash flow shortage developed. And then a few weeks later, another one. This continued to happen for several months. Mike's wife decided to have the secretary/treasurer teach her about the books and accounting functions for the business. Too little, too late. The secretary was secretive, had everything password-protected and was down-right unhelpful. When ordered to reveal the passwords, she would comply and then promptly assign new secret passwords before the next morning. Admittedly, Mike was too shell-shocked to fight that battle and I was too far away to be of any help.

In November of 2005, Mike had reached his limit. He closed the business, turned everything over to the banker and retreated into himself. I hired a high-powered Houston probate attorney and went after Pearl, the bank, the business partner and everyone else I could think of. We managed to have Pearl removed as administrator and myself appointed as successor administrator. We discovered that the former business partner had been operating out of my dad's closed business which was ostensibly in possession of the bank. The banker pleaded ignorance, of course. We were making some progress, nevertheless. Then in February of 2006, our mother died. It was not expected and was, as with my dad and my sister-in-law's mother - quite sudden.

We all hit a brick wall at this point. Then the FBI showed up. The friendly hometown banker was claiming that my brother had defrauded his bank of some $464,000 by submitting false invoices to the bank. The court-appointed lawyer advised my brother to plead guilty in exchange for a slap on the wrist and the promise of probation and no jail time. It didn't seem to matter to her in the least that the claims were false, that no such crime had occurred. She turned a deaf ear to our explanation that this was a scheme cooked up by the friendly banker and the former business partner who wanted the business. She never investigated the assets that were turned in to the bank by my brother and were sold by the bank with no accounting to the probate court or application to any debt owed by the business to the bank. Mike was threatened by the FBI agents that if he didn't take the plea, he would probably serve 30 years and be assessed a $1 million fine. He was mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually empty and he was terrified. Our entire world had been turned upside down over the previous year and a half. It wasn't much of a stretch for him to believe that he could very possibly end up in prison for 30 years even though he was innocent. So he took their deal. They lied. He got 15 months in prison.

The bank refused to accept any payments from the estate on the business loan. They foreclosed on the business and the friendly banker made a deal with the business partner who now owns the business. The friendly banker knows that I know what he did. He knows that I keep tabs on him. I know that what goes around, comes around and that it may not be me or my brother or anyone I even know who is the instrument of retribution. But someday, just like OJ, all of this will catch up with him. And with the former business partner as well.

My brother and I aren't the kind of people who take revenge. We weren't raised that way and we know thatvengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. Being the problem-solving, I-can-fix-this eldest child that I am, I've had a difficult time letting go of this. I refused to for a long time. My sister and I investigated the hell out of everyone involved. We found a computer whiz who recovered the sabotaged hard drive on my dad's computer. We researched the accounts, emails, documents and every bit of drivel on both computers we had from my dad's company. We even discovered a document outlining the plan the former business partner, the banker and several of dad's business associates had concocted to steal the business from him by sending him to prison to get him out of the way. When Dad died and Mike took over, they obviously rolled the plan over on to my brother. Through all our investigation, we learned more than a little about everyone and everything ever associated with my dad's business. We talked to more lawyers than I ever hoped to in my entire life.

It turns out that convincing a lawyer to take on a case like this is not an easy thing. Two and one-half years of this nightmare finally took it's toll on me. I literally lost my mind. Somehow, through the fog in my mind, I realized I had to let it go. I could not be the one to fight this battle any longer. I finally heard that still, small voice telling me I had done all I could do. It was the voice of God that said, "And having done all, stand." So now I stand. I stand in the knowledge that this is no longer my battle and that the One who fights this battle is just and fair, unfettered by the injustices of this world.

My brother is home now, out of prison, and amazingly at peace. He is content to leave the nightmare in the past and let God sort it all out. I still struggle with that at times and want to pick it back up and fight the battle again. But, I don't. I refuse to let them steal any more of my life or my joy. The day will come when each of those people who planned, participated in and executed this travesty will be called to account for what they have done. I have realized that I am not the "Righter of All Wrongs". I'm only human, only one person.

Yes,our life was turned upside down and it was an unbelievable hell for a few years. However, through all of it, we all learned to trust God in a deeper way than we ever had before. I know that He witnessed it all. He brought us through it. How He chooses to deal with it all is His business, not mine. I can finally let it go with no regrets and go back to living my life. There is a peace in knowing that I don't have to fight any more. I can live secure in the knowledge that whatever happens is in the hands of the Maker of the Universe.