End of an Era

Sorry for my month long absense! And thank you to all who have emailed me with your speculations as to my mysterious disappearance. No, I have not fallen off the earth or wrecked my pretty new auto (whose name, by the way, is SU-Z-Q the Subaru - thinking of getting a vanity plate next year).

What actually happened was my mother's younger brother (at 92 years old) died a few weeks back. He had suffered from dementia and Alzheimer's disease for the last few decades. And though his death was not unexpected, it was nonetheless a trying time for us all. Since last Fall I've been working on a novel roughly based on events and circumstances surrounding his illness - it was the novel I wrote for National Novel Writing Month. My uncle's death has pushed the project ahead - as well as prompted me to write a memoir of my six year stint as his trustee/caregiver. I will be posting some of it as a kind of cautionary tale - the story of a family tragedy. Like Dickens' "Bleak House", it involves a trust fund and the distruction of a family. Here is the first draft beginning:

This is a cautionary tale and a mystery - it’s also a story of deception, confusion, elder abuse, exploitation, and neglect. My part of the story started in the Fall of 2003 when I became my uncle’s trustee.
His wife had died the previous Valentines Day and my mother, his elder sister, began to suspect that the old man was not coping very well on his own. Uncle had always left domestic matters to his wife. She was keeper of the check book and manager of the household. Now that she was gone Mom felt her “little” 87 year old brother could use someone to make sure bills got paid etc. She “volunteered” me, saying that all I would actually have to do was collect rents from Uncle’s rental properties, make deposits, mail checks. Sure, what the heck, I thought. I’m pretty good at financial practicalities so I’d pitch in and do my part. How hard could it be? (You can see it coming, right?)
One thing to understand is that Uncle lived half way down the coast in Oregon, five hours drive from Mom and me. We had seen him at most twice a year during the previous fifty years - talking on the phone and exchanging Christmas cards of course but not much more. In the Spring Mom attended Aunt’s funeral and seeing how lost and flummoxed her brother seemed, she easily slipped back into her childhood role of bossy big sister.
In retrospect it’s clear that we knew next to nothing of Uncle’s true situation. We had accepted as true the elaborate fiction he’d woven around his life for half a century. Not that he had consciously, deliberately lied to us - Uncle was utterly incapable of guile and probably would have been amazed had anyone pointed out that there was a disconnect between who he thought he was and who he really was. He had wanted everyone to think well of him so the image he presented to the world was one of a successful independent business man, owner of rental properties, investor in oil wells - in other words, if not a wealthy man at least a man comfortably well off. He often told us he was making lots of money in the market and his duplexes were producing healthy cash flow. We had no way of knowing none of it was true.
As a child I heard what the family said of Uncle: that he was well-to-do but something of a cheapskate. He never picked up a check at the restaurant even though he could afford to, never left a tip unless someone reminded him and, even when reminded, he was not a big tipper. And he seemed to think no one noticed how slickly he had fumbled his way out of paying. We kids thought it was terribly funny. The adults would shake their heads when they were once again stuck with the bill. Everyone saw Uncle as cheap as Jack Benny - an eccentricity at once aggravating and comical.
There were times though when his perceived miserliness could cause pain to members of his family - times of hardship and trial when a monetary bailout would have saved the day yet he never did offer. Several family members wrote him off as cold and cruel. I learned much later he was neither but it hardly mattered by then. Some wounds don’t heal.
All I really knew that Autumn of 2003 was that Uncle was a sad elderly widower in need of my assistance. Whatever I personally thought of him I couldn’t turn my back on family - nor was I about to refuse when my mom asked me to help. No one turns down Mom. So I signed on as trustee of my uncle’s “Family Trust”, though at that point I wouldn’t have known a “Trust” if it bit me on the behind. (I capitalize Trust, the legal entity, to destinguish it from trust, as in belief in the honesty and reliability of another.)
Most people, even when they are talked into setting up Trusts, don’t understand what a Trust is - how complicated they are, how much work they generate. They are sold the idea of setting up Trusts as a way to avoid probate but, believe me, probate creates nowhere near the misery of managing a Trust.
I called the attorney in Oregon who had set up the Trust ten years before - learning in the process that there were two Trusts, not one. There was Uncle’s, which was a “revocable living trust”. There was also my aunt’s “irrevocable trust”. (When a person dies their revocable trust becomes irrevocable.) My uncle had been trustee of them both - when he passed the baton to me I became trustee of both Trusts. I also found out that every cent and every property Uncle supposedly possessed were held within the Trusts. His only personal income was a tiny monthly Social Security check - tiny because as a self employed man he had paid nothing into the Social Security system. He called this $500.00 monthly check “free money” he could just have fun with - “mad money” - he didn’t understand that he had nothing else.
That was as much as I learned from the attorney because as he pointed out he had no attorney/client relationship with the Trusts - he was my uncle’s personal attorney, not the attorney for the Trusts. And who then was the attorney for the Trusts? I asked. As far as he knew there wasn’t one. Not good news.
He explained that a Trust is like a corporation, a legal entity with its own strict demands and restrictions. A person who sets up a Trust has no further access to the assets of the Trust beyond what the trustee determines is a reasonable monthly or yearly distribution to the Trust’s beneficiary. The purpose of a Trust is to preserve wealth, therefore a trustee is not legally allowed to speculate with assets or divert Trust assets to personal use. In other words if you put your house in Trust it is no longer your house - it belongs to the Trust and what happens to it is up to the trustee, not you. You had better have yourself one heck of a trustworthy trustee!
Unfortunately, for ten years Uncle had not had a trustworthy trustee - though he certainly hadn’t realized it. He had appointed himself as his own trustee. Which is very like a dentist filling his own teeth. No doubt Uncle had been lured by media hype touting the benefits of Trusts as a way of avoiding taxes and probate. He would have thought he was being very clever - kind of like dodging the dinner check at the Olive Garden Restaurant.
The Trusts now squarely my responsibility, I got on the internet to learn everything I could on properly managing them - the first thing being that it was not for amateurs. I would need to immediately hire an attorney and a C. P. A . - especially since I lived a state away from where the trust properties were located. Being an out of state trustee complicated already muddy matters. So, next day I hired an attorney who specialized in elder law and also hired a very savvy accountant - both of which earned their keep from the first day by pointing out that the trusts needed bank accounts to receive rent deposits from the duplexes. (Each trust owned three of the six duplexes, thus splitting the rental income evenly.)
The banker asked me to produce legal documentation of my authority to act as trustee - a one inch stack of legalese which the banker photo copied and stuffed into a matching pair of clean white folders. By the end of an hour I had two checking accounts and a large safe deposit box. I was now ready to deposit rent checks and pay the attorney and accountant - had there been money to deposit. But my uncle’s tenants were still depositing the monthly rent payments into Uncle’s personal checking account. I’d have to contact all the renters and ensure they sent me, a total stranger in another state, their money from here on. How on earth would I do that, I wondered. There was also the issue of collecting the trusts’ financial records, files, tax returns etc. Which, I was beginning to suspect, probably did not exist. I had no recourse but to get into my car and get myself down to Oregon. There are some things you just have to do in person. There was no way I could sort the mess out without sitting down with my uncle for a good long talk. That would prove to be impossible. (To be continued)