Good News, Bad News
The first piece of good news is that I won first place in the Best of Fandom UFO Awards for the Dresden Files story "The Affairs of Wizards." (Not that fandom awards mean much, but I'm very pleased just the same.)
The second piece of good news is that I've lost forty pounds since January, and I'm going to try to keep losing.
But the bad news outweighs both. You see, my POA--the one who was hospitalized for falling down her attic stairs--wants my house.
She says she wants it to protect me in case I have to be hospitalized again. That I can have a life estate in the house and she will just take care of it for me. And she keeps insisting that I'm running low on funds, even though she also said in the next breath that I have plenty of money and have nothing to worry about.
And I call bullshit.
I have seen what happens to old people whose kids say that they will do this. The kids sell the house out from under the old people, dump them in a nursing home and leave them there. And then they are stuck forever. They can never leave. They have no more income and no hope of getting more, and they can never ever leave the prison of the nursing home.
I have been incarcerated in nursing homes. They terrify me. I would kill myself before going back to one.
Though she keeps saying, "Don't you think that I have your best interests at heart?"--no. No, I really do NOT.
Because even if she means well--and given what I saw of adult children cheating their elderly parents of their houses and savings, that's a BIG if--there's still the fact that she's old and far sicklier than I am. Transferring the house to her while I'm still alive would make it an inter vivos gift--which would legally make it part of her estate when she died. If she dies, I lose the house to her kids. And I cannot count on them to take care of me. If I did this, I would end up homeless when she died. And there wouldn't be a fucking thing I could do about it.
I brought this up. She didn't seem to grasp that I was talking about the possibility of her death, or what it would mean if I outlived her.
This does not overwhelm me with confidence.
I don't think it's her idea. It has the fingerprints of her attorney all over it.
She insisted that I think about it. And oh, I am. That does not mean that I am considering it, however. This is fucking NOT going to happen. It would be a disaster.
I proposed renters. She likes that idea...but she is proposing renting to teachers who work at St. Mary's Home. I told her flat out that I am not renting to nuns or old people. I have the feeling she thinks I'll back down on that. I won't. I had my fill of nuns. I want nothing to do with them now.
God, why do I have to put up with her shit? Why can't I just make my own decisions about my own life without having to deal with people who pull crap like this?
The second piece of good news is that I've lost forty pounds since January, and I'm going to try to keep losing.
But the bad news outweighs both. You see, my POA--the one who was hospitalized for falling down her attic stairs--wants my house.
She says she wants it to protect me in case I have to be hospitalized again. That I can have a life estate in the house and she will just take care of it for me. And she keeps insisting that I'm running low on funds, even though she also said in the next breath that I have plenty of money and have nothing to worry about.
And I call bullshit.
I have seen what happens to old people whose kids say that they will do this. The kids sell the house out from under the old people, dump them in a nursing home and leave them there. And then they are stuck forever. They can never leave. They have no more income and no hope of getting more, and they can never ever leave the prison of the nursing home.
I have been incarcerated in nursing homes. They terrify me. I would kill myself before going back to one.
Though she keeps saying, "Don't you think that I have your best interests at heart?"--no. No, I really do NOT.
Because even if she means well--and given what I saw of adult children cheating their elderly parents of their houses and savings, that's a BIG if--there's still the fact that she's old and far sicklier than I am. Transferring the house to her while I'm still alive would make it an inter vivos gift--which would legally make it part of her estate when she died. If she dies, I lose the house to her kids. And I cannot count on them to take care of me. If I did this, I would end up homeless when she died. And there wouldn't be a fucking thing I could do about it.
I brought this up. She didn't seem to grasp that I was talking about the possibility of her death, or what it would mean if I outlived her.
This does not overwhelm me with confidence.
I don't think it's her idea. It has the fingerprints of her attorney all over it.
She insisted that I think about it. And oh, I am. That does not mean that I am considering it, however. This is fucking NOT going to happen. It would be a disaster.
I proposed renters. She likes that idea...but she is proposing renting to teachers who work at St. Mary's Home. I told her flat out that I am not renting to nuns or old people. I have the feeling she thinks I'll back down on that. I won't. I had my fill of nuns. I want nothing to do with them now.
God, why do I have to put up with her shit? Why can't I just make my own decisions about my own life without having to deal with people who pull crap like this?