Four months ago, I sat down
to write about a phone call I received from my sister, Jonya. In my search for
words to express my heart ache, my eyes glanced around. Seeing this quote
struck me like whiplash, jarring me inside and out. I began to cry, even
more.
Four months later, now August, I can
still hear my sister's tearful pitch crying out, "Fred has died. Our
cousin Fred died. Letty, he died several days ago...home....alone. No one
knew...."
Before Jonya and I finished
that first conversation in April, we already knew that Fred was in heaven, seated with
God in love and spirit. Fred filled his life with Faith and Love, sharing and
expressing his belief in God with friends, co-workers, Young Life students, the
waitress at The Diner, neighbors, sports buddies, and family.
Now we needed the strength of his faith to guide and sustain us.
What we learned over the next
two weeks before arriving in Nashville, Fred's home, that friends from his
Bible study group had missed him at church and at Monday night Bible study.
Arriving at his home, late that Monday to locked doors, they saw him through
the windows...still...rolled over on his side...unmoving. No amount of window
tapping or shouting could awaken him. The police were called. No foul play was
found. His heart had simply given out, or so we thought.
Fred never married and our
parents had died a few decades ago. We were the closest living relatives to
locate his "Will" and plan the funeral. Even though we had no keys,
we were naively planning to stay the first two weeks in Fred's home, to
organize and prepare for Memorial and burial. Until we could be given the keys
to Fred's home we would spend two nights with a relative of a relative, who
lives in Nashville. Sarah M. became a 'Godsend' for us.
On day one we made calls to
Fred's estate planning team, whose names had been given to us by one of Fred's
close friends. After one hour of shaking our heads "no no no"
the team sadly assured us that Fred had not returned their signed 'Will'
written in 2023. Didn’t that leave room for the possibility of a Will
written by another law firm?
Thanks to an earlier meeting
in Norman with a retired law professor from OU, we began to understand the term
“intestate” that we had no rights and may not be able to stay at Fred's. Mark
G. instructed us over a two-hour period on terminology we would need to know and
the pitfalls of dealing with unknown attorneys and scammers.
Our next step was to call Fred’s
business and ask for the keys to his house so we could locate the signed Will,
possibly. This time we experienced more than a negative head shake, it was an
earthquake of whiplash. We came face to face with the reality of intestate, even
though we were his closest relatives we had no right to his house, until a
Judge could appoint us as "co-administrators of his estate." Still,
we held out hope that we would prevail and find that signed Will.
At last Fred's friend and
owner of the business where Fred worked agreed to meet us at Fred's home in a
couple of days. In phone calls made on our behalf by friends, angels I call
them, we managed an appointment that week with a trusted law firm to help us
manage the estate.
After our two nights at
Sarah's house, we explained our situation and asked her if she could suggest an
affordable hotel nearby. I'm sure she realized from the forlorn look on our
faces that we needed help. Standing up from her desk, where she worked from
home on 8–12-hour shifts, she smiled and replied. "Why don't you stay
here? I am leaving for Europe on Wednesday." We looked around at our
open suitcases in her living room, the mess we had made since we’d only planned
to stay two nights and did not take our suitcases up the steep narrow stairway
to our rooms. Still in silence we stood. She continued, “I won’t need the car,
and I’ll take Uber to the airport. Keep
the keys and use the car while I’m gone.”
Philippians 4:19 God will meet your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.
Our smiles and tears arrived simultaneously.
God knew we needed help and he sent it. From that moment on we began to realize and
count our "God Moments." Writing now in August, I can tell you that
we lost count of the Goodness of people who cared for Fred and for his
family.
Carrying our family genealogy
chart in my arms, proof that we were family, we arrived at Fred's home on the
afternoon of the third day. We were given two hours to search his home
for important papers and a Will. We were accompanied by two friends of
Fred's as we toured the house. In one room we realized that Fred had been
sorting family photos, letters, memorabilia on his own. There were boxes and
pictures strewn across the bed, the dresser and in boxes along both sides of
the wall. At age 77 we thought that normal, as this age in life, is a
time of reflection and gathering our thoughts and memories. Like reading a
good mystery, we missed this clue.
The clock was ticking; our
hands were empty. Bill suggested that we visit Fred's office the next day and
go through those boxes. We readily agreed. Before leaving Doug and I searched
Fred's bedroom. In the bedside dresser we found stacks and stacks of
papers. Piling them on the bed we began to sort. Suddenly, I saw the
estate planning papers and screamed to my sister to come back to the
bedroom. There the four of us sorted and read through the paperwork, only
to realize that Fred had not signed the Will.
More than that we discovered
a stack of papers giving us health updates on Fred's cancer, that we did not
know about. Doug confessed that Fred had known about the cancer and had
been in treatment since 2023, but Fred was not one to share his miseries. We have
over the last four months how truly Fred compartmentalized his life. Only Doug
and another friend knew that Fred's cancer existed. Instead of whiplash,
our heads dropped in sorrow, silence, and disbelief.
We could not believe that
Fred, who seemed so well organized and such a deep thinker, would not sign a
will. We asked ourselves and asked God, how!
All Fred ever wanted was to
have his estate go to Young Life of Nashville, and a charity for orphaned
children in Nepal "House with Heart." House with Heart
At this point we had no
control, no choices that we felt good about. We prayed and we asked God to guide
us, to help us make decisions when the time came.
Over the next week we filled
our lives with house calls, business calls, emails, and phone calls. Eventually,
people began returning calls offering even more help than we could imagine. One
by one we began meeting the people who formed Fred’s circles of life.
It wasn’t all work on this
trip. Jonya and I found our way to Parnassus Bookstore and walked out richer in
books and knowledge. We spent an early evening with a member of the NEO golf
team when I played on the men’s team in 1965-67. How fun to meet up with George
Billows and his wife Dori after sixty years.
After attending Fred’s church
CPC we drove to Franklin, Tennessee for a stroll through history and a late
Sunday lunch of Southern cooking accompanied by a few good hearty laughs, as
you can see from the photo.
Before flying home, we had
hired a law firm to represent us, paperwork would be filed requesting that the
two of us become "co-administrators.” We met with the pastor from Christ Presbyterian
Church. We met with a planning team from
the cemetery. We met and hired an agent from a trusted bank to help us follow
the Tennessee law.
Tennessee law requires the
estate to be divided equally: half to his mother's side of the family (us) and
one-half to his father's side of the family. We are a small family and
have all stayed close over the years, but we did not know one single soul of
Fred's father's side of the family. We only knew that his father had grown up
in an orphanage and was wounded in World War II. The search began for Fred’s
cousins.
We flew home and waited for
the Judge to appoint us co-administrators. Our attorney and I frantically
searched and shared genealogy and obituary updates regularly. We waited on
friends to return calls. We waited on updates and steps involved in the selling
of the home and furnishings. We waited on bills to arrive and income to cover
them.
Waiting taught us faith and
patience.
Lucy Barton says in one of the novels by Elizabeth Strout,
"It
is a gift in this life that we don't know what awaits us."
