| I have no doubt that mother changed her will after our falling
out. She was angry that she got chastised for the extent of her
gambling. She contended that her gambling was a "social"
activity. Spoken like a true addict. The alcoholic doesn't
have a drinking problem, he/she drinks to be sociable. It is their
contention that it is their life and they can control it, but the truth is
that they can't control it and they fail to see the effect their
self-destruction has on the lives of those around them. First, they
drink/gamble, to be sociable. The victim controls the disease and
the disease has no effect. Then the disease begins to take up more
and more of their lives, their thoughts and their time until there is
nothing left for them except to answer the call of the disease. At
this point, the disease controls them and they cannot live without their
addiction. Mother's every phone call and every letter over the
period in those journals was a discussion of how much she won, and how
often she visited the casinos. She never spoke of her losses or how
much she spent. An addict never does. There is always one more
big win waiting for them on the horizon. Her addiction began small,
but according to her bank withdrawals, it was escalating. On an
income of $20,800 a year, over a five year period, mother gambled away
well over half of her income annually. Oh yes, it was her money, but
she lived another 10 years from the date we last spoke. Apparently
she made it through financially, but if she kept up her habit after we
stopped speaking, then this document was pretty much dead air.
The accusation leveled against me was that I squandered mother's money
in paying the bills she told me to pay and was planning to do so with the
rest of it. The fact was that I paid exactly those bills she ordered
me to pay and safeguards were put into place so that the effects of this
will would be followed exactly as she instructed as always. The reader can
see the terms of this will as opposed to the terms of her Trust agreement
and will see that the distribution was almost identical. The only
difference in how things were before the Trust and after the Trust was
that mother's gambling money was cut off in an effort to protect her from
her own foolishness. I could not stop her from her addiction and
there was no cure for the sickness. Like most diseases. All we
could do was to try to treat her symptoms. |
