Mediation and Mental Health...

Portrait at the white rat by Anne-Julie Aubry - Beauty and the Ratty Beast...

Our solicitor, a professional litigator as it turned out, was petite, professional yet ditzy, and comfortably feisty and reassuring.

She clicked into action, examining the will and my late father's wishes.

I wept in her office. I wept there a lot.

She could have charged me water rates.

She probably did...

We went through what would happen, what could happen, what might happen, what had happened historically (viz Dombey and Son!), what was her experience of legal cases such as this... Did he have any other properties? A villa abroad. A caravan in Skegness...

My dad's wishes, as I knew them from his words to me from his sick-bed, the first time he fell ill, were for his partner to remain in their home if he pre-deceased her. But the house and his small remaining estate (his trinkets and treasures) were to be mine, my son's and my husband's.

I would then continue to pay for the upkeep of the house, while she remained there. The solicitor thought some of this to be a little odd...

So did my family given, they opined, she had property of her own.

But such were his wishes...

And I would honour them...

I began to deal with the bills that remained to be paid... I did so much while I returned to work, and then my solicitor took over. She stepped into the breach as his partner began to try to pass off utility and other bills that were really hers, not his...

...She tried to convince my dad's bank that she was his wife, his widow. She was ringing the bank the day that I went in with his details and his certificate of death in order to have the accounts frozen, as we must do... 'What right had I to be asking them for information?'

She opened a new account in the same bank there and then, while still having another account, her own, with another bank... This would make things easier, she said...

And they began to be very difficult with me...

Then, the afternoon that we were sitting in my dad's home, discussing the service to come with the, oh-so-patient, retired vicar, she started to go through the falsehood of searching for their 'mislaid' marriage certificate to give to him. It had never existed, of course...

I understand this, but found it all very trying... Exhausting...

To be called a liar, deemed troublesome, having to prove all the time that my steps were legal, and that I was executing what were my father's last wishes...

I got hold of the briefcase, in fact, one grey, distraught and distressing afternoon... I looked around the cluttered room at things that were his and I thought, maybe I'll never see those things again - I wanted to touch the last thing he touched, to handle his little black leather coin purse, to hold the silver keyring I'd given him from Christmas, where I told him with its engraving, just how much he meant to all of us...

...She went on to ring pension companies and the state, often at the same time as me. She said that she was owed his pension. 'Where was her share?' I tried to explain to her, while I was still speaking to her, and working in the government machinery myself -- She already had one widow's pension from the state after the loss of her 'first husband'.

She would not be entitled to any second pension from my father's estate. That would be illegal, unlawful... She told me I didn't know what I was talking about and that the pension department had said she was getting some of his pension... That was because she had misrepresented herself to them... I couldn't tell her thus.

She began to scream at my solicitor down the 'phone... Things became increasingly difficult for me to deal with. And it all became too much for me to bear at some stage and, at his request, I passed all the dealing with her, and her family, on to GJ, for his broad shoulders to bear...

In time, I returned to work. She would ring me on my mobile at work while I was in meetings, frantically shouting and just generally being awful... I began not to answer any of my 'phones that showed her telephone number, my old home number, on the screen...

It got to the point, where I became increasingly phobic about answering the 'phone at home...

Today, four years on, if you ring my home number, I might not even answer.

Please bear with me if that happens...

And please forgive me for going on and on, but these words and your comments are the glue that is keeping parts of me together as a whole at the moment... I love you. I hope you're having a nice break this Easter holiday... I send you all my best wishes - Mwah! x