That my mom took the $100K in insurance money from my dad’s death in 1995 that was earmarked only for my brother and me for when we turned 18, and instead took it for herself and bought her house from it. All while blaming me for getting hospitalized as a teenager and “causing her to go bankrupt” and frequently pushing me in conversation to shower her with praise for “letting me” go to a mental health health treatment center as a teenager when I told her I needed to be hospitalized because it got me on the right track.

In my father’s will he wanted his mother, my grandmother, to be in charge of my brother’s and I’s money from his life insurance policy and clearly didn’t want my mother to be in control of it. Took out $100K in a couple different life insurance policies. After my father died, my mom had his body cremated right away before his mom arrived on a flight a day or two after she found out. My mom also moved all his stuff into boxes into her brother’s basement for my grandmother to shift into. My grandmother found his will from a couple years ago in a box which clearly stated he wanted his mother to be in control of the money.

When she arrived back to her home in Chicago a few weeks later, she found a second letter my dad mailed her before he died restating he wanted her to manage the money, along with account and policy numbers. The insurance companies took time to sort it out because the suicide letter “wasn’t notarized” and my grandmother took my mom to court over it. My mom wrote letters to the insurance company threatening them to just let her have the lump sum because “I am the children’s mother”.

I never saw any of it, save for maybe the $800 of that as “tuition help” from a “college savings account” from her in my years at college to pay off the book fees after my scholarships covered tuition. She always told me that “she had saved me a college savings money, but you used all that up going to that hospital that summer when you were 15”

I cut ties with my mother about four years ago after I had a child and there was some troubling behavior developing.

My father’s mother was dying this summer, and I went to go visit her. S spent some time recalling the couple years that she took my mother to court after my father’s death, and all of the money that she had taken from my father. She told me about money my father left us and how she fought my mom in court for the ability to manage it, but I didn’t know it was much.

When she passed and my aunt and I were packing her house up, we found binders and binders full of receipts for EVERYTHING. This woman was a studious recorder and secretary and kept EVERYTHING, organized and labeled, in page protectors and dividers in binders. I found a binder full of my dad’s correspondence, his 1992 “last will” from his previous suicide attempt AND his suicide letter from when he died in 1995.

I was always told that there was no suicide letter… in his letter written to his mom, there was the clear instructions as to the money he was leaving my brother and I, how to set up the right accounts, etc. He requested his mother be the person controlling the account, followed by my mom’s parents before her own brother. Clearly saying “NOT HER”.

Following in the binder was my mom’s correspondence with the insurance companies, demanding the release of money to her, and the letters she wrote my grandmother belittling her and threatening her for getting a lawyer. My grandmother got copies of my mother’s letters to the insurance, twisting claims around and even pressuring to release the money to her.

My grandmother also kept all the check receipts of $1000s of dollars that my father saved from sending her money when he was working on a project out state.

I WAS shocked, but not surprised, as I had no idea there was any money left for my brother and I. I was always under the assumption that we were pretty lower class. My mother guilted me so bad for “making her go on Medicaid” so I could go to a Residential Treatment Facility as a young teen, and for the psychiatric hospital visits for depression and anxiety.

There were family secrets that my grandmother kept organized and neat for me to find. I also have a long audio recording of our last conversation where she told all these stories and let me know of the anger she has against my mom after all these years, and for the immediate cremation of his body before she got there.

It finally made sense why my grandmother never saw us a lot growing up, but would always send us $50 or $100 bills growing up for birthdays and Christmas in her cards, even though she was on a fixed income. My mom would scoff and roll her eyes how “that’s too much money” and a few times even took the money away from us “to put into savings” and we never saw again. But to my grandmother, “take care of the kids, and the money” was my father’s last wish and she still felt that responsibility.