comments:
We agree emphatically. And I also understand how your mom felt. My sister wanted to take over my mother's finances for the longest time. But to my mom, that was ceding control to someone else. She had spent an entire marriage doing what someone else wanted, and did not want to give up the opportunity to make her own choices. My mom recognized what was happening, though. When she turned 90, I got a video camera and set up an interview (using questions from To Our Children's Children, a book I highly recommend -- I gave copies to all my siblings as a way to record their lives for their own grandchildren). It starts out with the basics, including "Did you have brothers and sisters? What were their names?" and my mother couldn't recall her brothers' names. There are a lot of memory lapses we can explain away, but that's not one of them. Watching her struggle is one of the worst memories of my life.