An unsatisfactory visit, part 2

[Continued from Part 1.]

The next morning, after breakfast, I asked her what she was worried about. She settled into a comfortable chair and started to explain.

Where did her money go?

In the first place, it's not that all of Mother's money is gone. Or at least that's not what she ended up saying. It took her a while to explain this, because she wandered elliptically around the subject. But the way I understand it, this is what happened.

1. Ever since Father died, she has kept most of her liquid assets in two big bank accounts: one savings, and one checking.
2. Mother still works part time. She doesn't make a lot, but she said she always hoped that her earnings would more or less cover her day-to-day expenses.
3. But she doesn't know if they do. She doesn't really know what her day-to-day expenses add up to. All she ever did was to look at the overall balance of her two big accounts: as long as they didn't move much, she figured she was OK.
4. Some time back in the past, she (or maybe "they," if Father was still alive) took out a home equity line of credit (HELOC), because of some reason. It was no longer needed, but for too long she had just placidly paid the interest on it.
5. Finally at the beginning of this year she decided it was stupid to keep paying interest on a loan she didn't need. (Yes, that's true.) So she paid it back in a lump. That meant something like $30-35,000.
6. Then Brother and SIL came to her, asking for a loan. They have done this before, for smaller sums. This time they wanted to borrow $66,000 in cash.
7. Their explanation was that their credit cards had gotten away from them, and they needed to clear them out. Mother said they did not tell her how their credit cards had gotten away from them, and she said she did not ask. But she also said that she was very worried, because what's to stop the same thing from happening all over again? I agreed with her. 
8. She added that for the past few months they have been paying her back a thousand dollars a month. She did get them to sign a note for the full amount, but she did not ask for any interest. She is also aware that, at the rate of a thousand dollars a month, it will take five and a half years to pay back $66,000.
9. Anyway, what with paying off the HELOC and then lending so much money to Brother and SIL, her bank accounts are down something like $100,000. And yes, that arithmetic sounds about right.
10. So when she sees that her overall balance is so much lower than it used to be, she's afraid.   

Is this truly something to worry about? Who can tell? There's no way to know without more information.

"Why don't you ...?" "Yes, but ...!"

So I started to ask more questions, and to suggest things she could do to address her fears. Turns out this was not a good idea.

For every idea I had, she had a reason that it wasn't practical. It began to feel like we were playing "Why don't you ...?" "Yes, but ...!" In fact at one point I even referenced that game a little obliquely, reminding her that Father used to accuse Wife of playing it all the time (Mother remembered this part very well) and saying "But of course that's not what is going on here! You are just identifying parameters that any solution has to meet."

Translation: Yeah, that's exactly what we were playing.  

I admit that some of the things I suggested might be a lot of work. Mother has no idea how much she spends for her day-to-day expenses, so maybe she'd like to go through the last year's utility bills and credit card receipts? Then she could come up with a rough number, and she'd know whether her part-time salary covers it or not. Of course that's a lot of work, but is it worth it to buy the peace of mind that she would get from a definite answer? Maybe to some people. Maybe not to her.

There were other suggestions. None of them was trivial. And even if one of them were trivial, that doesn't mean she would do it. How hard can it be, after all, to fill out a Medical Power of Attorney form?

In earlier years, I was inclined to think my mother was something of a saint. (See for example here and here.) But in retrospect, that was largely because she was quieter than Father, so it was easy to assign all good qualities to her by default. I have already remarked elsewhere that the stories we (as a family) normally told about Father and Mother weren't really true.

Speaking of synchronicity

Mother has many fine qualities. But if she doesn't feel like doing something, she's not going to do it—even if "doing it" would solve some other problem that bothers her a lot!

In a sense that's self-defeating, just the same way all my failed conversations with her all weekend long were self-defeating.

And gosh, wasn't I recently writing something else about self-defeat? Indeed I was. That's why I started Part 1 of this story by talking about synchronicity ... because the topic of self-defeat seems to be haunting me these days.

Maybe I should pay attention.