My brother had spent four years telling me the same thing whenever Mom mentioned the land: “She has dementia. She doesn’t know what she’s promising anyone.” I believed him because questioning it made me feel like I was accusing him of something terrible. But Mom had made the promise in 2016, and her diagnosis wasn’t until 2020.
I only realized how important those dates were last March, sitting in a lawyer’s office with a folder I’d never opened. The lawyer read through the documents, then looked up at me and asked, “Who told you the diagnosis was earlier?” I told him my brother had, and he went completely quiet before pulling another page from the file.
He placed it in front of me and pointed to a signature dated 2016. Then he said, “Your mother knew exactly what she was doing when she signed this.” I looked at the name of the witness and immediately recognized it, because it was someone my brother had never mentioned. And when the lawyer told me what that person had written beside the signature, I finally understood why my brother had spent four years insisting the dates didn’t matter…
