Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

  Willpower

  “Nobody ever died from making a will. But a lot of people have left a hell of a lot of confusion behind by not making one . . .”

  We heard an item on the radio about Make Your Will Week, urging people to drop into Buswell’s Hotel and meet fleets of lawyers who would tell them how simple the process was. Then, during the week of the promotion, people could make a will for the relatively low cost of £25.

  The man curled his lip and looked at the radio with pure hate.

  “Don’t solicitors give you the dry heaves?” he said, assuming my complete agreement. “As if they hadn’t enough money already, they’re trying to frighten poor, harmless, perfectly healthy passers-by and scare the life out of them with Testaments and Sound Minds and advice about what to do with my ashes.”

  He was totally serious. He was a married man of 38 years of age who hadn’t a notion of making a will, and what’s more, thought that it was like inviting bad luck, illness or an air crash to do anything of the sort.

  He received the news that I had been making wills cheerfully and healthily for over 30 years with disbelief, and not a little distaste. He thought it was arrogant, with distinct overtones of the Grande Dame, or owner of the mill – reminiscent of an eccentric Aunt Agatha, power-crazed and disinheriting everyone around her on whim.

  But of course this is idiotic. I made my first will when I was 21 and had £100 and I see no association whatsoever with making wills and dying. I see a lot of connection, however, between not making wills and leaving a monumental cock-up for other people to deal with. Solicitors do not give me the dry heaves but people who are too mean to employ one, and therefore render a will invalid, do.

  The history of litigation is strewn with shoddy home-made wills, usually beginning with the phrase “If I die”, instead of “When I die” or “After my death”. A reality check for those who begin a serious statement of intent with the words “If I die” needs to be considered. What about the alternative?

  “Suppose I am, by chance, one of the few, or indeed the only human being, who doesn’t die, then let this document be null and void.”

  People who make home-made wills have often invalidated them by trying to write everything on one page, so that when it eventually comes to probate, the court literally cannot read it and it is put aside.

  They say “my money” when they don’t mean money, they mean “estate”. They give away more than they have, instead of dealing with the whole thing in percentages.

  They disregard the provisions of the Succession Act and forget that the ratio of what they have actually by law belongs to a spouse. They leave bequests to people, bequests that are so vague that they cause endless and sometimes painful confusion. “I leave a chair and a decanter to my old friend.” What chair? What decanter?

  I gave this man the benefit of my blinding clarity and sureness that this was a matter in which right was on my side – and not on his.

  He accused me of being a foolish lackey, an unpaid public relations officer for a profession which he likened to several tanks of barracudas. They weren’t doing this for any one’s good he said, astonished at my naïveté. They just wanted to make more money.

  They weren’t going to turn into very fat barracudas at £25 a will, I answered. This conversation had by now become highly confrontational.

  Aha, he said, this offer was only to get you to put your toe in the water. Once they had got you in, taken your £25 and made your Simple Will, they would explain how you’d need to update it and come back every year or any time you coughed or sneezed. You would be in the system, making a will at every new moon or fluctuation of the Dow Jones Index.

  He said it was ghoulish to try and persuade people of his age to come in and discuss death. Perhaps I’d love it if groups of undertakers also had a promotion week, he said, and we could all go and be measured for coffins and choose nice inscriptions for our Celtic crosses.

  If he were to die suddenly, well, what he had would go to his wife. That’s what he’d like. Well, he wouldn’t like it because he wouldn’t like to be killed but it would be an okay way for his money to go.

  So why then let all the solicitors trade in their small cars for big ones just to render the situation the way it was? Why should he go every few weeks and give some lawyer fistfuls of cash so that his wife would get all his money anyway? The whole business was insane.

  Had he any friends, I asked him through gritted teeth. Had he parents, colleagues at all? Was there ever any cause he considered worthy of support? Any youngster whose education might be helped by a contribution? Any token to be handed over with a pleasing remark?

  This wasn’t the point, he said. It was a point, I insisted. A very important point. I showed him the typewriter, the bound books and the little glass left to me by friends in their wills. He is young and he thinks I am a combination of melodramatic, sentimental and naïve – is there any worse mixture?

  But he did seem to be thinking about it.

  Why should the barracudas who were manning the booths in the hotel during Make a Will Week get all the £25 cheques, he wanted to know? Wasn’t that stealing work from brother barracudas? We checked. This is not the situation. The barracudas in the hotel give free advice, and urge people to go back to their own solicitors for the £25-a-head offer.

  He was genuinely afraid that it might call the attention of the Fates, or whatever, as if someone up there would hear you making a will and consider it was time to haul you in. Did it not give me intimations of someone walking on my grave? he asked. And he was the one who thought me naïve. He probably doesn’t walk on cracks on the road either.

  My friend Mary Kotsonouris, in her book Talking to your Solicitor, says that, apart from in the occasional Agatha Christie story, nobody ever died from making a will. But a lot of people have left a hell of a lot of confusion behind by not making one. And they have left their friends unaware of how much they were valued.

  That alone makes me advise healthy young people to get over their superstitions and do the thing nice and briskly, when the prospect of death is still ages away. Surely that kind of thinking couldn’t drag you down and make you feel old before your time?

  Foul-Weather Friend

  “What would really cheer her up would be if I were to

  say that I was in bad form”

  I know someone who only comes to life when you tell her bad news. She is a real Cassandra, who likes to hear tales of woes and get to grips with them. The trouble is, she is a terrific sympathiser, and she specialises in grouses, gripes and situations where someone has been hard done by. So, if you have any huff or grievance or sense of being passed over, she’s your woman. But dare to get better, to recover your good humour sufficiently to see things more lightheartedly, or from the other point of view, and the light goes out of her eyes. She is not a fair-weather friend, she is a foul-weather friend and I think people like that can be dangerous for your emotional health. They keep the barometer low long after it should have started to rise.

  These are the kind, interested listeners who will remember, months later, how someone had cut you dead, long after you had forgotten it yourself; they will recall how hurt you were by somebody in power, someone whom you now like and do not associate with some gross injustice committed years ago.

  I was pleased that someone I knew ages ago got a great job recently. Now, when I say ages ago, I am talking, not years, but decades. I said wasn’t it grand that he had done so well, and the downbeat person said it was very generous of me to say that, considering the way he had stood me up that time.

  A dark cloud floated over my head like one of those incomprehensible maps from the Met office. A vague, woolly memory came back to me of a night spent waiting and a lot of ultimately unsatisfactory explanation and counter-explanation. Had it ever been properly resolved, I wondered? Was he really suitable for his present position of importance, having played fast and loose with people in the past?

  Was I in fact try
ing to suppress this memory myself, and had my pathetic pleasure in his appointment been some kind of inner cry?

  Now, it was generous, in a way, for her to have remembered that incident. In a way. I must have told her about it and must have been delighted at the time, with the sympathetic response, the ready shoulder and the listening ear. At the time.

  Does it make me a shallow person and a false confidante, if I didn’t really want this incident filed away for twenty-something years and then trotted out again as one of the many catastrophic things that had happened to me in my life? Why did she never seem able to bring up the good times, the day her first article was published; the day my first article was published . . . these are the golden days carved in stone, why not think about them as much as the days we were rejected or others got garlands we thought should have been ours? Why not remember the day when we went to lunch with a drunken PR person who said he would put a fiver for each of us on a horse and it won at eight to one? That was a day. Memory can be selective, and perhaps there is a Pollyanna aspect to some of us that is equally unhealthy, tinting the glasses through which we view other days to a sickly shade of rose.

  Perhaps this woman feels she is right to be aggrieved. She soldiered through the slights, the upsets and the insults and now we want to deny that such intimacy existed over what could now seem fairly irrelevant, even petty complaints.

  Perhaps right is on her side. She was there when people needed a supportive, non-judgmental listener. She would still be there, and is there, I know, for anyone who has a sad story to tell. But she is not there for anyone who has a jolly story to tell. She brings you down – right down – unless you feed her compulsion to know the bad news.

  You can’t say you’re fine or great or be cheerful if she asks how you are. You have to say something low-key, otherwise it’s a non-conversation. If she were to ring now, and I were to say that things were fine and I had a lovely Easter, or that I was looking forward to friends coming to visit, there would be a silence. Then I would ask about her Easter and she would say it had been all right but the weather had been terrible. And I would say the weather had been terrible in Ireland too and I would hear her brightening a bit.

  But what would really cheer her would be if I were to say that I was in bad form. Then she would ask why and I could say it was hard to know, really. And I would get the warmth of her interest and concern. To fuel the fire, I might add that I was full of arthritis and she would glow with sympathy and later I would hear from someone else that I am on all fours with it and isn’t it a tragedy. If she asked about Kenya, I wouldn’t say it was great because of the climate. I don’t want to live in Kenya, I just want to go there on holiday. So I’d have to say it was a bit too hot for a holiday, which is a lie.

  Most of the things I say to this kind, good woman are lies. So I talk to her less and less. I cannot bring myself to recall some of the low spots in her life and to remind her of humiliations and failures. I cannot believe that she would want to be led back to this territory. If we end up resolving to be downhearted in order to chime in with someone else’s mood, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We will be downhearted. In the pits, in fact. And that’s not going to help the planet or those who live on it.

  Why should we have to say that the current suspension of violence is useless if we have some hope that it might lead to something? Why be forced to say things are fair-to-middling when things are fine? I’m not doing it anymore and I advise anyone else with Cassandra-like friends to take the same stand.

  Giving Thanks

  “You can’t write the script. You can’t give a gift and

  make it into a deal”

  It doesn’t have to be a long letter, the woman says, just a few lines. A postcard even. Just something to say that the children enjoyed it. To acknowledge that it happened.

  It’s not that she feels a martyr about giving them treats. She loves to see them – she’ll take them to pantomimes, or to McDonalds, for as long as she has the strength and they have the interest. She will leave them everything she has when she dies anyway, whether they send her thank-you letters or not.

  But she thinks it’s such a bad training not to make children respond to generosity with some kind of gesture: a drawing when they’re very young, and then they could graduate to a few words. It doesn’t come naturally to children; she remembers the difficulty she had with her own. But soon it became like clockwork. Almost a Pavlovian response.

  She would provide the paper and the envelope and the stamp and her children were highly regarded as being very polite. Not hypocritical little creeps, she thinks, just warm-hearted and able to say they enjoyed something.

  So what happened to all this politeness that she instilled? Evidently it didn’t last into the next generation.

  No. But, she repeats, it’s not a thing that they’d know for themselves – they have to be told. And she doesn’t like to tell them. She doesn’t want to say at the end of a perfect day: “Now, if you enjoyed that you must write me a letter to thank me.”

  But on the other hand she fears that if somebody doesn’t tell them that, they might well grow up selfish, taking everything for granted. Or alternatively people will think that is what they are, since there will be no evidence otherwise.

  She doesn’t know if she should say something to their parents. After all, her son is very busy – he has a demanding job, he’s away from home a lot. And for all this new equality and sharing the roles, it’s not up to a man to organise thank-you letters, is it?

  There’s the danger that he might just snap at her and say she’s old-fashioned and outdated. She doesn’t feel very old at 58, but everything is relative. And he might see a veiled criticism of his wife in this too. She doesn’t want to be a troublemaker.

  That’s why she has said nothing to her daughter-in-law. She has always been aware how prickly this relationship could be: her own mother-in-law had been less than sensitive over three decades ago. She hasn’t forgotten. She has always been full of praise for how well her grandchildren are being brought up: it’s only this one aspect that gets to her, because she sees it as much more important than the actual letter-writing itself.

  Has she given any hints that she would like to see thank-you letters incorporated in their lifestyles? Oh yes, heavy hints. When she sends a present she will telephone to wonder has it arrived. She will be assured that it has. And did they like it, she will wonder? Oh, but they loved it, she will be promised, and sometimes they will be brought to the phone to tell Granny what a success it was.

  If she has the grandchildren over to her house and a neighbour does something nice for them, she will suggest that they all write a letter. The thing that drives her mad is that her two little grandchildren seem to enjoy creating this letter with her. They will even add bits of news of their own about their goldfish. It’s not as if they would find it a chore.

  Is her daughter-in-law thoughtful and polite in other ways? Yes, very. That’s the maddening thing. She’s charming. No, no, I must believe her; this is not the classic case of a woman thinking that no other woman is good enough for her son. She has made an excellent home for her family and is most welcoming to the grandmother. She has a part-time job now and will not return to full-time work until the children are older. No way has she blotted her copybook, apart from this business of the bread-and-butter letters.

  I know a lot of young mothers who would think that life is fairly crowded enough for children these days: there are so many things that they have to do already, that they don’t want to add to them.

  They wouldn’t for example, think that something enjoyable like a treat with the grandmother should immediately have to be followed by the downside of it all: The Duty Letter.

  Might there not be an argument in favour of keeping the whole thing pleasurable? No. She won’t buy this. “It’s all right for you,” she says. “You don’t have grandchildren. You don’t know how lovely it is to get little letters from them.”

 
I do know how great it is to hear from children. I’ve kept children’s letters for years because they are such a pleasure.

  But you can’t write the script. You can’t give a gift and make it into a deal. I give this to you and you give me the promise of a thank-you letter which will warm my heart. Either it will come or it won’t. It will be inspired by a parent of course but, if that’s not the way the household works, you have to accept it.

  If you live with someone who never says “I love you” and you beg him or her to use those words, explaining how important it is to hear them, you would need to have a fairly short memory if the words suddenly thrilled you to the marrow with their spontaneity when they were delivered on demand.

  I advise this woman not to say a word to her busy son, her admirable daughter-in-law and her much-loved grandchildren. I advise her from my own experience of sending a Christmas gift last year to two children in England from Australia; I genuinely thought it might have got lost. So I telephoned afterwards to know if they had got it, and they had, and it was all bad news because we can’t do a thing for them now without the immediate and lengthy letter which is the product of parents’ guilt and very possibly children’s great rage.

  I will never be able to read anything from them again with the same delight as before, because I know it’s brought about by my having more or less said that I had expected to hear from them. I might as well write myself thank-you letters and open them on appropriate occasions.

  So that’s what I advise this woman to do. Ask for nothing because it will be dust in her mouth when it does arrive.

  She should have faith in people’s nature as well as in the training they get.

  Perhaps when these children get a bit older they’ll realise how much we all love to be thanked for things. And they’ll do it all on their own. Their letters will then be much more meaningful than a box full of gratitude drawn from them by duty, extracted like teeth.