It has been what seems like forever since my last post. A lot has happened during that time. I won't burden you with all of it, but I'll try to fill in some of the spaces.
First, our friend with cancer has moved out. She is in remission and the prognosis at this time seems to be for a full recovery. She had the cancerous kidney removed and the other places where it had appeared are either gone or shrinking. Good news for her. But there's more to the story. She did not leave because she was ready to. We asked her to.
When we first learned of her condition and decided to ask her to live with us (see previous posts), we also knew that we were going to need to find a way to help her financially so that she could get back out on her own once her condition improved. Otherwise, knowing her as we do, we knew that she would not be able to leave because she would never come up with the money on her own, nor would her family help out. Thus we decided to have a fundraiser. There is a surprisingly close network of people in the real estate business in this area and many of them know her and many more know Sandi and the lady that she works for. So they (Sandi and her boss) set about organizing a trivia night with all the proceeds to be placed into a trust for our friend. Sandi and I would be named as executors of the trust because we knew that if she had control over the money it would be blown long before she could move out of our house and, well, let's just say that would be bad.
The event was a success with many people from the real estate community as well as our church responding generously. We raised nearly $5000 for her. Sandi and I went to the bank and made all of the arrangements and deposited the money. We told her how the trust would be set up and why. The money was to be held until she was well enough to move on and none of it would be spent until then and it wasn't. That was in early September.
In November we received a call from the bank asking a bunch of questions about the account. It felt very much like an accusation. As we pressed the guy from the bank for details he told us that our friend had been in that day, unbeknownst to us, seeking access to the funds. It had set off some sort of inquiry and the end result was that the bank told us that we could not have the account as it had been originally intended. We had to give her the money and close the account. It made us both pretty angry (actually, Sandi was fit to be tied) to be placed under such scrutiny when we had done nothing wrong--only tried to help. And it demonstrated yet again that our 'friend' has no real concept of the nature of friendship or self-control. When Sandi confronted her (remember, she didn't know that the bank had spilled the beans) she tried to deny everything and when that didn't work she tried to make excuses and say the bank had misunderstood her intent.
To keep a long story from getting any longer, the final result was that we told her she could no longer live with us. I gave her until the end of January to find a place and move. We knew that if we didn't get her out of our house soon the money would be spent and then there would be real trouble. The funny thing is that she ended up moving in with the guy I talked about several posts ago who has pined away for her for so long.
I could go on and on about this, but I'm tired of talking about it. The end.
No comments:
Post a Comment