She’s So Cold | Some Estate Stories

She’s So Cold | Some Estate Stories

• November 26, 2019 - Abused Beneficiaries, Estate Litigation, Trust Litigation,

Late November mornings in Northern California are turning cold. It’s near Thanksgiving. It’s a time that stirs memories. As I got up this morning, I thought, “it is really cold.” And, soon thereafter a song started playing in my head.

Psychology Today calls these earworms. They’re the song version of “Groundhog Day.” And the song snippet that came uninvited to my mind was … The Rolling Stones “She’s So Cold.”

OK, I thought – lets have some fun with this. So, I’m going to use a few song snippets to describe some trust cases where the prime wrongdoer was really cold. This is not a pass for men who do similar acts. It’s just that the Rolling Stones songs says: “she’s so cold” – not “he’s so cold.” So, with the need to protect confidentiality in mind, I’ll broadly generalize some instances where “she’s so cold.”

“She’s so cold…Like a tombstone.” Speaking of tombstones, I’ve seen cases where a decedent’s daughter wouldn’t allow the placement of her father’s tombstone for until she got her way from her father’s estate. I’ve been appalled when a parent’s ashes are withheld from burial or possession by other family members as bargaining chips for an heir to get their way. Still others where a mother, isolated from her children by the acts of one child, dies and is buried long before her children receive notice of her death.

How about a case where the trustee, having no right to the decedent’s body, fought the decedent’s sister from claiming the body. She lost. But that was cold.

More Mick Jagger observations – “She’s so cold – She was born in an arctic zone.” It’s pretty cold when a daughter takes her incapacitated mother out of state, sells her mother’s house, pockets the money, keeps her mother’s whereabouts secret from her sister, and takes a long time to let her sister know that their mother died. It’s probably colder when a daughter and her husband get their mother to unknowingly transfer her house to them and then evict her mother once title is in their name. It’s near freezing when a granddaughter unduly influences her incapacitated and blind grandmother to freeze out the grandmother’s two daughters from her estate.

That’s enough of “She’s so cold.” I’ll see what I can do some other time about songs that describe some bad things that “he” did. I know that I can’t use the Chiffons “He’s So Fine” for the source of that inspiration. Because there are a lot of cases where he isn’t fine at all.

Anyway, it’s getting cold outside. Stay warm and have a great Thanksgiving.