Open Hands · Week 4 · Monday · HURT
The will said what he already knew, and somehow that made it worse rather than better.
His sister gets the house; he gets a third of what is left over after everything else is settled. And there is a sentence in the document, two lines long, about her having been the one who was there in their mother’s last years.
The sentence is true. She was there and he was not, or not as much, and he knows it. It is also, word for word, the sentence his entire childhood was written in, and reading it in a lawyer’s typeface with a signature line underneath felt like getting a receipt for something he had been trying to believe he imagined.
Scripture Does Not Pretend It Was Imagined
One of the things I appreciate about the Joseph story is that the Bible does not soften the family it comes out of. It says the favoritism was real and it says it twice.
Now Israel loved Joseph more than his other sons, because Joseph had been born to him in his old age; so he made him a robe of many colors.Genesis 37:3 (BSB)
When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.Genesis 37:4 (BSB)
Notice what is there. The father did it. The brothers saw it, correctly. They were not inventing a slight to feel sorry for themselves about; the text takes their side on the facts.
And then it does not take their side on anything else. The next thing those brothers do is throw him in a pit and sell him, and nothing in the chapter suggests the favoritism makes that acceptable. Both things are true at once, and the Bible does not seem to feel any need to resolve them.
He was not making it up. He really was the second one. He still had to decide what to do with a pen.
That is the hard spot, and it is a much harder spot than the one we usually talk about. It is relatively easy to forgive something that turns out to have been a misunderstanding. What do you do when you were right? When the thing you suspected for forty years shows up in writing, notarized?
What It Cost
He signed it.
He did not call his sister about the sentence. He did not call the lawyer to ask what the process would be for contesting it, which he had looked up on a Tuesday night and then closed the laptop on. He has not raised it with his wife more than once, and he has not raised it with his sister at all.
I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that is just avoidance wearing nicer clothes. The difference, as far as I can tell from the outside, is that he is not pretending the sentence is not there. He knows exactly what it says. He could quote it to you. He has decided not to make his sister answer for it, and that is a different thing from deciding it did not happen.
What it cost: a third of an estate is real money, and he has a roof that needs doing. The sentence is going to sit in a drawer in his house for the rest of his life and he is going to know which drawer. Nobody is ever going to tell him he was right.
That last one is the expensive part. Releasing the right to be repaid also means releasing the right to be told you were owed.
He went to her birthday in March. He says it was fine, and that he was mostly fine, and that he caught himself looking at the house.
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