Inheritance

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

—Prospero, The Tempest. Act IV sc i

[Editor's Note: Though the idea for this entry was conceived a while ago, recently I decided to modify it for submission to Market Place, an NPR show that deal with business and investment, but which also occasionally features personal stories about money. Because the story is intended for strangers, I have taken advantage of "surprise" elements that won't "surprise" anyone who actually knows me (viz. the way in which I became an outright home-owner). ]

I have achieved the American Dream—of sorts. At the age of 26, I am a homeowner. It's not the full Dream with a wife, and a white picket fence to keep in our 2.5 kids and our dog, Rusty, (and to keep out JWs, and any solicitors not offering Thin Mints), but still, the home has always been the hardest part of Dream to achieve, hasn't it? The rest should pretty much be downhill from here. [The house, after all, is the human equivalent of the assortment of insects the males of some species of birds use to attract a mate; once you have the dowry ready, the females are sure to beat a path to your door. And once you have the female, the kids should come as naturally as swimming to a fish...and after that, there's just no stopping the JWs or solicitors.]

Still, even without the complete Dream, I am a homeowner. Not just a borrower paying off the bank, but the owner with his name on the deed, with the house completely paid off in full. And I acquired my home during the peak of the housing market bubble (or, as Mr. Greenspan might say, "from the top bubble in the 'frothy', irrationally-exuberantly driven market"), in February of 2005. And, even more remarkable, the home is situated in Los Angeles county, one of the most inflated markets in the nation.

So what's my secret? Shrewd business dealings, A Warren Buffet-like mind for investment? Nope. The fact that I own 20% of the property, with my sister holding an equal share and my mother owning the remainder? No, not that either.

I inherited the house from my great uncle. Oftentimes when I tell them I live in a house that I own with my sister, they ask if my parents bought it for us. When I tell them I inherited it, the response is invariably either "cool," or "very nice." It seems that they have forgotten (or never realized in the first place) that one's inheriting something necessitates someone very close to him to have died. And in this light, there seems to be something very "not cool" and very "not nice" about living in my own home.

So, there is a considerable amount of guilt, whether justified or misplaced, associated with my home ownership. Sometimes it feels like blood money, not in the traditional sense [if colloquialisms can be said to have 'traditional' definitions], but insofar as I profited from a relative's death. Rationally, I know that he wanted me to have his house, and that his death was ineluctable—a fact made more salient by the fact that he was 88 at the time of his passing. So his house had to go somewhere, and he chose to bequeath it to me and my sister. Of this I am certain, because I am the one whom he asked to drive him to the attorney to adjust his living trust to include us.

Moreover, I neither caused nor wished for my uncle's passing. On the contrary, when he began to show signs of senility and fragility, I moved in to his house to help care for him. I learned to test his blood sugar twice a day to keep his diabetes in check. I learned to which of his four medications he needed at which doses and at which intervals. When Alzheimer's began to take over, and he wanted to eat foods high in carbohydrates at all hours of the day and night, my sister and I devised a system of chains and locks around the refrigerator to keep him away from dangerous (high sugar) foods; we moved other snack items out of the pantry, and into closets, backpacks, under furniture—anywhere we thought we could stow items to thwart a potentially perilous spike in his blood sugar.

And my sister and I were the ones who pleaded with him to shower and change his Depends (c) when his dementia took over and exacerbated his recalcitrant personality. Not only did I bathe and shave him, but I endured the olfactory torture when our best efforts to induce him to shower failed.

Ostensibly, my listing of the duties I voluntarily accepted serves to legitimize my acquisition of my uncle's house, but in retrospect, I see that it really just demonstrates how uneasy I still am, uncomfortable enough to feel the need to make such a list justifying my inheritance. In part, the list imbues me with the sense that somehow I earned this house, that I worked for something that, in fact, I really did not work for. These are measureables—how many times I made him breakfast, or went out to buy his groceries; how many times I tested his blood-sugar, or chained the refrigerator to prevent it from getting too high; how many times I showered him; how many times I drove him to the doctor, &c, &c.

Yet this type of rationalization never really mitigates the guilt, because it's impossible to measure how much I cared for my uncle in tasks done, or duties fulfilled. And even if these things did constitute a perfect, complete set of criteria, I still can't say that I earned the inheritance, because is inheritance is just a special kind of gift, and gifts must be free; that which is earned is "wages."

Which (rather clumsily and disjointedly) leads me to my second point: my uncle did ALOT more for me than I did for him, so on the cosmic ledger sheet, he is still way in the black, and I am way in the red, as far as our relationship is concerned.

When I gave his eulogy, I mentioned something in passing I had generally taken for granted; I included only by way of example to demonstrate some larger, seemingly more important point (which, at the time of writing this, I have forgotten). "From my earliest days in kindergarten to my last day of high school, he dropped me off at school each morning, and picked me up again each afternoon." Then I remember an audible gasp coming from the room, followed by an approving murmur as each person turned to his neighbor to agree how selfless and dutiful my uncle had proved himself to be. Later I would reflect that he not only chauffeured me to and from school, but he also picked me up from band practices and competitions, shuttled me to work on school projects at friends' houses, came to get me after MUN trips, often having to wait in the school parking lot because there was traffic, or because our bus was delayed for one reason or another. And I do not recall him once complaining about hours' long wait. This list does not include the various functions for which my sister needed transportation.

And this is only one part of his "duties" list, a list that far exceeds the very poor one I have constructed, exceeds it in the quantity, difficulty, and duration of the responsibilities. So I suppose my little project of justifying my slice of the American Dream has failed, and instead, I have slipped even farther into 'unworthiness.' Perhaps all there is to do is know that all I have inherited shall eventually dissolve, and hope to pass it on to someone else when my little life is rounded with a sleep.