Of Death And Acceptance

Right Or Wrong ?

The formalities consequent upon my mother's death seem to have gone on for far too long. I now believe they are at an end but not without a final episode which has left an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Prior to my mother having state-provided carers she had engaged a lady from a list offered by Age Concern to help her with housework. This engagement continued until her death. The lady did a sterling job and was helpful beyond the strict terms of her engagement. When my mother died I felt that this lady should receive something from my mother's minimal estate and said to her to take £200 from the bank account she was managing for my mother (the account contained only £395). She did this but then claimed I had told her she could have all the money in the account, which I know I did not do (I did not know at the time what bills might be outstanding) and which her subsequent withdrawal of exactly £200 confirmed. As I've said, this lady did a lot for my mother, almost certainly doing extra jobs for which she may not have been paid, so what should I do? I decided that since I had determined that a bequest of £200 was appropriate I was going to stick by that, and did. The result was an unpleasant exchange of emails and a very soured relationship.

Did I do right? On one hand it seemed stupid to argue over a trivial sum which did not matter to me, particularly regarding someone who had effectively befriended my mother. On the other hand, this lady's work is with people who are vulnerable and, if I let this pass, would the same be repeated? Indeed, should I report this “misunderstanding” to Age Concern? I asked myself what my mother would have wished and thought that she probably would have let the lady have the extra money; she wouldn't have wanted what she would have called “bad blood” between her and the lady. However, I stuck by what I knew to be the situation and the £200 bequest. It did, though, leave me with a very unpleasant and unwelcome feeling.

Inheritance

Claudine came round this evening to eat with me and Steve and Jo and the discussion got onto inheritance law. French inheritance law looks at first glance pretty straightforward. Virtually all a deceased's estate has to be left to members of the family and in designated proportions. There appears to be little point in a will so I was surprised, when discussing this with my cleaning lady, that she should comment that it was always best to make a will (which has to be lodged with a notary).

I took the matter up with Claudine. She confirmed that French inheritance law was indeed extremely simple but only in extremely simple cases. That is, for example, if a married person dies who has never been married before and is married to someone who has never been married before and if neither of the couple have any children outside of that marriage. If, however, there has been a divorce somewhere along the line, within the couple or indeed the putative inheritors, or if there are step-children, all hell breaks loose. The previous simple prescriptions for the simple case become Byzantine. The law, as it stands, was simple not encoded to cater for such cases and a will cannot override whatever the law, in any specific non-simple situation, may decide. The result would seem to be a bun-fight for lawyers who will get rich at the expense of putative inheritors. This has convinced me that I need to see a notary soon to sort out what, if anything, I need to do. I don't want to leave my kids with a complex legal situation to resolve in a foreign country and in a foreign language

Acceptance

I have recounted to various friends my interchange with the Mairie over my website, why the Mairie refused my gift of the website but wanted to copy it. There were comments varying from “what do you expect from the Mairie” to surpirse and indignation. I think the Mairie's reaction was to do with acceptance and degrees thereof. I remember Pedro, my roofer, saying to me three years ago, that when he had arrived 28 years earlier from Alsace that, as far as the village was concerned, he might as well have arrived from outer space. At the time, even people who arrived in the village from as nearby as Nyons (20kms) would be regarded as “foreigners”. Time changes perceptions of course but a lot of time is needed to change entrenched ones.

I reckon I'm pretty well accepted in the village now. I remember writing, a couple of years ago, that I felt I was accepted at boules because nobody any longer felt the need to be polite to me; they felt free to swear at me, as they would to anyone else, if I played a couple of bad shots. That has moved on, as my boules playing has improved, to the point where they react with puzzlement if I play badly: what went wrong? I take that as a further degree of acceptance. The villagers who know me even acknowledge, if with some surprise, that an Englishman can cook as well as they can. But there's a limit. Clearly, an Englishman writing about the village in the public domain in French as well as in English was a step too far, for the time being at any rate. The village had to assert itself.

That's fine by me and relations regarding the website are very amicable. They will build their website on the basis of mine and I will develop my site in my own way. The boundaries, for the time being, have been established.