None of it required anyone’s permission or anyone’s validation, including Daniel’s. That was the thing Maya kept pointing me back to, every time I started circling toward wondering if I was being fair, if I was reading the situation right, if maybe the family version of events had more merit than I was giving it.
She’d say: “What do the records show?”
The records showed what they showed.
That clarity — records show what they show — was what I kept coming back to in the conference room when Daniel made arguments and Patricia noted legal limits and the whole thing had the quality of a situation that could go several ways.
It went the way the records supported, which was the way I needed it to go.
Maya asked, at the end of the Saturday when we finished going through the folder, what I was going to do when it was all over. I said I wasn’t sure. She said: “When was the last time you did something that had nothing to do with your mother’s care or your family’s needs or the estate?”
I thought about it seriously. “I don’t know,” I said. “A while.”
“Make a list,” she said. “Not a task list. A list of things you actually want.”
I made the list that night. It was shorter than I expected, because twelve years of putting other things first means you lose track of what you want at an almost cellular level. But a few things were clear.