I was not doing her a favor. I was being her daughter. Those are different things, and I didn’t have a good way to explain the difference at the time, standing in her living room with a plate of reception food I wasn’t eating, accepting condolences from people who knew her from a comfortable distance.
Now I have the distance to say it more clearly.
Care is not charity. It is not a sacrifice in the religious sense, something done to accumulate virtue. It is work, and it has a cost, and the cost is real regardless of whether it was chosen, and choosing it does not eliminate the cost.
The cost was real. I have documented it.
My brother knew it was real when he tried to use the housing framing to offset it. He was doing his own accounting, and in his accounting, the housing was a countable benefit and the caregiving was a personal choice that produced its own emotional returns and so couldn’t be weighed against anything else.
That accounting was wrong. Not just unfair — wrong.
Twelve years of living in a house while caring for its primary resident is not the same as twelve years of free housing. The housing was where the care happened. You cannot separate them.
When I said this to Patricia she said it was a perspective courts sometimes took and sometimes didn’t, which was her careful lawyer’s way of saying it wasn’t a slam-dunk legal argument, which I knew. It was a true statement, though, regardless of its legal standing.