Something that gets lost in the estate narrative, which tends to be told as a family story, is the role of the professional.
Mara Chen had worked with my father for what turned out to be several years — not just the will and amendment but earlier legal work, the ordinary business of an adult life that requires documentation. She knew him as a client. She’d sat across from him in the professional way that creates a particular kind of knowing — not intimate, but careful. She’d helped him put his intentions into language precise enough to hold up.
When I met with her, she was professional in a way that was also kind. She answered what she could answer. She was clear about what she couldn’t say without a formal process and she was clear about what the formal process would establish. She didn’t editorialize about Vanessa or about what had or hadn’t happened at the Tuesday reading. She did her job and she did it well.
But she’d also called me back by nine the morning after my email. Which was, in my experience, not nothing. She hadn’t put me in the queue for a two-week callback. She’d read my email, understood what I was asking, and called me in the morning.
I think she had a sense of what my father had intended and a sense that something had gone sideways. I think she took the call back to me seriously because she understood what the amendment was supposed to do, and she wanted it to do it.