“How do I know if I’m a named beneficiary if I can’t see the document?”
“That,” she said, “is the problem you’re describing.”
She gave me some practical suggestions. She told me to document what I had — the photocopy with the missing page, the text message from my father. She told me to put any requests in writing. She told me not to sign anything, including any waiver or agreement about the estate, until I’d seen the complete document.
That last point turned out to be important.
## The Waiver
I found out about the waiver on Wednesday afternoon, when Deb called me.
Deb was not someone I talked to often. She was our cousin, June’s daughter, three years older than me, someone I’d grown up seeing at Christmas and holidays. She’d driven two hours to be at the reading. She was, by disposition, a person who preferred not to be involved in anything uncomfortable. The fact that she was calling me told me something about how uncomfortable things had gotten.
“Vanessa’s asking everyone to sign something,” Deb said. “She’s calling it just a confirmation that we understand the estate distribution.”
“A waiver,” I said.
“She didn’t call it that.”
“What does it say?”
“It says something about all parties having received information about the estate and agreeing to the distribution as presented.” Deb’s voice had the quality of someone reading from something they weren’t sure they should be reading. “I don’t know, Hannah. It has a lot of words.”
“Has Aunt June signed it?”