Shona Sibary as a baby
A young woman has told the excruciating story of how her own mother totally cut off her joy after her will was declared. The young woman, Shona Sibary, told how the pain of being cut out of her own mother's will was shattering
Read her story below:
The morning after my mother died last October, I sat on her bed and felt strangely closer to her than I had in a very long time.
We had been estranged in the year before her death.
She was an alcoholic living with her third husband in Canada. I live in Devon with my husband and four children.
Throughout my childhood there was nothing to suggest how things would so catastrophically deteriorate. I’m an only child and she had always been a fabulous mother. She was even my birth partner when my oldest daughter Flo – her first grandchild – was born in 1998.
Then, in her early 50s, she emigrated to Canada. She didn’t really want to go, but it had been a lifelong dream of her new husband, and my mother wasn’t of the generation to put her foot down and insist they do what she, rather than he, wanted.
It turned out, for her at least, to be a disastrous move.
I was newly married with a growing family. I had three babies in just under four years. Thousands of miles away, my mother was increasingly lonely in a town she didn’t like.
And so she started to drink. And drink some more.
On her annual visits to the UK, I began to notice how she was unravelling, but it’s hard when you only see someone once a year to see how bad things are.
I felt desperate for her, but I also started to dread her coming because she was constantly drunk and would wreak havoc.
She would wander around all night turning lights on in the children’s bedrooms, wailing and crying. Not a visit would go by without her falling down the stairs and telling my husband Keith that she hated him.
I tried, after every difficult visit, to rally and write a letter to her explaining that I loved her but I couldn’t have this in our lives. Nothing worked.
She would promise not to drink and then, on the next trip, stash vodka bottles in tissue boxes and under the mattress. A year ago, something inside me snapped. I said she couldn’t stay and she was having no access to her grandchildren until the drinking stopped.
I didn’t realise at the time that this would be the last conversation I would ever have with her.
Six months ago, at the age of 68, she collapsed with liver failure and doctors gave her 48 hours to live. Her husband called and I rushed to her bedside.
She was unconscious when I arrived but I stroked her hair and sat with her until she passed away 10 hours later.
It was utterly devastating. I yearned to take back the hurt and say how sorry I was that everything had gone so horribly wrong. I hoped she knew.
And so began the wretched task of going through her things. I wanted jewellery for her three granddaughters to remember her by, and other little keepsakes I recalled from my own childhood – scarves she liked and empty bottles of Chanel No. 5.
Then I found her will. On the last page it had been amended, just a few months previously.
To this day I can recall the utter shock of reading the following words: ‘I want my daughter, Shona, to have nothing. She has made it clear she doesn’t want a relationship with me and I therefore cut her out of my will.’
The blow was physical and intense. I actually had to sit down. The overwhelming rejection felt gut wrenching and wrong. It was nothing to do with the money. From beyond the grave, my mother had delivered a final, harsh slap to the face.
Yes, our relationship had been rocky. But I always trusted that, deep down, her love was unconditional and never ending. Yet here was the evidence – legally bound – suggesting otherwise. Who knows the state of mind she was in when she changed her will? Probably, she was furious with me, bitter and angry.
I have to believe she didn’t really mean it, that she would have had a change of heart. Would she really have wanted this to be the final thing I remembered her for? Or did she think – as I did – that there would be time for forgiveness?
But that’s the problem for those of us left behind. There are no second chances, just questions and confusion.
It’s why I can so sympathise with Lynda Bellingham’s sons, Michael and Robbie. I’m sure it’s not about the money for them either. It’s about knowing, for sure, that their mother would have wanted to put them first.
Sometimes it all feels so hopeless and sadly, it’s too late to be fixed. My mother had the last word. And I’ll have to live with the sentiment behind it for the rest of my life.
- Mirror Online
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