The Devastation of Disinheritance

This essay is part of a Modern Love project on the intersection of money and relationships.

In 2017, eight years after I discovered that my father had disinherited me, a FedEx driver stopped at my house to deliver an envelope.

I didn’t know how to feel. Joyful? Relieved? Vindicated?

I had already spent what felt like a lifetime trying to move on from the aftermath of my father’s will, which sent a shock wave through my family with its surprise sentence: “To my daughter, Mary Beth, I leave no bequest for reasons known to her.”

I had tried everything to keep those words from echoing in my head and battering at my heart: yoga, therapy, Al-Anon, and obsessive writing and rewriting of a book about disinheritance that my mother ultimately asked me not to publish.

I sat on the stoop, letting details crowd back in. In his will, my father left the house and investments to my mother. He left his hunting cabin on hundreds of acres he called “the Farm,” his most prized possession — place of all his best days and his very last breath — to my oldest brother. The will stipulated that my two other brothers could use the Farm for hunting and hanging out, as they had done all their lives, but only with permission from our brother. If he ever decided to sell, he was to reimburse himself for repairs and maintenance, then split the rest three ways among the brothers.