Aunt Barbara’s Will
My dad and I traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2011 because his sister died unexpectedly. I lived in Portland, Oregon, and he lived in NW Indiana, an hour from Chicago.
Massachusetts, Part 8
I just read Aunt Barbara’s will. She names a couple lawyers as the executors of her estate, which means they have to deal with all this complicated stuff instead of my dad. That makes things so much easier! She wants her entire estate (all her possessions) to go to “the President and Fellows of Harvard College, a Massachusetts educational, charitable corporation, to establish the Barbara Lynn Wiget Endowed Research Fund at Harvard Medical School.
“I further direct that the income only from this fund be utilized by the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine to support research pertaining to the understanding of severe psychiatric disorders with special emphasis on the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia.”
When I read this section to my dad, he said that maybe she had paranoid schizophrenia. I had a kneejerk denial reaction. I thought she was just manic depressive, but after some thought, it’s possible.
I found in her files at least one article on schizophrenia that someone had sent her with a letter. However, I also found papers — including the autopsy report — about the boyfriend of hers who suicided in 1983. I have a…