Current Events > I think I need to make a decision about my granddad's house soon... (long read)

(+) Yeah! (+)

My relationship with my dad was... not ideal, to say the least. My mom and dad were both pretty successful at first... My mom worked at IBM for about 34 years before she retired. My dad was promoted to plant manager at some construction company in Florida. Then he decided to drive home drunk in a company car one day. He hit a woman and put her in a wheelchair. She sued the company for about $2 million in the 1980s and he got fired. This started a downward spiral that he never recovered from. He started doing hard drugs.

My grandparents on my dad's side brought him back home to pay for his rehab. He graduated from rehab and then went back to doing the same stuff. My mom tried to stay and help, but she eventually got sick of it. She moved from Pensacola, FL to Austin, TX with me when I was about 3 years old to get away from him. The only memory I have of the trip is me looking at the night sky in the car somewhere along the way and then us getting to Austin in the middle of the night. I would go back to visit my dad every now and then, but the trips became more and more sporadic as the years went on.

My mom never told me about his issues because she didn't want to talk negatively about him in front of me. They would argue so much every time they happened to be on the phone with each other, though, and I never really understood why. My mom would just beg me all through my childhood to not do drugs. She told me my dad had issues with drugs, but never went into very much detail. My dad's drug use was never really front and center for me my whole childhood. When I went to visit, he never did drugs in front of me.

It smacked me in the face pretty hard one year, though. My dad sent me a check for my birthday. It might have been my 20th or 21st birthday or something like that. I went to the bank to cash it. The next day, I looked at my bank account and saw a $35 fee instead of a credit for the amount of the check. Turns out my dad spent the money on drugs before I could cash the check. I called and asked him about it, and he said he would make it up to me. He sent me an empty envelope. I never really got over this.

I feel like that incident is where my relationship with him started to get worse. At some point, I got sick of even talking to him on the phone. He had gone full on conspiracy theorist and I got sick of hearing the weird stuff he was so convinced about. I never really worked up the courage to demand that he tell me the full story of what happened with the bad check he wrote me.

My dad got real sick in 2017 and started going to the hospital a lot in Alabama and Florida. At one point in mid to late 2018, my cousins, aunts, and uncles started calling me saying he might not have too much longer. Even with that information, I still had to sit at home and think long and hard about whether I even wanted to go see him. I talked to my cousins for a bit and decided to make the trip. I took care of what I needed to take care of for an ESPN broadcast that was happening at my old job and then drove straight from that location to Pensacola, FL.

He was in bad shape. He was in good spirits when I got there, but his body was failing on him. Pancreatic cancer and kidney cancer. They weren't sure where it started, but it wasn't good. Within a week or so, it was time to decide to put him in hospice care because he just wasn't getting any better.

I drove back to Austin with my thoughts and emotions swirling like crazy. I got the news that he died about a week later when I was at work. I drove back again for his funeral.

When I was 19, he told me that I had a half sister that was older than me. She had an even worse relationship with him than I did. When her mom died, she wouldn't even let him go to the funeral. We don't talk, and I probably need to fix that at some point. I have this (likely irrational) fear that she would see too much of him if she were to look at me.

My granddad built a house in a super small town in southern Alabama, and it's going to fall to me and her to make a decision about what to do with it. I pretty much don't want anything to do with it, and I doubt she does either. She has her own life in Washington, DC and I have my own life in San Antonio, TX. I have no interest in living in the middle of nowhere, much less in the middle of nowhere in southern Alabama. Nor do I have any interest in traveling there regularly to maintain it. It would be a poor decision to give up the land, though.

Right now one of my aunts and uncles are technically responsible for the house, but one of my cousins lives in the house permanently at this point. There was a pretty big argument in my dad's side of the family about that, but... I'm not about to even give any amount of input one way or the other because I just don't care that much.

I really need to reach out to my half sister, but... I gotta figure out how to get over the fear.

Tl dr

Piss off CE, and become a landlord.

on one hand, I feel like it would be nice to have a property that stays in the family, but if it's something that neither you nor your half-sister would want, then maybe pass off the ownership and responsibility to the part of your family taking care of it/living in the house.

unless if money is an issue, and you want to cash out on it.