Don and Eva

We live in a community property state, and in the middle of the night I was wondering whether my married children understand how the community property laws work. It seems simple: If they inherit something from me, they can consider it theirs and leave it to others as they see fit ONLY if they keep it in a separate account and never mingle any of it with their spouse’s money. Otherwise it becomes community property. And then I remembered a story from my childhood.

Don and Eva were long time friends of my parents, and I believe that my father and Don were boyhood friends before either of them married. I think they were in the army together during World War II. They owned a gas station together before the war, and they had a couple of businesses together afterwards, too.

My little sister and I thought Don and Eva were a funny couple. Don was skinny and quiet, while Eva was plump and lively. Don did not smoke cigarettes, and Eva was a chain smoker. She had that deep, raspy voice of heavy smokers that some people used to think was sexy, and when she laughed she usually ended up coughing a lot. When we were dragged along as children to see Don and Eva, I knew I was going to have a hard time breathing, and I tried to avoid her big hugs that always included clouds of smoke. We went to see her when she was in the hospital with emphysema, and I remember her lying in her hospital bed wheezing and hacking and smoking away. It is hard to recall, in the present day, how pervasive and socially acceptable smoking once was.

Don and Eva never had any children, and they were fond of my sister and me. They always said that they intended to leave everything to us, but they had only one will -- Don’s. It was fairly standard in that it left everything to Eva, and if she predeceased Don, everything went to us. Since Eva was dying of emphysema, they saw no need for any other type of will. They weren’t very old and Don was healthy, so it seemed a safe bet that Eva would predecease Don. 

However, as she lay dying with Don by her side, he suddenly had a heart attack and died. A couple of hours later, Eva died, too. We reacted to this news with a complex set of emotions -- shock, sadness, and a secret thought that it was somewhat romantic that they couldn’t live without each other. Only much later did it become clear that this unexpected order of death had economic consequences. Since Don died first by a couple of hours, Eva inherited everything. Since she had no will, everything went through probate to her closest relatives, her brothers and sisters. We got nothing.

At the time, we were young and thoughtless, and the fact that we inherited nothing did not bother us. Besides, Don was only middle aged, and if he had lived on, he may well have remarried or spent all his money. Only later, as an adult, I began to think that it was rather sad that their expressed wishes had come to naught. Eva did not even like her brothers and sisters, all of whom lived out of state and did not visit her while she was alive. They were quite rude to us, locked us out of Don and Eva’s house, and did not let us take even a little thing to remember them by. They disinvited us to the joint funeral, but that’s another story. At any rate, this sadness for how Don and Eva did not get what they wanted in the end motivated me to learn about estate planning.