On another note, yesterday, speaking of estates, we finally got around to clearing out BILs stuff out of his car. Basically although he slept in an apartment, he lived out of his car. His situation makes me so sad. His life was in that car. Underneath the mess of cans and clothes, and other junk, there was:

A photo album of his wedding day (his marriage lasted less than a year. She was here on a green card working as an au pair when she met BIL. She walked out on him unexpectedly and that was that.)

His autographed baseball collection.

Another photo album of the family through the years.

A water-ruined 1981 high school yearbook.

Boxes of skin care from a company that he "invested" in. He was in love with a young girl he worked with. She had a side gig selling for a MLM company. My BIL pretty much funded her directorship. Of course, the attraction was completely unrequited, and 10 years later, he still had boxes of that product in his car.

Resumes

A copy of the bible and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.

Anichni silk sheets. When he worked as a sales clerk for a very high end store in NYC, he was named Sales Person of the Month and given a full set of these sheets. It was his only recognition he ever got for "a job well done." This was probably somewhere in the early 2000s. He was later fired. He kept saying, "someday when I have a nice place and a new bed, I'm going to use those sheets." He never did use them.

There is so much that makes me sad about his whole life and how it ended. The stuff in his car said it all, really. And he was not a "bad" person. He had his quirks and certainly could annoy you, but he was, OTOH, one of the funniest people I ever met. Of course, his self-deprecating stories were the funniest. He could go on riffs of these situations he found himself in that would have our stomachs aching. He was also very intuitive about thoughtful gifts that he knew we would enjoy. My kids loved him. His dog loved him.

And he never complained. Whenever he was sick, people had to tell him to get to the ER. He knew he had to give up smoking and he did it without making a big deal about it. When he had to give up drinking, he did. No fanfare. I think he felt undeserving of attention.

I keep thinking we should have paid more attention, but in another stroke of bad luck for BIL, his demise came when we were throwing all our attention on DD's, DIL's and DH's cancer diagnoses. There wasn't any energy left over for BIL, who had no other support but us. It makes me very sad.