Thank you for the kind posts above. There is no money for anyone to get. My guy is a recovering alcoholic - sober for the last 21 years. When his marriage fell apart, he took to drinking heavily. He went through his pension funds and went in and out of homelessness. I met him during one of his brief stable intervals. By the time I realised how close to the edge of barely surviving he was, I had fallen for him. His family welcomed me. I guess they thought that being in a relationship might help stabilize him. But it didn't. So I broke up with him. But he would contact me when he was on the street and desperate. (He didn't want his kids to see him that way . . . . . . and that was fine with them.) I would help him get off the street. Eventually - after a few years - his sober periods got longer and he would stick with jobs longer. We became very close and, when I moved across the country, he came with me. He found low paying jobs and we didn't need much materially to be happy. I earned more than he did, but I didn't care about that. What did bother me was that he would relapse into drinking, which became too much of a strain on me. So, after 7 years, we separated, but remained friends. Eventually, for health reasons, he did completely stop drinking permanently. So we grew very close again, though we have maintained separate apartments. We each have the necessities of life, but there's no money in the bank. Neither of us has any assets. So there is nothing for anyone to inherit.

Lest anyone rush to the presumption that he was an abusive drunk to his family during his marriage, that was not the case, according to them. He had been a good provider, and his kids told me they had happy childhoods. The marriage lasted many years . . . and then it didn't. He completely fell apart, when his wife found someone else.

His kids wrote him off as a lost cause when his drinking led to homelessness. Then they got a lot friendlier when he got sober and maintained employment. They encouraged him to visit annually. Then his health deteriorated from a spinal problem and he had trouble walking, and they lost interest in having him visit. It probably got to be too much bother for them. As seesaw says above, "they wrote him off" . . . again. The son told me on the phone, 6 years ago, "He belongs in a nursing home."

Even before the recent cancer diagnosis, it was clear that he was coming to the end of his life. Over the past few years, he's been hospitalized over and over. When an elderly person starts getting pneumonia recurrently - 3 times in less than 6 months - and repeatedly gets admitted to ICU, they're not long for this world. His kids knew well and good that they were likely to get a call any day with news that he had passed away, even before the cancer diagnosis. So this sudden drama about how "heartbroken" they are at the shocking news that he's dying seems hollow to me.

This is no shock. I figured a bout of pneumonia, or a heart attack, or another stroke would take him before the year was out. I just hoped it would be a quick final illness. What is new and distressing is the increasing likelihood, with lung cancer, that his final days may be pretty awful. The coughing that comes with cancer is awful. One lung is already more than half shut down. That's what disturbs the son. He thought a phone call would come one day soon saying his dad had a sudden heart attack and was gone. He would have been fine with that. But imagining his father now slowly suffocating to death is disturbing to him. He doesn't want to think about his father going through a painful process of dying . . . and he sure doesn't want to witness it. Now that Dad is officially "terminal," he feels obligated to fly out and make an appearance. But he doesn't want his father to look all sick and pitiful when he gets here. "We'll all go out for a nice dinner." the son texts me. "I will be seeing him for the last time, unfortunately." the son texts me. He wants to get here and get away before his father's condition becomes truly unpleasant to behold. Seeing that would be too "heartbreaking" for him. I guess I'm supposed to be impressed at how deep a love he has that he can't bear to watch the end. His texts to me past two days were all about how hard this is for him.

Well, that's enough venting from me. I got so upset yesterday, I neglected things that need doing. I better catch up.