Chapter 26 - THE CASE THAT MADE ME ANGRY
At seventy-two, I still thought I had become difficult to manipulate.
Then a case made me furious enough to prove otherwise.
A woman named Jenna Cole came to the center.
Her father had placed her inheritance into a spendthrift trust because she had opioid addiction in her twenties.
She had been sober fourteen years.
Still, the trustee required approval for rent changes, travel, business investment, even some medical expenses.
Jenna wanted full control.
I immediately sided with her.
Too quickly.
The trustee’s records showed three recent relapse scares.
Not proven relapse.
But concerning financial transfers.
Cash withdrawals.
Loans to a former using partner.
Jenna said:
“That’s my money.”
True.
Also incomplete.
The trust was specifically designed because her father feared addiction-related loss.
Was continued restriction paternalistic?
Maybe.
Was immediate release safe?
Maybe not.
I felt myself wanting the clean answer.
Choice good.
Control bad.
Then Sophie stopped me.
“You’re turning your biography into legal analysis.”
That hurt.
Good.
We brought in an addiction specialist chosen by Jenna.
A fiduciary expert.
Independent counsel.
The result:
Not full release.
Not status quo.
Step-down control.
Quarterly review.
More personal discretion.
Business investment cap.
No trustee access to therapy records.
A clear path to full control after two years if stability continued.
Jenna accepted reluctantly.
Later she told me:
“I thought you’d fight for me.”
“I did.”
“You compromised.”
“Yes.”
She stared.
Then:
“Maybe that was the fight.”
Exactly.
The lesson embarrassed me.
Even principles can become controlling when we force them onto people before listening to their actual risk.
Freedom includes the freedom to build safeguards around yourself.
Choice can include chosen limits.
The older I became, the less interested I was in perfect endings. People changed unevenly. Some apologized and repeated old habits. Some never apologized and still stopped harmful behavior. Some relationships healed. Others ended. The goal was not to force every story toward reconciliation. The goal was to leave fewer people trapped inside someone else’s definition of peace.
What the old Mercer years taught me was that control rarely announces itself as control. It arrives as efficiency, stability, family culture, privacy, protection, or concern. Those words are not bad. The danger begins when one person gets to define them for everyone else. That was why I kept asking for documents, timelines, independent advice, and a way to challenge any decision made in my name.
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I had also learned not to confuse emotional clarity with factual certainty. Anger could tell me something mattered. Fear could tell me I felt threatened. Neither feeling could prove motive on its own. The discipline was slower: preserve the evidence, separate what we knew from what we suspected, and let the person most affected decide how much help they actually wanted.
The center’s staff sometimes found that frustrating. People came to us expecting a strong answer. Leave. Sue. Fight. Sign nothing. But strong answers can become another form of pressure when they arrive before understanding. Our job was not to replace one family command with a professional command. It was to widen the number of choices available.
