12.3 Wife’s Relatives Did not See Petar

“My wife had been sick for more than two and a half years, when one day my relatives from Slano near Dubrovnik informed me to urgently come in order to resolve some problems concerning the construction of the house. Our son and daughter were visiting us at that moment, so I asked my son to look after mother during that week. I proposed him to take her to the relatives in Prekmurje. I went to Slano to arrange some papers related to the house.

Daughter called me by the phone in Slano and cried. I was hardly able to understand through her tears that she saw mother’s medical findings, in which mother had two large metastases in the brain and would soon die. I knew that my daughter did still not understand the health condition of her mother, so I tried to calm her with my peaceful voice. I said that she would live for some more time, but that she had an incurable disease and we had to slowly accept the reality that she would soon be gone. When I asked her who showed her the findings, she said that aunt and uncle from Prekmurje brought them.

The aunt, sister of my wife, lived in the town of Radenci; the uncle, my wife’s brother, took over the property and land and stayed with parents. They both behaved toward me as if I was to blame for the illness of their sister and tried to convince my son of the same. I asked my daughter why they showed her the X-ray of her mother’s brain, and she said that they were persuading her to talk her mother into bequeathing the apartment in which my wife and I lived to her, because the mother would die anyway, and they should take away all valuable things from the apartment, while the money that my wife and I had on the bank account should be divided between them. I had never before seen, read or heard from someone that the relatives of an incurably sick person robbed this person blind and acted toward another live member of the family as if he perished from the Earth. I just could not believe it. I told my daughter not to burden herself with all that, because I was coming home and I would solve all controversial problems; I called her aunt and told her to calm the situation and console my daughter, because she and her brother caused that awful situation.

When I arrived home, I expected that someone, i.e. my wife, relatives, daughter or son, would tell me what happened in my absence, but everyone behaved as if nothing was happening. After several months, my wife felt worst and she died six months after that event. Several days after the funeral, I checked the bank accounts and ascertained that they were empty, that my wife withdrew all the money without my knowledge. Interestingly enough, she took the money only one month before her death. She even withdrew the amount that we together saved for the construction of the house and for extraordinary occasions. I tried in vain to find out where the money was or who took it from the house. I wanted to believe that my wife left the money on some hidden bank account for her grandchildren, whom she loved very much. After several years, I watched the national television programme and a broadcast about successful farmers in the state. Among others appeared my wife’s brother, who was the wealthiest farmer in Prekmurje and said that he possesses more than one hundred heads of cattle and almost the same number of pigs, but the state blocked him with regulations and he was barely surviving. His sister built a chinchilla farm in Radenci.”

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