I thought I would take time today to share a true story of what happened in my own JW family as I was growing up as a dub that puts the spot light on what money starved dubs are willing to do when it comes to money issues.
Both of my grandparents on both sides and my parents were dubs. When I was growing up we were never well off financially thanks to the constant harping that Armageddon was near at hand and that my father should only work just long enough to make enough money to barely get by as Jehovah would provide (yeah, right). To make ends meet in our large family, my mother used to work by taking in older people who would otherwise need to be spending their last days in a nursing home and we typically had two or three people stay with our family until got to the point where they needed to be in a hospital, and often died soon thereafter. Anyway, something strange about some dub families is that money becomes more important that blood relationships and my grandmother on my mother’s side of the family was getting way up there in years and her husband (who was the PO of a congregation in a different state) wanted to put her in a nursing home.
After much heated conversation with my mother, he relented and decided to let her move in with my family in a different state, while he stayed where he was in his state. After a few months though, he started complaining about the costs of her care (he was a real penny pincher) and said he was going to put his foot down and pay a certain amount each month and that was that. Because of my grandmother’s medical condition, she needed the extra income to stay alive and my parents couldn’t afford it so they took the issue to the local body of elders and complained about it.
Our body of elders sent him a letter, which showed the scriptural reasons for his obligation to take care of his wife. As he was the PO of his own congregation, his body of elders wrote back accusing my mother of financial fraud. This lead to another series of letters between congregations wherein our congregation demanded that he show up in person to prove these allegations and if he wouldn’t they were going to send copies of all the correspondence to the Society and have him removed as an elder.
Well my grandfather was by nature an angry man and didn’t like to be bullied but to make matters worse for my mother, she was very angry with him and was padding the bills for my grandmother’s care by having her do a bunch of unnecessary medical tests, etc. that her Medicare didn’t cover to make his bills even higher. Anyway, he finally did come up with one other elder from his congregation and had a meeting with the local elders but our family never heard the results of it. Eventually, though the Circuit Overseer got involved in the fighting between congregations and they were going to setup some kind of hearing with a medical expert to see what kinds of billing was justified in taking care of my grandmother as nobody wanted to take this to court and make it public. Sadly, my grandmother was totally depressed because of all this fighting and the lack of love and she got so depressed she stopped eating, refused to move from her bed, and soon died before it went any further. I think she died from a broken heart.
My grandmother’s favorite advice to me was “always carry a Watchtower with you, you never know when you are going to need it.” It sure did her a lot of good didn’t it?
Skipper