I was listening to the radio Friday evening when the announcer described a news report to be aired after a commercial. Normally, I would change the station but was intrigued by the story — a son evicting his mother from the home she had lived in for forty years. The news story reported that the son served the eviction complaint on his mother’s ninety-first birthday, just twelve days before Christmas. The reporter recited that the son had somehow gained control of the title and was seeking to sell it. Some one more clever than I must be rewriting The Twelve Days of Christmas with this story in mind.

While we do not know the back-story to this attempt to throw a ninety-one year old into the snow, one suspects that it arose from the desire to cut down on the estate taxes due on the mother’s death. There are, however, methods to safeguard a parent’s home while still trying to decrease the size of a taxable estate, and these do not necessarily require a parent to lose control and suffer the same fate as this ninety-one year old...