To Divorce or not Divorce...that is the question

Person_one

margaretclare wrote: »

I haven't read through all the thread

You'd have saved yourself the bother of typing that out if you had...

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

My mother was in the process of getting divorced when her husband ended up in intensive care just after the Decree Nisi had been issued, but before the Absolute. They'd been living separately for nearly ten years at that point and she had met somebody else roughly five years after that.

She had the legal right to make decisions about his care, whether he had surgery, whether they performed resuscitation, whether they kept the machine switched on. It didn't matter what his mother, father, girlfriend or children wanted, as she was still married to him, she made all the decisions.


She told them to switch off the machines.

Mojisola

Jojo_the_Tightfisted wrote: »

She had the legal right to make decisions about his care, whether he had surgery, whether they performed resuscitation, whether they kept the machine switched on. It didn't matter what his mother, father, girlfriend or children wanted, as she was still married to him, she made all the decisions.

He could have changed this by nominating someone else as his NOK for health issues - worth doing for anyone who splits up with their spouse.

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

Mojisola wrote: »

He could have changed this by nominating someone else as his NOK for health issues - worth doing for anyone who splits up with their spouse.

I don't know whether that was in force at the time, but I suppose he thought that still being married wasn't an issue/that everything would be sorted in a few weeks once the divorce was finalised. It was settled, but not in the way he or anybody else anticipated. He was 47.


She benefited from an entitlement to a widow's pension based upon his national insurance contributions, as well. Hardly seems fair in the light of the fact that she'd been with my father for five years and I'd been born a few months previously, so his contributions went to support a child that wasn't even his. And she apparently got a higher rate of pension at 60 because of the contributions he had made up to his death.

DigForVictory

No matter how little I had or expected, I'd save up & get the formal divorce, and absolute separation of finances. After all, if my Vegas husband met Ms.Right who happened to be dreadful with money, that fact I was still married to him would enable her to leech down my credit rating.

Just because we were still married.

No sirree.

Divorce, and with all reasonable speed.