The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [406]
After Leila died—on Warren’s sixty-sixth birthday—the family assembled for a funeral, their grieving complicated by a cauldron of mixed emotions. She went to rest as the person she had been; any hopes of what she could have become had things been different went to the grave along with her.
“I cried a lot when my mother died. It wasn’t because I was sad and missed her. It was because of the waste. She had her good parts, but the bad parts kept me from having a relationship with her. My dad and I never talked about it. But I really regret the waste of what could have been.”
With both his parents gone, Warren was the senior member of his family, the watchkeeper at that thin boundary between life and death. It was his sisters, however, whose lives were most affected by Leila’s death. They were surprised to find themselves inheriting a sizable amount of Berkshire stock from their mother, more than they had originally owned themselves, along with the first distribution from their father’s trust set up by their brother years before. Bertie had kept all her Berkshire stock from the beginning, and had her own philanthropic interests. She had always tended to contribute her energy and effort quietly, behind the scenes and did not want to play a leading role. And Doris now had real money again, for the first time since the “naked puts” debacle had wiped her out in 1987. For Doris, her mother’s death was a new beginning. She set up her own foundation, the Sunshine Lady Foundation, and started her giving with the Edith Stahl Kraft Outstanding Teacher Award, named after their aunt Edie—and modeled on the Omaha teacher awards named after their aunt Alice that her brother’s foundation gave out.
Warren’s sisters were now rich. Two of his children also had a little money, thanks to Susie’s persuasiveness about the million-dollar birthday gifts. Buffett had never demanded an accounting of the huge amounts it took to fund Susie’s largesse, although he scratched his head and wondered what on earth she did with all the money. The tax complication of the large gifts to their children, however, required that she give Warren a history of her gift-giving. He had always been proud of her generosity, although not always pleased about those who benefited from it. He was now particularly displeased by some of her larger gifts, which flew in the face of what he had understood about the nature of their marriage. His impression that she had ended her other relationship stood corrected. Despite the parallel between his own complicated personal life and Susie’s, he was upset.
A discussion of Susie’s will ensued. They had sharply differing opinions about who among her friends should receive bequests. In the end, his decision ruled. Afterward, the Buffett bathtub memory went to work. Anything negative that had transpired between them simply vanished, and Susie was restored as his ideal, because he needed her to be.
Warren had stood firm on the question of Susie’s bequests to her friends. But she had gentled him enough on issues of money when it came to their children that he was not only comfortable giving them a million dollars every few years while he was alive, he was going to leave them a reasonable amount of money after his death.5 It would not fund a zoo full of bears like William Randolph Hearst’s, but they would be more than comfortable.
Howie had used his first million-dollar birthday gift to buy a nine-hundred-acre farm in Decatur, Illinois, where he still lived. Now