When Land Isn’t Just Land…

When Land Isn’t Just Land: Inheritance, Dementia, and the Old Irish Wounds We Carry…

There’s a strange heaviness that comes with family inheritance. And it’s not the paperwork or the solicitors or the bickering over fences and sheds.
It’s something older. Something heavier. Something no one warns you about.

If you’ve lived it, you’ll know what I mean.

I’ve spent the last while trying to wrap my head around it, not from a legal point of view, but a spiritual one. Because what happens in families when dementia moves in and land comes up for grabs is nothing short of a reckoning. And if you’ve got Irish blood in your veins, it hits differently.

The Land Carries Memory…

In Ireland, land isn’t just dirt and grass. It’s memory. It’s survival. It’s proof your people existed and mattered.

It holds the stories of those who worked it, fought for it, died on it, and kept silent about what happened between those stone walls. And when an inheritance battle begins, when wills get changed in the dark and greed wraps itself up as loyalty, it’s not just the fields at stake.

It’s the family myth. It’s the unspoken debts. It’s the ancestral ghosts scratching at the window, demanding to be heard.

Dementia, Dysfunction, and Unfinished Business…

When dementia arrives, it changes the game. The parent who held the family history in their head suddenly forgets names but remembers old grudges. Secrets leak out at midnight. Things that were buried come crawling to the surface. And it forces families into roles they’ve rehearsed for generations without even realizing it.

The dutiful one. The greedy one. The black sheep. The silent one. The peacemaker.

It’s a play that’s been running for centuries in Irish families. Only now, the stage lights are on and nobody knows their lines anymore.

Greed Is Often Grief in Disguise…

I’ve learned that the greed you see in these situations, the snatching at land, the lies, the rush to control, isn’t always about money. It’s about fear. It’s about validation. It’s about claiming something solid when everything else is falling apart. It’s ancestral survival instinct dressed up as entitlement.

Because somewhere in the bloodline, someone was left with nothing. Someone starved. Someone lost the family land to the landlord or the Church or the brother who had the priest on his side. And that old wound moves through generations like smoke under a door.

The Spiritual Inheritance…

Here’s the bit no one tells you:

The real inheritance isn’t the land. It’s the wisdom. The resilience.
The choice to end the old patterns before they bury you too.

I did a small ritual last night, nothing fancy, just me, a candle, a stone, and a few whispered words to the ancestors. I told them I wasn’t carrying their old grief anymore. I’d take their strength, their stories, their resilience, but the rest could go back to the soil.

And I felt lighter.

Because the land may belong to someone else now, but the spiritual inheritance is mine.

And no one can touch that.

If This Is You Too…

If you’re tangled in a family mess of inheritance, dementia, greed, and unspoken hurts, I see you. It’s brutal. It’s lonely. And it’s ancient.

But you’re not mad. You’re the one in the bloodline meant to wake up.
To name what no one else would. To end what needs ending.

And that’s the real legacy.

Mae 🧡