Court Opinion

ID: 9665498
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 00:49:57.610291+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:16.159258
License: Public Domain

LeGRAND, Justice
(dissenting).
I cannot agree with the conclusion reached by the majority.
As in most disputes involving the construction of wills, the question reduces itself to whether we are giving effect to the testator’s intent, obscure but nevertheless present, or whether we are making his will over to conform to our notions. The majority says it has done the former, which is permissible; I say it has done the latter, which is not.
I find nothing in the record to support what the majority fixes as the testator’s intent. To say, as the majority does, he “thought” his granddaughter would die before she reached 30 because her mother did is hardly the stuff upon which such a decision should rest. Similarly to say, again as the majority does, the testator did not contemplate the possibility she might reach that age before his death is so unlikely that it cannot form a reasonable basis for determining testamentary intent.
If there is anything of which one is aware when executing his will, it is the uncertainty of life, both his own and that of an intended beneficiary. Usually it is this insecurity which motivates a testator in the first place. It is sheer speculation for this court to decide now that this testator did not contemplate such an elementary fact— that his granddaughter might reach 30 *700years of age while he was still alive — and to announce what his intent would have been if he had.
It is far more reasonable to say the provisions of Item III should be read as they are written without a tortuous searching for something that is not there. There is nothing to suggest otherwise except the majority’s gratuitous statement which attributes an unexpressed intent to Ernest Beaver posthumously for reasons which are both insubstantial and unpersuasive.
I believe the trial court reached the right result, and I would affirm.