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My wife’s Aunt Louise is a wonderful lady. She and her husband bought their home in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1970s. After her husband passed away, she sold her home for well over $1 million and moved back to the farming areas of Southern California where she grew up to be closer to her family. Living frugally, she doesn’t have to worry about money.
Aunt Louise has three children, all in their 40s and early 50s. Her two oldest are nice, normal people. Her youngest, Kay, on the other hand, is a different story. Kay meets all the criteria for a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Aunt Louise just turned 70. She’s really happy about it, especially after some health scares last year, and decided to celebrate. As a kind and giving person, celebrating means “doing something nice for others.”
Aunt Louise has three children, 14 nieces and nephews, and more than 40 grand-nieces and grand-nephews. She sent everyone a generous gift and a personalized note saying how much she loved them and urging them to “do something fun with this money, don’t pay bills with it!” Judging from what my wife (her niece) and our kids received, I suspect she sent each niece and nephew a $1,000 check and each grand-niece and grand-nephew a $500 check.
It was a generous and sweet gesture. When a couple of the kids came by this weekend for a BBQ, we talked about Aunt Louise, their plans for the money, and, as I suspect Aunt Louise intended, had happy conversations about fun plans.
Then the email came…
For background, Kay audits her mother’s finances with a level of scrutiny that would make the IRS blush. Last Christmas, she berated her mother for vacationing in NYC with a friend, despite it being a lifelong dream of Aunt Louise’s to see the city during Christmas. She has frequently talked about her inheritance in front of her still-very-much-alive mother.
Kay’s email to my wife and others claimed that her mother is suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s, and made a request. While we suspected this was “Kay being Kay,” my wife still called Aunt Louise, just in case. All of this was news to Aunt Louise, who was as lucid as ever.
The best part of Kay’s email was her request that everyone send the money they received from Aunt Louise to her, Kay, instead of Aunt Louise. Kay “nobly” volunteered to handle all the deposits herself, claiming she wanted to avoid burdening her poor, infirm mother.
Given Kay’s history of helping herself to Aunt Louise’s money without permission (let’s call it what it is: stealing), I’m fairly convinced not a dime would make its way back to Aunt Louise.
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Let’s swiftly assess a handful of the top comments: AITA for Keeping the Checks My Aunt Gifted to My Relatives for Myself?
Sadly, this is just one chapter in a long book.
Aunt Louise has taken steps with a lawyer and accountant to protect herself. That is the fullest extent she’ll go. She is aware of who Kay is and what she does, but then she says things like, “She’s my daughter, what can I do?” and through that inaction, hopes for change end.
She is aware of Kay’s latest scheme. If she confronted Kay at all, I have no doubt Kay told her, “I was gonna deposit the money for you!” And no doubt that Aunt Louise didn’t believe a word.
Careless-Ability-748 writes:
You can’t shame someone who is shameless.
You can call Kay out to her face and she’ll look at you like, “Yeah, and?”
My wife posted something in the family Facebook group about it. Most replies were along the lines of, “Yeah, we figured.”
