Help! I Could Keep My Brother Alive, But I Don’t Like His Wife!

Carolyn Hax, Washington Post,1 November 2021:

Dear Carolyn: What do I owe my siblings, if anything? My husband has been fortunate enough to make a lot of money, and we agreed long ago that it was for us and our adult sons, not our (many) deadbeat relatives.

My older brother pretty much raised me and helped my husband when starting out. Brother had a severe stroke three years ago, and Second Wife claims they have gone through all their savings and are now $140,000 in debt with all the costs. She is trying to guilt me into helping them. I do not feel this is appropriate.

She did quit her job to take care of him, but they were improvident and did not buy long-term care insurance. I ask her why she does not put him in a home or hire a full-time aide and she says they can’t afford it.

Brother’s adult children tell me Second Wife is horrible, which is why they choose not to help, either. Second Wife had the nerve to ask me to help buy Brother an oxygen concentrator. It is expensive: $2,500. I think this is pushing it. She comes off as bitter, so we said no.

Now she tells me she will have to launch a GoFundMe, because otherwise they will lose their house. This will be extremely embarrassing to my husband and me, because we are prominent in the community. What do you advise? — Family

Dear Family,

While your problem has, on the surface, a very obvious solution — let the brother who raised you and gave your now-wealthy family its start in the world die a slow, desperate death in poverty because you don’t like his wife’s attitude — families are complicated. Sometimes it’s not as easy as getting what you want from someone financially and emotionally and then abandoning them forever because you don’t care whether they live or die — because then the neighbors might talk! What a pickle.

Of course your brother should be forced to forego the medical care he needs because you don’t like his wife. That much is clear. It’s not about the money — you’d never miss a dime — but you think your brother’s wife sucks, so it’s just really not worth ensuring he has the medical care and housing he needs. Anyone in your shoes would make the same calculation without a second thought.

However, things get sticky when we start thinking about what really matters: how embarrassing it will look to people you aren’t related to, who you’ve never met and have no responsibility toward, if it comes out that your brother is an irresponsible poor who didn’t even get long-term health insurance before deciding to have a stroke in a country with an exploitative, unjust, discriminatory, and deliberately impenetrable medical system that drives millions of people into unimaginable debt every year.

It would be a kindness if the man who raised you and seeded your family’s vast financial success could just suffer in silence and die in the streets with his bad wife and leave you out of it. That’s an outcome you could be proud of — the kind of comfortable, happy little family story you’d be fine sharing with a few intimate friends at the club. But for your sister-in-law to publicly humiliate you by trying to stay alive and housed in order to fund your brother’s medical care, when she knows you simply can’t help him because you hate her! That is impudence of the highest order, and your brother’s wife is only creating for everyone a self-perpetuating cycle wherein she quits her job to care for her husband and has to beg other people for money to stay alive, and you have to keep not giving her money because you hate her because she’s so poor and embarrassing! The one and only solution in this situation is so simple — she shuts up, he dies! — and yet, this self-absorbed couple just can’t bring themselves to take the necessary steps.

There’s nothing you can do here, since funding your brother’s medical care as the most minimum thanks for his support at the most crucial times in your own life will only help him live a longer and more comfortable life without his wife having to make a big public show of their poverty at you. Some people really can’t see past their own self-interest! An upside: if your in-laws go forth with their crowdfunding plan, you will see your own visibility in the community grow in some interesting new ways.