TW for brief descriptions of DV, child abuse, suicide and death.
Tl;dr My mother spent my childhood suing the people responsible for leaving my sister severely disabled and maimed, often leaving me and my two older brothers alone with our abusive father while she was at the hospital getting things documented with my sister. My sister was awarded $8–15 million, but she’s now on hospice. My eldest brother died by suicide because of the trauma we endured, and my surviving brother turned to drugs. My mother just told me about the lawsuit and the money, which my brothers knew nothing about. Because of my family’s circumstances, I’ll inherit it all when my sister dies. My mother made that choice. My surviving brother has no idea.
I grew up extremely poor. My family lived below the poverty line. Two older brothers, an older sister and me. My sister was maimed and left severely disabled after an incident, by the fault of people charged with protecting her. I won’t go into detail about it, as it’s extremely identifiable and I don’t need anybody recognising me. But it decreased her life expectancy to just years, a decade or two at most, and her quality of life is abysmal.
I always wondered why my mother never sued. I used to ask her and get some vague answers about how it only would’ve made our lives harder, and they were just trying to pick up the pieces and carry on. But it made me resentful, admittedly.
My sister was always the favourite, all the extra attention went into her, my mother would disappear with her for months at a time taking her to specialised programs and treatments at world class hospitals across our country or even in other countries—leaving the other three of us with our severely abusive father and no money left for a second or third meal of the day.
My sister was spared the abuse by virtue of how disabled and sick she was. One of my brothers learned early on how to shut up and keep his head down. But my other brother and I… we got it really bad. One particularly bad concussion left my brother with cluster headaches at 13.
That same year, after 10 horrific years spent with him, my mother uprooted all us kids and we moved across the country in the middle of the night to a small town where he’s unable to find us. But the damage was already done.
My brother developed addictions to try and manage the pain from his cluster headaches, and deal with the trauma he lived with from the abuse we suffered. He confided in me at one point that he’d been offered a place in a trial that had promising results for cluster headache sufferers, and he wanted to take it. Then he found out it wasn’t covered by healthcare yet. With how sick and disabled our sister is, and how she’s always been the favourite, the focus, he did what we had been trained to—he… left the trial. Because he didn’t want to ask our mother for any money that we had been taught should go to my sister instead.
If we were expected to give up meals so she could be part in random trials around the world, then how could he ever justify taking part in a trial himself when my mother could use that money for something for my sister instead? We were so well trained by that point. My sister was so clearly the favourite. Her birthday was the passcode to everything, including the credit card PIN numbers. Every holiday was one she had chosen. And yes, weirdly enough, we managed to afford several holidays after we left my father and cut off our one income—in hindsight, this is one of the things that should’ve tipped me off. My mother didn’t work, but she said she had saved a lot from when she did, and we were living off the interest supposedly. That’s the story we got. My sister would get double the presents, she got to pick any pet we got, etc. So it went without saying that we grew up to believe everything in our lives needed to be directed around her, and therefore—no cluster headache trial.
He took his own life a few months later.
I grew up knowing my mother was getting older and increasingly unwell, and that I would eventually be expected to care for my sister. My other brother escaped into drugs and alcohol, too, so it fell to me.
I geared my life around it. I resented my sister for being the favourite, and sometimes thought horribly that if she’d died, my mother might have left our father sooner and spared us all that abuse.
But I love my sister. None of this is her fault. She doesn’t even know about any of it, and she loves us so, so much. So I dedicated my life to becoming the best possible caregiver for her.
I did healthcare courses, then went to uni for journalism and law. I’ve always wanted to be a journalist, but I know I’d make a good lawyer, and I need to earn enough to support the carousel of carers and medical professionals my sister requires.
I’ve always wanted to be an author, though. To actually use my voice for me for once. My life has always been dedicated to advocating for others. I was born with that job, but books and writing were my escape.
Alas, my sister comes first. So I went into law and journalism. Filled out the paperwork to apply for scholarships, because we’re still so poor. But the scholarships are assets and income tested, so I needed proof from my mother that we have no income except her piddly savings, which she told me were $40k at around that time—far below the half a million dollar threshold.
My mother put it off for weeks. Then my sister got extremely sick. Her heart is failing, and it’s filling her lungs with fluid. She stops breathing sometimes, and an alarm she’s hooked up to will go off, screaming through the house. And so my mother told me she had something to tell me.
They did sue. And when I was 10, they were awarded money. In exchange, the matter would be settled out of court, but no “settlement” would be exchanged—no admission of wrongdoing. An award of money. A donation. How philanthropic of the people who maimed my sister and will be her killers.
I won’t say the amount, but it’s between 8-15 million dollars awarded to my sister directly. The largest sum of money that had ever been awarded to any singular benefactor in the place we lived at that point in time. This money doesn’t include the individual awards given to my mother and father. Between half a million and a million each. My father put his in gold, apparently. My mother owns three plots of land—and our home. I knew about none of it. My cousins, my aunts, my uncles, family fucking friends knew. But not my brothers or I.
And because my sister is dying, that trust will dissolve soon. Apparently, the way it’s intended to work is that when the recipient dies, the trust dissolves and splits between the remaining immediate family members—my brothers, my parents and I. Except, my mother is still legally married to my POS father, and my brother is deep into drugs and gang activities. So my mother has spent the last several years going to court over and over, and consulting with an array of attorneys, to ensure that when my sister passes, the money only moves onto me.
I’ll inherit it all. I didn’t even fucking know about it a few months ago. My mother is confused that I’m so fucking gutted, and I can’t talk to any of my friends because how am I supposed to explain that becoming a millionaire is the worst thing to ever happen to me? I lost my childhood for this money. The lawyers told my mother that their best chance at winning if it went to court was if we met a standard of a picture-perfect family who were otherwise perfect, until the Incident. So my mother stayed with my father. The defence delayed everything constantly by pushing for more and more tests, insisting that evidence could be found to prove my sister wasn’t as bad off as my mother made her out to be.
So my mother had to keep taking her to all these different doctors around the country and around the world to have elaborate tests and treatments done, just to prove that nothing ever improved. Every holiday, every pet being picked by my sister is because everything was paid for by her. Her blood money. Every password, every PIN number being her birthday? Apparently it’s a reminder to my mother every time she buys something—this is paid for out of your daughter’s blood money, so do you really need it? They get a quarterly payment out of the trust, and my mother has to prove to the company where every dollar is spent. Which is why basic necessities were struggling to be covered for my siblings, but my sister was getting dozens of presents every Christmas. Every SINGLE thing in my life ties back to this stupid fucking money, and it’s the worst thing that could have happened to me.
Without it, I’d still have my brother. Without it, I’d have my sister. I’d have my other brother, not lost to drugs. We wouldn’t have been stuck with an abusive POS for a father. We would’ve been able to grow up with our mother. I could’ve followed my dreams. I could’ve gotten a scholarship I earned, and deserved, rather than a lame one simply because I don’t qualify for the others.
All of my drama-loving, leech cousins buddying up to me in recent years was because my aunt had shared with them about the money. My other aunt constantly trying to hold cherished childhood photos of my brothers hostage to force me into getting coffee with her or something when she couldn’t have cared less about my brother when he was alive, desperately trying to reach out to the little family we had left, isn’t because she had some wakeup call after his death—it’s because she knows about the money and who it’s going to go to. Fucking everybody knew, but my brothers and I, who aside from my sister, gave up the absolute most for this piece of shit blood money. It makes me sick. I hate all of them. I hate the money. I hate that my mother thought it was good compensation for the childhood we had. I hate that I wasted so, so many years resenting and hating my sister for being the favourite, the “spared”, the protected, all because I didn’t know what was actually going on, and now she’s dying and I’ll never get those years back with her. I hate that instead of my brother and sister, that’s all I’ll have. I hate that I’m in my second year of uni and nobody will understand why I’m crying over inheriting millions. I hate that it could’ve saved my brother. I hate that I’ve worked so hard all my life, suffered so much, graduated several years early and it’s all been for fucking money that I was lied to about. I can’t even earn my own goddamn scholarship that I fought for years for. I worked so hard for it just to be unable to apply because of this money that I didn’t earn at all.
Everyone chose to sacrifice us, making the executive decision for us that the money we would inherit would be decent enough compensation one day. I hate that I grew up poor while my sister grew up rich, and I hate that I understand my mother’s reasonings for most things, because the impact of them was so horrible at the time. The favouritism in hindsight… of course my sister should’ve been the one to choose everything. It’s her money. But nobody told us anything. In fact, they explicitly lied about it. My mother said she wanted us to live our own lives and create our own paths without the knowledge that we’d inherit millions one day—she didn’t want us depending on that. I hate that, seeing how my brother is now, I understand why she made that choice.
Because my brother, the one person who understands, who loves everything with me, the only one who could possibly conceptualise what a monumental betrayal and heartbreak this is… he’s not inheriting any of it. He gets nothing for his troubles, except a whole lot of trauma. And with the person he’s become, it is justified. He would just depend on the money, and see it as the world finally giving him what he deserves for his pain, then he’d use a good chunk on the first wild night and OD, with his luck. Or get stabbed again, and not wake up this time. So I’ve become all the people I’m scorning. I’m hiding it from him. The money he would be just as entitled to, I am taking all of.
I had a horrible childhood, and yet somehow, I was never jaded from it. Now I’m just so jaded, so betrayed. I’m so, so angry and resentful, and I have no idea where to go in life from here. It’s completely shattered the foundation everything I know has been built on. Every choice I made in life, based on a lie.
I apologise for the supremely long tangent. And I want to really thank anyone who stuck around this far down. I hope you jumped around or skim read, because I think the only thing worse than living all this would have to be reading it. As stated, I’m unable to talk about this with anyone in my personal life, so I really just needed some girlfriends to vent with, maybe even get some advice if anyone could possibly advice any part of this niche, nuanced disaster.
Even the counsellors at my uni kind of mocked me about this until I broke down in class one day, and my journalism tutor (thank god for her) pressed me hard about what’s wrong (I’m an excellent student so my performance dropping is really unusual for me) and then met with one of the counsellors herself to talk to them about me and got
me an appointment. I just… can’t fathom what my life has become. If this had been a soap opera, I’d have turned it off by now for how much it’s reaching.
Dinner is the all-day big breakfast (salad, bacon, hashbrown, scrambled eggs on sourdough toast, avocado and mushrooms) offered at the cafe down my street and a rose latte.
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