How much do you owe a long-estranged parent? (kind of long)

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think the only person who can assess how much guilt she will feel is Letty herself, and she should be guided accordingly. My personal opinion is that she owes her father nothing – but I do understand about the guilt in reaching such decisions.

However, all that has been well said by others in this thread. I want to raise a different concern:

If Letty’s father is already on Medicaid in order to be housed in his current facility, won’t monetary contributions by either child push Dad’s income over the Medicaid threshold, causing it to be withdrawn?

This was certainly the case for my birth mother twenty years ago. I can’t imagine Medicaid’s rules have changed.

By contributing funds for a better facility, they may actually make Dad’s situation worse.

22

Bob wants money. He is trying to get money by using emotional manipulation. Do not give Bob your money. He’s really no more than a scam artist in my opinion.

23

It was the OP that said “virtually a stranger.”

I’m not sure it is worth the effort to maintain the relationship with an adult sibling you barely know, especially if your main connection is childhood trauma.

I’m an only child, but each of my parents has siblings like this. Various parties have made various degrees of effort, and they’re all basically nice people, but they really can’t make up for the damage their parents did them. It’s not their fault at all, but that ship sailed long ago. I think the only time my two uncles (half brothers, maybe five years apart in age) even MET was at their father’s funeral. Without time and money to bridge the geography, not to mention the effort, it’s really hard to actually become close.

24

If it helps her deal with her guilt, she should remember that this is a zero sum game, and not just between her and her estranged father. If she gives money to this person that she does not know, she is not just making a personal sacrifice. She is directly taking that money away from her husband and children who do love and care for her.

25

This is my experience also, having been a community health nurse for many years.

Personally, when my mother was in a Medicaid nursing home, we could not do more than occasionally supplying her with $20 dollars worth a month of her favorite pudding cups. We were not allowed to get her better hearing aids or the fancier corrective lens implants during her Medicaid funded cataract surgery nor replace her dentures when they became ill-fitting and painful without her losing her nursing home coverage.

26

This was exactly my experience, too. Thankfully, she’d gone into the facility before she qualified for Medicaid and it was a good facility. And they treated her the same before and after Medicaid.

27

A nice card and good wishes on the appropriate occasions. No $$. The Medicare facility is fine.

28

Well that hit home. I am not going to hijack this thread with my fucked up childhood but I wouldn’t think of guilting my two step-sisters with bullshit like Bob did. I actually like them a lot but we didn’t grow up together and they are half sisters and have no relationship at all. Last September the three of us were all in the same place for the first time since 1995 and I think the second time ever. One I hadn’t seen since then and one twice since then. I had a heart to heart with each of them and told them that when the time comes I would appreciate any help but not expect any help and there would be no judgments. They indicated that they wouldn’t be inclined.

29

I haven’t seen my dad since I was nine. I hope he wins the lottery and leaves me a fortune when he dies.

30

Haven’t really read anybody else’s opinion, but mine is:

Your friend owes their estranged parent sweet fuck-all.

An accident of birth does not bind a person to some mysterious “debt” to anybody, let alone anybody that they haven’t been in contact with for something approaching half a century.

31

I’m not excusing his negligence but people grapple with this issue with parents who were abusive, not just absent.

32

True. But I don’t see how that doesn’t make total absence a break in the relationship.

And while it’s not clear whether there was active abuse involved, ceasing contact with an 11 year old is still plenty of reason for the adult child to refuse contact or assistance later, if they choose to do so.

33

Letty has no relationship with father. Bob does, and wants a different kind of care for father. Bob also seems to be essentially out of relationship with Letty but now seeks funds for absent dad. Letty isn’t obligated to fund Bob’s preferences, or a different kind of care for, essentially, a stranger, unless the impetus comes from her own decision to participate.

34

I did say other than that, not that it wasn’t a break in the relationship. If there had been abuse by her father that would be a clear reason that Letty should not sacrifice for his care. We don’t know if he provided child support, how he treated her brother, or how her fathers detachment was related to his mother’s life. Divorced parents used to bow out more often when their ex re-married. So possibly Letty feels some responsibility to care for her birth father that she wouldn’t feel if things had been worse between them before the complete break. I don’t think either Letty or her brother should sacrifice much for him, or anything at all. As others have pointed out he should be fine with a Medicare covered facility. She has no great obligation to him if he made no attempt to remain in her life even if the early years were fine. This seems to be a problem Letty and her brother have to both work out and as I mentioned before (I think) the brother probably feels guilty about not being able to cover the costs since he had a closer relationship with his father. I know I wouldn’t want my children to have to pay for me in those conditions but other people feel differently about these things.

35

What I was responding to was this:

Plenty of non-custodial parents remain in touch with their children despite being separated by divorce. Even if the distance makes physical visits difficult, both telephones and mail exist (though Zoom etc. probably didn’t if I understand the time right.) Unless the custodial parent was blocking both phone and mail contacts that the absent parent was attempting to make, failing to do so is most certainly a break in the relationship that was not caused by the divorce itself. There’s no mention of that in the OP; and even if that was happening, there was no contact after the child reached majority and the previously-custodial parent would no longer have been in a position to do so.

36

I don’t disagree with you. I should have simply pointed out the story didn’t mention any abuse or worse treatment by her father other than him leaving the picture. That’s not good fathering, unacceptable to many, but it’s not the worst possible kind. The only reason to mention that was to contrast with cases of children who had much worse parents who should have no difficulty with a decision like this.

37

Some of them do, though.

I don’t think adult children in either situation need to feel guilty about refusing help. But saying that they don’t need to doesn’t automatically make guilt go away, if it’s there.

And I don’t think that ‘some people have it worse’ is very often a useful response. To a person insisting they should go to the head of the line in the ER because of a broken toe when others are in there with multiple serious trauma from a car accident, yes it is. But not in cases like this.

38

That’s pretty far away from what I was saying. Some people still feel an obligation to care for abusive parents and it would be easy to tell them they have no such obligation and should find a way to deal with those feelings instead of sacrificing their actual family’s needs.

Letty’s situation could be different. Her parents made the decision to split up the children and we don’t know how much her mother had to do with her father’s separation from Letty. We don’t know if her father paid child support, or possibly alimony. Her father may have been an acceptable parent to her brother which could count for something depending on her relationship with him. Then she had a step family eventually which could have played a role in the distancing of her father.

If she feels some obligation to her father for whatever reason she may be better off in the long run contributing to his care so she doesn’t feel any guilt about this situation and how she will deal with this situation with the rest of her family in the future. OTOH if her father treated her worse than we know about dealing with her feeling of obligation and/or guilt would serve her better IMHO.

39

Whoa, so many great replies! I spoke with “Letty” (aka “Louise” due to my brain farting) last night, after I’d read a lot of them, so I was able to get some info in response to questions that came up. Lately I haven’t been able to do multi-quote replies successfully, so I’ll just put it all in this message, sorry for not quoting appropriately.

Also, since all the messages were greatly supportive of Letty, I’ve sent her a link to the threat – I’ve got to think that it will help her with her feelings of guilt to see what you all have said. Hey, maybe she’ll decide to become a poster here, I know she at least used to be active on facebook.

Okay, answers/clarifying starts:

“When Letty … lost her mother, how much did the brother and father do for her mother at that time?”

Nothing. But for context, Letty has no reason to think either was even aware of the death. The split between the sides of what used to be a family was basically total, especially after her father moved away for job reasons. Letty doesn’t know all the details, of course, having been a first grader at the time, but later she was told by her mother that she and the father had worked out their own divorce settlement (each with their own lawyers) and the judge had basically accepted what they’d decided. Her mother had been a SAHM since they married, her father the bread-winner. Instead of alimony and child support, he had used a big chunk of an inheritance he’d gotten around that time to fully pay off their house and transfer it into the mother’s sole possession plus a large amount of cash. Mother had gone back to work – she was a secretary prior to marriage – and eventually gotten into a lower level management/supervisor position. The money was enough, along with her earnings, that they lived comfortably and Letty got through college okay between help from her mom, a scholarship, and a part time job during college.

Her father rented a house in a nearby town where he and Bob lived, along with the woman he was having the affair with that led to the divorce. Apparently the marriage had been rocky for years, and there had been other, um, ‘less important’ others, but the father wanted to be free to marry that ‘other woman.’ There had also been sometimes violent fights between them. Letty didn’t go into that in details, mostly she didn’t witness them, just overhead it happening sometimes at night. She said she and Bob weren’t abused themselves.

Anyway, after the father (and Bob, she doesn’t know what happened with the new woman) moved away, contact fell off swiftly to just a phone call now and then, and the some years birthday cards. She knows they came from various states before ending. Bob told her they moved around a lot due to his father losing/taking other jobs.

So she didn’t have either of their addresses when her mother died, and apparently it had been so long that she no longer really thought of either of them being ‘family’ to her. (Maybe that counts as her ‘abandoning’ them?)

Apparently the only way Bob was able to contact her now was that her real first name is very rare plus he was able to find some older contact info via searching the internet after tracking down records from when she’d sold her mother’s old house.

Various comments about the nursing home probably being adequate/Letty might check on it herself/her father likely not really caring about it due to his condition. I also told Letty yesterday that that agreed with my own experience. My mother got to the stage that all she wanted to do was sort of simply exist. She ate whatever we made, apparently fine with whatever it was so long as it was the kind of foods that she herself had cooked for her family. Her favorite activity was staring at the TV. She’d been a great fan of MASH always. I built up a set of four six-hour video tapes of MASH episodes, and most days I’d put one of them into the VCR in the afternoon and she’d sit there watching it, usually smiling or even laughing sometimes, for many months towards the end. It sounds weird, but I think she’d have said her life was happy. So long as the facility provides her father with basic care – keep him warm, fed, clean – it’s probably ‘okay.’ Letty seemed somewhat reassured by that, but really not inclined to go check. I think somewhat of the ‘don’t look for trouble’ mindset.

She appreciated the advice to check, really thoroughly check, about the Medicaid rules and how any contribution from her might screw up the entire situation.

Something that doesn’t directly tie to one of your comments, but that became pretty clear as I talked to Letty: her father was, to put it kindly, really strict about separate gender roles. He was proud of Bob, took him on camping trips, was involved in the sports Bob played, would do typical fatherly activities like washing the car together. Letty? Well, he loved her, but she was a girl, and a very young one at that. It was her mother’s job to take care of her, deal with all the ‘girly’ things. I got the feeling that other than kissing her goodbye when he left for work, or talking a bit at the dinner table, there was never much interaction with her father ever.

40

Any small ounce of sympathy I had for the brother went right out the window with this sentence. I can’t imagine ever having the gall to not speak to someone for 40 years, and then only look them up to ask for money. Seems like he and the father were cut from the same cloth.