The Pessimist

Well, for the second time in a month, I'm doing the unusual -- I'm posting something personal on this site. Have you ever been disinherited? It is the atom-bomb of family relations. It is cruel, final and undo-able. You can't ask the question "why did you do this?" You can't complain. The prick is dead and he's not talking. You can only wonder why and curse into the ether. And that's how we find ourselves here. Cursing him out on the internet is the best I can do.

Angelo 1924 - 2005

Elsie 1920 - 2006

Angelo is the only rich relative I had; He's not even my relative really; he's an uncle-in-law. But he left my wife nothing, despite he and his wife being very close to her for over 40 years, just to spite me.

What horrible thing did I do to him to deserve this treatment? Here's the story. I did his tax return for a few years. I noticed that his investment income was rather low, because he had all of his money invested in 30 day bank notes, in his savings account and in his matress. I suggested that he could earn more with different investments. I wasn't suggesting commodities futures, or high growth equities, or anything risky like that. I suggested he could at least double his investment income if he put his money into 5-year GICs. He didn't want to. I suggested he really should. He didn't want to, though he couldn't/wouldn't tell me why. I insisted that he should. He told me he didn't want to talk to me anymore.

That was my sin. He couldn't deal with locking in his money. I suggested doing 5 years, with one fifth of his money maturing each year. He wouldn't hear of it. I guess he didn't trust the banks (the "Jews"). Or, he kept saying "What if I need my money in a hurry?". Like why, I said, in case you need to leave the country at a moment's notice, like if a world war broke out again and he had to flee? As best as I could figure, this was his rational for wanting to earn 1.5% on his entire life savings.

Also, he didn't want to pay taxes on the extra income. I hear this argument from old people from time to time. They seem immune to the logic that tax is a percent of the income. If you earn an extra dollar and pay 40 cents taxes, you still have 60 cent more than if you didn't earn the extra dollar. He couldn't be convinced. The man was a moron.

If he had followed my advice, he would have had an estate one third larger than he did. (That's the power of compound interest over 10 years. It could have been his for the cost of a phone call.) But instead, he gets mad at me and fucks over my wife.

But dear Angelo didn't just have a hate on for me. He and his wife Elsie spent decades of their life dropping relatives in and out of favour (mostly out). Angelo could hold a grudge like an Arab. Half of the family did something at some time to to get on their "never speak to again" list. I was never sure if Elsie was a moderating influence on these hate cycles, or if she was a corrosive catalyst that magnified these perceived slights and helped carry the grudges over the decades. Elsie spent the last 5 years of her life in a vegetative state, so her contribution can't really be known.

But Angelo was a total freak in so many ways. He was paranoid to a level that certainly constituted a mental illness. He was certain people were tapping his phone, sneaking into his apartment, following him when he moved around. He mistrusted all strangers -- particularly the ziki-boos (dark skinned people) and the Jews.

But for the half of the family that he (they?) hated, he used their wills for the final punishment. They had no children of their own, so they used their money to bludgeon the extended family:
- on the German side of the family: 4 relatives 1 inherited 3 did not.
- on the Italian side of the family: 7 brothers/sisters, dozens of nieces/nephews, about 1 third received something, but the distribution seemed designed for hurt.
Of my wife's siblings, 2 brothers received, 2 did not.
This seems designed to sew dissent to the survivors. Jealousy, guilt. How monstrous.

My mother-in-law (Angelo's sister-in-law) received nothing. My M-i-L fed that man several meals a week; during his wife's 5 year mental absence, she fed him 2 meals a day. He never bought groceries, never reciprocated in any way. "Inez, I'll take care of you" he'd say. It was easy to say: he was rich, she was poor. But in the end, he left her nothing.
For that, I hope that he and Elsie are receiving Satan's barbed penis up their asses every hour for all eternity.