DEAR SOMEONE ELSE’S MOM: My grandfather was a very wealthy businessman. He started a bank in his hometown when he was just back from WWII. He and my grandmother were like local royalty.
When my grandfather died everything was left to my grandmother, who remarried after a few years to a man with an adult son who was still living with him and who then moved into my grandparents’ house when his father did.
My grandmother died last year, and it turns out she left everything to her second husband, not my father and his three sisters, which really gets me angry.
Doesn’t it seem just plain wrong to leave everything to someone who has no connection to my grandfather and the family he and my grandmother raised, not to mention the legacy they built for that family?
I am so hurt for my father and aunts. When I think about how my grandmother’s stepson will then get everything when his father dies, it makes me even madder! --- JUST NOT RIGHT
DEAR JUST NOT RIGHT: Regardless of how right or wrong it feels, your grandmother was at liberty to leave her estate to whomever she chose.
It’s understandably painful for you and your family, but your grandmother may have based her decision more on a desire to provide for her second husband than to slight her other loved ones.
Through the years, I’ve seen similar cases where there was a perceived uneven distribution of assets between survivors based on the departed’s belief that some of them were either better off or less in need of extra income than others.