u/Express-Commercial32

My mum died earlier this year. There are five of us siblings.

Her will left her estate to only three people: my younger sister, one of my brothers, and my younger sister’s adult daughter. My sister received the largest share, my brother received the next largest, and my niece received the rest. The other three siblings, including me, another sister and another brother, were left absolutely nothing.

I want to make something very clear because this is where inheritance stories often get misunderstood: I did not need my mum’s money. I am financially comfortable and, to be honest, I had even wondered whether Mum might leave me out because she knew I was financially secure. Another of my sisters was actually more shocked than I was that Mum had excluded me, given the amount of support I had provided over the years. What I hadn't expected was for three of Mum's five children to be excluded completely.

I never expected an equal share. My younger sister and her daughter did an enormous amount of caring for Mum towards the end of her life, and I always believed they deserved to receive considerably more than the rest of us.

I should also explain the geography because it matters. I live in another country, whereas my younger sister and her daughter lived around ten minutes from Mum. They therefore did the vast majority of the day-to-day physical caring for her, and I have never disputed how much they did or the toll it took on them.

Because I couldn't provide the same day-to-day physical help from another country, I tried to support them in other ways. When my sister told me that caring for Mum was costing her working hours, I started paying her £100 a week to compensate for the income she was losing. I continued doing that for over a year. I also helped financially and practically in other ways over the years.

What upset me about the will was the complete exclusion of three of Mum’s five children.

But even then, I think what I was relying on was the relationship between us as siblings. Mum could make whatever decision she wanted. I believed that when the time came, we would still look out for one another. I suppose I assumed there was a basic loyalty between us that existed independently of whatever was written in a will.

Initially we were told by the beneficiaries that they hadn't known what was in the will until after Mum died and they dealt with probate.

That turned out not to be true.

My younger sister had apparently known the contents for roughly two years. My brother eventually admitted that he had known too. In fact, he admitted that he had actually written the will for Mum.

He said he wasn't happy with what she wanted, argued with her about excluding us, but she was adamant. He also admitted that he deliberately didn't tell us because he knew the three excluded siblings would be hurt.

So he knew exactly what was coming.

My brother and I had actually spoken once after the initial fallout, before I knew he'd written the will. During that conversation he agreed with me that the will was unfair, but at the time he denied knowing what was in it beforehand. He said he would get back to me after he'd had a chance to think about everything.

He never did.

I later discovered that not only had he known what was in the will, he was the person who had actually written it for Mum. That completely changed how I viewed our earlier conversation. He had sat talking to me about how unfair the will was while allowing me to believe that he had only just discovered its contents.

I can't know why he never came back to me, but part of me wonders whether, once the truth about his involvement came out, he was simply too embarrassed to have another conversation with me. Whatever his reason, he has never tried to explain it to me.

I haven't spoken to him since, and at the moment I don't want to. My reasons are different from my reasons for stepping away from my sister and niece, but the result is the same: I no longer trust him.

One of my biggest problems is that the beneficiaries therefore had a long time to think about what would happen after Mum died. Even if they quite reasonably believed it wasn't their place to tell us about Mum's private will while she was alive, once she died they could have talked amongst themselves.

I never expected them to ignore Mum's wishes or divide everything five ways. What I hoped was that the three beneficiaries might look at each other and say, “Leaving three of her children absolutely nothing is incredibly hurtful. Perhaps we should make sure they each have some small remembrance.”

Nobody did.

Instead, when the fallout started, my younger sister told me she didn't care that we had been left out. She later complained that she hadn't been given enough time after Mum's death to process the will or decide whether to “do the right thing.”

That became much harder for me to accept once I discovered she'd actually known what the will said for about two years.

To be fair to my sister, she did later offer to give me some money so I could buy something to remember Mum by. I declined.

By then, accepting money would have completely missed the point. I hadn't wanted a payout. I wanted to know that my sister saw the hurt of three siblings being completely excluded and cared enough to acknowledge it without having to be pushed into doing so.

A small gesture made freely to all three of us who had been excluded would probably have meant an enormous amount to me. The same gesture offered only to me after the arguments, denials and accusations meant something entirely different. What I wanted from my sister was loyalty and consideration towards all of us, not money for myself.

There was another revelation that particularly hurt me. My sister apparently told another sibling that the £100 weekly payments I'd made while she was caring for Mum had only lasted “a few weeks.”

I have the bank records. They continued for more than a year.

Her daughter then sent me some extremely angry messages saying that nobody had physically shown up for her mother, that there was “absolutely no excuse” for us, “shame on you,” and accusing me of sulking and taking a “cop out.” She knew I had financially supported her mother but dismissed it as “only money.”

That hurt because I had never once diminished what either of them had done for Mum.

Another sibling, who also lived some distance away, had actually offered to travel down and stay nearby so she could help physically. My younger sister told her not to come.

After the initial arguments, my sister said she hadn't been given enough time to process everything. She said it had only been a matter of weeks since Mum died, that she hadn't had time to think about what she wanted to do, and that it was unfair to expect her to have immediately worked everything out.

I actually accepted that. However hurt and angry I was, I thought perhaps she genuinely did need time. So I gave it to her. I stopped pushing the issue and stepped back.

The problem is that when we eventually communicated again, nothing fundamental seemed to have changed. She still appeared to believe that she had done nothing wrong. There was no real acknowledgement of the dishonesty about how long she'd known about the will, the minimising of the support I'd given her, or the wider hurt caused to the three siblings who had been excluded. The explanation still seemed to be that Mum had made the decision, my sister had cared for her, and therefore the rest of us should accept what had happened and move on.

That mattered to me because by then this wasn't about wanting an immediate reaction from someone who was grieving. She had asked me for time to think, and I had given her that time. I wasn't expecting her to suddenly hand over her inheritance. I was hoping that, once the anger had settled, there might at least be some recognition of why trust had been damaged and why the other siblings were hurt.

Instead, her daughter then accused me of bullying her mother because I still hadn't forgiven her.

That accusation particularly bothered me. Giving somebody space doesn't create an obligation to forgive them at the end of it. I hadn't been harassing my sister or demanding money from her. I had stepped away because I no longer trusted her. To have that boundary characterised as bullying made me feel that even my decision not to resume the relationship was now being treated as something I was doing to her.

And that was probably the point when I realised that time alone wasn't going to repair this. The problem wasn't simply that emotions had been running high immediately after Mum's death. We seemed to have fundamentally different views of what had happened and of whether there was anything for her to take responsibility for.

This whole thing has also made me reassess my relationship with my younger sister over many years. There have been occasions where I've backed down or let things go because dealing with her when she doesn't get her own way can be extremely unpleasant. I always excused a lot because she was my youngest sister.

I've now also learned something about her previous falling out with our brother. According to him, she once sent him a letter saying he was “scum at birth” and “scum for life,” and wrote “scum” repeatedly on the outside of the envelope where the postman could see it.

That absolutely appalled me.

The excluded brother has now been told everything. He asked for a copy of the will and, after learning what had happened, independently contacted the Probate Service and arranged to speak to a solicitor. That is entirely his decision. I haven't encouraged him to challenge anything.

The other excluded sister and I have become much closer through all this. She is much angrier about the inheritance itself than I am, and we've actually disagreed about how to handle certain things.

At one point she wanted to test our brother's guilt by asking whether he would give some money to her daughters. I told her I thought that was unfair and put him in an impossible position. She listened, agreed with me and apologised.

That distinction matters to me because this isn't about blindly taking sides.

As a result of everything that's happened, I've also changed my own estate planning. I've decided that several members of the younger generation from different branches of the family will ultimately benefit from my estate.

I've also chosen to be open about the decisions I've made rather than letting people discover major decisions after I'm dead.

My younger sister and I now have virtually no relationship. There have been further text exchanges since all this happened, but nothing that has restored my trust in her or resolved the underlying issues. More recently, she and her daughter have effectively withdrawn from me on social media as well, so the estrangement now seems to be going both ways.

What has changed everything for me is what I've learned about trust and loyalty within my own family.

I believed that, whatever disagreements we might have and whatever Mum chose to put in her will, there was a fundamental loyalty between us as a family. I believed we would look out for one another and care when one of us was hurt.

This isn't only about how my younger sister treated me. In some ways, the apparent lack of concern for the other two excluded siblings has troubled me even more. I am financially secure. They are not in the same position I am, and the beneficiaries knew that. They also knew, long before I did, that three of Mum's five children were going to receive absolutely nothing.

I never expected anyone to overturn Mum's wishes or divide the inheritance equally. But I did expect the people involved to care about what this would do to the rest of the family. I expected some instinct to say, these are our family, our brothers and sisters, our aunts and uncle, this is going to hurt them, and we don't want them to feel that they meant nothing.

Instead, once everything came out, I saw very little of that concern. Things I'd done to support my sister while she cared for Mum were minimised, my niece attacked me for supposedly not being there and later accused me of bullying because I hadn't forgiven her mother, and my brother never came back to me after promising that he would. I later discovered that what he'd told me about not knowing the contents of the will wasn't true.

That's why my sister's later offer to give me some money to buy something to remember Mum by couldn't repair things. I declined it because my own financial position was never the issue. If this had simply been about getting something for myself, I could have accepted her offer and walked away with a keepsake.

I haven't lost trust in them because they inherited Mum's money. I've lost trust because of what happened afterwards: what I was told, what I later discovered wasn't true, how the hurt of the excluded siblings was treated, and how little responsibility anyone seemed willing to take for their own choices. What I thought was a basic loyalty between us as a family suddenly didn't seem to be there.

And that has made me question something much bigger than a will. I thought that if one of us was vulnerable or hurting, the others would care, regardless of who had what in the bank. I'm no longer sure we share that understanding of what being family means.

At the same time, I know grief can bring out the worst in families. My sister and her daughter carried an enormous burden caring for Mum while I lived in another country and wasn't there providing the day-to-day physical care. I don't want to erase what they did simply because of what has happened since.

But I also don't believe being grateful for the care they gave Mum means I have to overlook everything that happened afterwards or continue relationships with people I no longer trust.

So, AITA for accepting that my relationships with my sister, her daughter and my brother may be over because I no longer trust them or feel the loyalty between us that I thought was there, rather than trying to repair things simply because we're family?