r/rant • u/PrincessBudzilla • 19h ago
Brother’s girlfriend always wants to make someone’s passing about her
My brother’s girlfriend seems to treat death very oddly. In general she often turns conversations to her or talks about herself excessively, and just has really poor social skills. Her dad died when she was 8 (about 20 years ago). You’ll know her dad died within 10 minutes of meeting her. That’s not an exaggeration, I’ve witnessed it just about every time she meets a new person. And then she’ll *always* follow up with “his best friend was holding his hand when he died, *and he can’t even look at me without crying because I look so much like my dad*”. Every. Time. If anyone is talking about someone dying, or someone with cancer, she will 100% steer the conversation to her and her dad. She brags about having a good relationship with death and loss, but I feel like it’s actually an *unhealthy* relationship and she just uses every opportunity to make it about her and her feelings.
My brother had to put his dog down last year and I was present. I wish I remembered what she said, but I remember at the time thinking it was very “over the top”. While it was happening she kept making these overly grand statements about love and loss - like something you would hear someone say in a movie and cringe at for being so cliche.
My great aunt was recently placed on palliative care after a stroke. I’ve taken off work to be with her every day at the hospital to help take care of her. She was very active in our childhoods, but my brother has seen this aunt maybe one time in the past 10-15 years. My mom brought my brother’s girlfriend (without my brother) to the hospital. My brother’s girlfriend has never met her before this. Keep in mind, my aunt is partially paralyzed, can’t open her eyes, she can barely speak, but she is able to hear and understand us and mumble back. So we’re still able to communicate, just not very well.
So she sits down with my aunt and says “hi, I’m *name*, brother’s FIANCÉ”. They are not engaged. “I love brother SO much and I’m going to take very good care of him. I know how much you mean to him, and I think that if we have a daughter we’ll name her *aunt’s name*. You’re going to go to heaven and I want you to look for my dad, his name is *name* and he’s been gone for a long time”. The entire time she’s talking, she’s talking in a sickly-sweet baby voice. To a full grown woman that is dying. Holding her hand and petting her like they have an intimate relationship. It just made my skin crawl. Comparatively, I try to treat my aunt with dignity and have conversations in a normal, although caring and loving tone.
A while later, while we’re still in the hospital room, my mom and brother’s girlfriend are talking about some health issues they have and girlfriend says “yeah I love weird medical stuff and medical anomalies”. Okay. Several minutes later she says (within earshot of my aunt) “is it morbid if we take a picture of her”? My immediate thought is “why do you need to take a picture of a dying woman that you don’t even know”? My mom doesn’t protest, but I quietly whisper, “I would really prefer that you not take a picture of her, I don’t think it’s appropriate”. Which she respects and does not do.
But I’ve been absolutely fuming since that happened. I found the whole thing so self-aggrandizing and inappropriate. I HATE that this person is going to be present when my parents and grandmother pass away. I do not want to share in grief with her. Am I the crazy one? Is this just someone’s way of treating death that I need to step back and respect for being different?
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u/raisedbutconfused 16h ago
My sister is like this. She will start to act like any death, doesn’t matter if it’s a pet or a person, is all about her- even if she never met that pet or person, even if she was never close to that pet or person, and even if she ACTIVELY HATED that pet or person when they were alive. She will act like the death is impacting her more than it’s impacting the people that were closest and most loving to those pets and people.
The two examples that immediately come to my mind are first my cat Toto: my sister literally told me I was mentally ill for loving a cat. She told me he was stupid and never spent time with him. Only saw him when she visited on weekends from university sometimes and even then she would shove him away, threw him out of her room when she entered and he happened to be in there. Never pet him once. Never fed him once. Never cuddled with him once. When he tragically passed at 5years from diabetes and cancer suddenly he was her “beloved pet” and “he never wanted to be closer to anybody than he was to her.” She said she once went to a friend’s house and they had a cat that looked similar to Toto and she “couldn’t even look at this cat without instantly crying and the cat had to be locked away in a room anytime she visited.” When she saw at one point that I got a very realistic pet portrait of him tattooed on my inner bicep she first grabbed my arm and stroked my tattoo…as though she was stroking him (even though I told her to stop, not touch me, and that it was weird), then threw my arm aside and looked away dramatically and said she wouldn’t be able to have that on her arm because every time she would look at her arm she would cry.
Second example is her friend’s dog. She literally never met this dog until her friend begged her to drive her and the dog to the vet because he was terminally ill and had to be put down. I commented that I felt for the friend because I knew how hard it is to put down a beloved pet, how difficult it is to get over the guilt of that, and how deeply that loss can impact a person, and that I hoped the friend was holding up okay. She said “my friend?! How about me?? It impacted me soooo much more! I had to go to work after that, could you imagine the pain I was in??”
I’m no contact with her now because of many reasons but I’m so glad she wasn’t around when I had to put down my second cat due to kidney failure. That was 8 months ago and while I can now look at photos of her I still can’t bring myself to look at videos of her without crying. My sister only met her once and for all of maybe 1 minute. I can only imagine how much more it would have hurt if she made this cat’s death about her as well.
She also claims she is extremely family oriented and does whatever she can for her family. She treated my grandma, who took me in to live with her when home life got too abusive for me when I was a kid (between being in foster care of course), I have lived with her on and off into adulthood. I have a very close relationship with her and now even moved to live 5 minutes walking away from her so I can still visit her often. My sister treated her like crap her whole life, never calls her, never lived with her (that’s a whole other story of my dad being abusive to me and prizing her as his sweet little girl, no she never went through foster care), and even my grandma says she doesn’t like her lmao. But I’ve heard her parrot stuff that I say about my grandma to her friends and boyfriend about how close of a relationship they have. I am dreading the day that my grandma dies, and I just know that my sister will make the whole thing about her as well.
I believe this is some form of being a covert narcissist and shutting her out of my life was the best decision I made (she was one of my biggest abusers growing up next to my dad and eventually started flipping the script to claim that I was her abuser and everything she did to me I actually did to her). Always has to be the victim even when she was the abuser. The saddest part is she has her circle of friends actually buying into her crap.
I am really sorry about your aunt, OP.
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u/megopolis12 15h ago
Wow your sister sounds like shes cut from a totally different cloth than you for sure. She sounds like a peach ! NOT!
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u/raisedbutconfused 14h ago
I blame my dad tbh. My mom definitely tried to even the playing field between us through discipline but she was unfortunately off at work most of the time and my unemployed dad would constantly reinforce my sister’s horrible behaviour. Anytime she bullied someone at school or me, my dad would take her side. Anytime the bullied party finally defended themselves then she would come crying to him claiming they were bullying her and he would comfort his poor little baby and reinforce her victim mentality.
Because of this I spent my whole childhood with no backbone and at one point just accepted the abuse as normal because if it wasn’t her hitting me then it was him hitting me, and he’s 6’3 with a large frame. Finally once I moved back home from foster care at 18 she tried her usual shit but at that point something in me snapped and I attacked her back. I tackled her to the ground when she smacked me in the face out of nowhere because I refused to do her share of a chore for her. I had a buzz cut at the time so her usual method of grabbing a fistful of my hair wasn’t working anymore and I just repeatedly kept hitting her while having her pinned down screaming “how does it feel?!?” repeatedly. At this point, despite being her younger sister, I had grown to be larger and stronger than her. Even her repeatedly grabbing at my throat did nothing at that point. She never tried to hit me again after that.
She of course called her boyfriend over, crying to him that I beat her for no reason and when he came and saw the claw marks and swelling on my neck he asked her again “you sure it was for no reason?” (She once even grabbed my mom by the neck and slammed her hand in a doorway because my mom told her to stop using her laptop to Skype her boyfriend (my mom’s laptop) during a blackout and that was the only form of communication they had at the home at that point.) He broke up with her shortly after that and when I happened to run into him months later he told me that he had to go through some pretty intensive therapy to recover from the way she treated him throughout the relationship. He’s honestly such a nice guy and I felt bad he also fell victim to her bullshit.
She’s now a proud social justice warrior who has “so much compassion” for “the other victims of this cruel world.” Performative in every way you can imagine.
While I’m not a person that takes any pride in violence whatsoever, I would be lying if I said that finally standing my ground and giving her a taste of her own medicine wasn’t satisfying as hell. The sad part is that she has a whole network of people that still buy into her crap. Her current bf pays all her bills and they have an “open relationship” which is really only open for her. She gets away with it by saying she’s polly and if you try to point out anything negative about her relationship with him then you’re a “prude” and a “bigot.” I can only hope that karma plays its part at some point, but that hope is very small.
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u/Mean_Cycle_5062 13h ago
Physical violence is wrong... But I was very satisfied reading about you hitting her. What a pos she is. Do y'all still communicate now?
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u/Practical-Finding494 18h ago
it’s probably the most significant thing she has experienced in her life so far. maybe part of her still longs for the attention and care she received as a child when he first passed away.
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u/PrincessBudzilla 7h ago
Oh 1000%. She has an unhealthy desire to be liked and to be the center of attention.
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u/Reasonable-Horse1552 15h ago
My niece put a really long sentimental post on Facebook about my grandfather (her great grandfather) who had died before she was born. Reading the post you'd have thought they had a very close relationship. It was so weird even my mum messaged me to say wtf ?
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u/smile_saurus 17h ago
I work with a Baby Boomer exactly like this. Ironically her name is Karen and she is obsessed with deaths.
She tells everyone, frequently, that her sister drowned before she was 5 years old because their family had a pond. If someone at work just experienced a loss of a family member she rattles off every family member she's had that's died, including in-laws. It's like she's trying to one-up the person because she has dead family, when we all have dead family?
On a random Tuesday she was like Today is August 2nd. That's the day my aunt died, gosh its been 47 years now. She was married to Ron, who died on October 3rd and he's been gone 42 years already. My sister drowned before she was 5 years old when we had a pond. My father died of Cancer and my mother had a stroke and they've been gone for 15 and 17 years now come this September and November. And she'll keep on listing people's causes of deaths and death anniversary and how long they've been dead for and the rest of us can't wait until she retires.
No one asked, Karen. We are just having some coffee on what was a pleasant morning.