When a family member dies, it’s not unusual to want a keepsake that will help their memory stay alive. It’s never easy to say goodbye, but these tokens can ease the pain. A woman posting in Reddit’s AITA forum lost her teenage sister when she was just 6 years old. Although she was very young at the time and had few memories of her, the original poster kept one of her sister’s rings as a memento. Her brother recently got engaged and proposed with that special ring. OP flipped and wonders if she’s wrong for wanting it back.
OP kept the ring in a box, and whenever she wanted to remember her sister, she would look at it. When her brother brought the family together and proposed to his girlfriend, however, she noticed something unusual.
“I literally froze. His gf starts crying, people are clapping, I’m just sat there like wtf. I look at my mum and she just smiles at me like nothing happened,” she wrote in her post. “After dinner I ask her was that the ring and she’s like yeah, your brother asked me and dad and we said it was fine. She said it was sweet and symbolic and my sister would’ve wanted it passed down or whatever.”
The original poster kept pressing them about it, though. “And I was like ??? it was never yours to give though??? Like I’ve had it for years?? And she just goes oh come on it’s just a ring, don’t be dramatic. But like when I had it it wasn’t ‘just a ring,'” she continued.
OP told her brother that if he didn’t return the ring to her, she would tell his fiancé where it came from. OP’s cousin was on her side, but she wondered if she overreacted.
“NTA. I particularly like the manipulation of how it’s ‘just a ring’ when you are upset about it, but when you ask for it back suddenly it is not ‘just a ring’ and you are being selfish and making everything about you,” one Redditor wrote. “From what you say it seems pretty clear they knew you wore the ring and had an attachment to it. She was your sister too, your loss and your grief are valid. They should have asked if you were ok with the ring being given to someone else first.”
OP updated her post, that she met with her brother’s fiancé, and after explaining the situation, she gave the ring back. But things just got worse.
“Later I get a call from my bro where he says that ‘I’m selfish’ and ‘I’m so weird about my sister’ and that I couldn’t let him have his day and it had to be about me telling me that I just ruined his marriage and that I can’t claim anything with my sister because I was way to young to have a relationship,” she wrote in the update.
One commenter put the whole situation into perspective for OP.
“If I found out that the ring my fiancé gave me wasn’t something his family had been holding on to for him to use as an engagement ring because it was something he gave his dead sister or otherwise had deep meaning between them, but was actually a ring his younger sister had been wearing off and on for five or six years and his mom helped him steal from younger sister? I would be doing a LOT of reevaluating what I knew about that man and his family, because I find it horrifying,” the Redditor wrote. “I don’t know that I could go through with a marriage to someone who even conceived of the plan to steal from his younger sister, and I’d be really worried what my future in-laws would think they could steal from me – or how they’d treat any children of mine.”
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