A 25-year-old woman took to Reddit with a moral dilemma that she had been facing with her family.
In a Reddit post, the woman explained that her father was dying and in need of a liver donation, for which she was a match.
The woman explained that she is the oldest child, and her father left when she was only 10 years old, taking one of her brothers with him. In addition to his less-than-ideal presence in her life before leaving their family behind for a new woman, she revealed that “he was an alcoholic, and was drunk and abusive.”
“My mom was a wreck after he left, she was heavily depressed for so long,” she wrote.
Only two years before his liver failed, her father reached out to her and her siblings, attempting to apologize and reconcile with his estranged children.
From the sound of it, his daughter probably chose not to meet with him that day. According to her brothers, who did decide to meet up with him, she learned that “he said he was sorry for what he did to us and he was going to AA and rehab or whatever.”
So when they got a call saying that their father was in the hospital, at first, they thought he was just drunk because he had been found wandering around outside, confused. Drunk or not, they found that the situation was much worse when they arrived at the hospital, the daughter writing that “the doctors said he had last stage liver failure and needed a liver transplant.”
Jack, the second-oldest sibling, volunteered right away but turned out not to be a match. Meanwhile, her other brother had cancer, so he could not donate. That left only her. After the entire family pressured her, she reluctantly agreed to do the tests to see if she’d be a match, which she was.
She wrote, “The doctors came to me and said they’d heard the good news, and wanted to get started on the surgery right away, and I had to sign some stuff.”
She would soon be going under the knife if she did not speak up, so she clarified to the doctors that she refused to give her father her liver. This is when her family came in, shouting at her and trying to guilt her into donating, until she spoke up, saying, “I have no bond with my him, I feel no love for him, I don’t consider him family. I don’t care if he lives or dies, I’d actually prefer if he died.”
After what happened, both sides of her family shunned her almost entirely, with only a few messages saying that they were disowning her and that she was “cold-hearted.”