...
You, sir, are a prince.
Pretty much of a bastard, actually, with occasional attempts to rise to normal human decency. And unfortunately, a good deal more of a bastard after the process than before. I think the real lesson here is that helicopter parents need the skull at the banquet, the sword depending by a horsehair from the ceiling. They desperately need to know they will die. And the money will run out. And when they do and it does, the children, now 45 or 50 or 55 years old, will be wholly incompetent at all normal life tasks. The father died, and left a substantial trust. The mother died, and left a much smaller part of a shared trust. The father's trust was gone when the mother's part that I helped administer came available. It's gone now too. No one told those parents, or maybe no one they would listen to told them, that the better part of love is manifest in helping your kids become independent. On the fundamental level these learned money is obtained by whining and guilt ploys and once obtained, dissipates quickly and mysteriously and is replaced with more. Now they must find a replacement supplier. But with the parents gone, there is no one left alive who will care about these people and provide for them on the level they were led to expect. Their behavior was bad, but their loss was greater than normal; the death of your last parent, no matter how old and sturdy and normal you are, brings a queasy realization that the last bulwark has melted away. If you have well-tried confidence in your own ability, the loss is the ordinary grief humanity is loaded with. In a case like this, the parents had urged and fostered an abnormal bond, as well as economic dependency, so their offspring's grief and their (right) fear about how they were left were very great.
They were acting as they had been cultivated to act. I could understand that, but it could not influence my administration, and, though I hope it didn't show, it irritated me.
