Disposing of Questionable Assets

My dad’s brother passed away two years ago. I liked him, but I didn’t really know him well; the last time I’d seen him was at my mum’s funeral, about a year before his own. I’d kept my distance from that side of the family; ours was really just a wedding-and-funeral relationship. My uncle was a character. A dodgy character.

Here’s one example of his pedigree. Unbelievable as it sounds, back in the 60s and early 70s, Irish health authorities had a policy of giving pregnant women a glass of Guinness during their hospital stay, apparently the iron was good for them. My uncle happened to work in the stores at a large hospital. Strangely enough, he also had a side gig supplying Guinness to the local bars, a very profitable one. It funded a forty-foot fishing boat, which he used to run fishing trips from, licence be damned.

So when his will was settled and I found myself with an unexpected inheritance, I wasn’t exactly comfortable. It wasn’t a massive amount, around $12,000, but it was enough to make me think hard about where it had probably come from.

I did think about keeping it. I even went as far as opening a two-year bank CD, ready to lock the money away and let it grow. But then I thought about the Guinness, the boat, and everything else I didn’t know about, and I never funded the account.

He’d died of cancer, and he’d loved boating, properly loved it, not just as a way to make a few dollars on the side. So in the end I split the $12,000 four ways. A cancer charity, and the RNLI, the UK lifeboat rescue charity, felt like the obvious tributes to who he actually was, underneath the dodginess. A dementia charity went in for my mum, who died from complications of dementia the year before he passed. And the last quarter, just for the giggles, went to a youth charity working with kids getting into trouble with the law.

It felt like the right kind of send-off. Not clean exactly, but honest. Money doesn’t have a conscience, that’s something we have to give it by how we deploy it.