Going through a life-threatening illness is terrifying and deeply upsetting even if you have a ton of support.

But if you don’t, that makes your condition even harder.

Check out this story and ask yourself what you’d do if faced with a similar situation.

AITA for cutting my extended family out of my life?

In 2023, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. At my age, a large portion of tumors are malignant, so the initial news was extremely serious.

I ended up needing multiple brain surgeries, including a VP shunt placement, and for one of them I had to prepare for real, life-threatening risks.

Not everyone took it seriously.

My immediate family (mom, dad, brother) knew what was happening, and my brother posted updates publicly. My mom updated my aunts and uncle as things unfolded, and I posted on Facebook myself.

So my entire extended family, including my 13 cousins, definitely knew what was going on.

My aunts and my uncle reached out. One cousin texted. The other twelve did not call, text, comment, or even acknowledge it.

When we finally learned the tumor was benign, again, nothing from them.

Not a word.

During the hospital stay between surgeries, I proposed to my now-wife. Even that went unacknowledged by all the cousins.

When we began planning our wedding, we still didn’t have the final pathology back, and there was a real chance my life expectancy could be affected.

My aunt told me, “If you elope, then none of your family is going to come!” So we tried to be considerate of everyone and planned a wedding for late August.

Then what happened next angered her.

Then we heard through family that my cousin who had a wedding in early September felt mine was too close to his, saying that people would most likely not be able to make both, so we moved our wedding up to early August specifically to accommodate that.

I even briefly considered pushing it an entire year to 2025 just to avoid overlapping with his.

Despite all of that, every single cousin except one declined our invite. None of them said anything about it. Even the cousin with the September wedding skipped ours because he “had a surprise bachelor party to go to.”

That stung, of course, but I tried to focus on the positives: I am alive; the tumor was benign, and that I was marrying someone who stood by me through everything.

I didn’t go to that cousin’s September wedding because, frankly, after moving my date for them and still having them all decline, I felt uncomfortable showing up.

This was the final straw.

What finally pushed me over the edge was seeing their Instagram posts afterward from my cousin’s September wedding: “Family is so important,” “I’m so lucky to have this family,” etc.

They were posted by the same people who hadn’t checked on me during three brain surgeries, hadn’t reacted when they found out I wasn’t dying, hadn’t acknowledged my proposal, and hadn’t come to the wedding we specifically rearranged for them.

Seeing them celebrate “family” so publicly when they had shown absolutely zero interest in mine felt like a slap in the face, so I removed all my cousins from social media and decided I didn’t want to maintain relationships that clearly had no reciprocity.

My aunts and uncle are confused and think I’m overreacting. They say I’m really just upset they didn’t attend the wedding.

But that’s not the core issue.

The original hurt had never gone away.

What hurts is that after everything I went through, life-threatening surgeries, uncertainty about survival, and major milestones, they couldn’t be bothered to send even a single text.

This last May, they went to another one of my cousin’s weddings that honestly didn’t care if any of them showed up.

The fact that they would rather go to that, than even just acknowledge my existence and everything that happened, is pretty unbelievable, and I think I’m hurt because I truly thought that we were close as a family, I don’t know.

I’m self conscious about posting this if I am being honest. I don’t want to come off as entitled by any means, I just think that if you’re not going to reach out with a simple “hey, glad you didn’t die!” or anything, after all of this, I just don’t know what to think.

So… AITA for cutting off a set of relationships that were effectively one-way anyway?

Here is what folks are saying.

I have had a VP shunt my whole life and would cut those people out, too!

I agree.

I’m sure! I was just a baby so I don’t remember.

It’s no big deal.

I agree. Accept and move on.

Can’t agree more. Who cares.

I hope she has fab friends.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.