Diverted from Reddit: AITA for regifting a dead relative’s graduation present?

AITA for re-gifting a sentimental graduation present from a deceased relative?

I graduated Law School over 10 years ago and my father gave me an interesting but kind of strange gift. At an antique store, he found an old brass balance scale that happened to have an eagle on top of it, and I guess it was probably decorative because it doesn’t have anything that would make it very good as a scale. He filled it with a bunch of mildly interesting old coins adding up to around $200. None of the coins were coins that would have value above their face value, just mildly interesting things like Kennedy half dollars and bicentennial quarters, and a handful of Sacajawea dollar coins. As of his death the spring, I still had most of them, except for a few that have been pillaged by a kleptomaniac roommate, who admitting to stealing $30 or $40 worth.

Anyway, my father‘s death ended up being one of several triggers of a midlife crisis that I responded to by taking a very long road trip. When I left the house, I decided to grab some object that symbolized each person I cared about in my family, including around d 50 coins to represent my father. I have taken two keeping a handful of them in my pocket and including them in tips, throwing one or two into various bodies of water here and there, and often just giving one to someone who I had a conversation with. I have not, however, given any to “beggars” because, well, they aren’t really very good as money and I don’t really see them as money, they’re just small symbols that happen to have a trivial monetary value.

Anyway, it occurred to me that what I’m actually doing is technically “regifting” which a lot of people see as socially rude. And from a dead person at that! So maybe I’m totally in the wrong here and need to properly respect my father by putting these coins on a shelf for all eternity and prohibiting that they enter the world through any path I have control over.

Maybe I am totally wrong on this, an ahole of the worst kind disrespecting the dead. I don’t really see it that way though. In a weird almost mystical way, this journey, this bit of travel, and ultimately all of my travels and journeys, are about my father’s life and hopes and goals. He always wanted to travel but he wanted more to be with the people he cared about, and so except for a few family trips here and there he really never wandered much beyond a small radius around his place of birth. And I have gone… well, just about everywhere. And I’ve made sure to leave little symbolic bits of him, little metallic communion wafers that to me represent *his* body and blood broken for me in this form, in the places that he never went but I’m sure would have if he felt that he could without having to be alone. In a way it’s my way of scattering his ashes except not at a place that he loved except the place “America” and not all at once, and each piece of him, each particle of ash, with a conversation of the sort that he would have if he had been in a place to meet this person. And so I regift. And I really hope that people aren’t upset.