You obviously are not familiar with what it’s like growing up in an abuse household.(I won’t say “home” – that’s for kind places.) Be thankful you don’t understand her.
We could have written something like that about my father, except my mother wouldn’t have allowed it. Had my mother died first, it would have been very tempting. Shaming relatives would have been the least of my concerns.
He had zero people from his workplace of 30 years come to the charade of a funeral.
There was a crowd of people from the church and I would not have minded at all if they really knew what a son of a bitch he really was.
Brutal, yes. Honest? Well, we only have one side of the story, don’t we? I’m not going to condemn someone without knowing all the facts. Who knows, maybe she’s bitter about being left out of the will. Anything is possible.
And really, if it does point out to those in attendance “he had you all fooled, didn’t he”, that’s fair too. I’ve a relative who’s not abusive but who is an entitled whining PITA and professional victim, never responsible for whatever goes wrong but expecting it’s his children’s duty to bail him out AND let him get into another mess again. One of the more aggravating parts is how many people buy into it, lending him more confidence in keeping it up.
I don’t know why some people are so quick to attack the “truth teller” and have to white knight strangers. Maybe you see too much of yourself in the deceased? Worried people won’t say nice things at your funeral?
The only reason we are discussing it is because it got larger attention. I assume the brutally honest/bitter hatchet job obit was intended for the people that really knew the deceased, and not for us armchair analysts.
Read some of the tales here from posters with abusive parents. Sometimes, literally pissing on the casket at the funeral IS the appropriate response. Pretending the bully was a “nice man” just legitimizes the abuse.
If you knew him, you made your own opinion of him.
If you didn’t know him, his name and obit are sort of meaningless - its a name and an obit. It isn’t like his reputation suffers - you didn’t know him - he isn’t a public person. I read the obit when this thread opened, and have no idea of his name, or what town he lived in.
If the daughter’s opinion was not widely held by the community, the community will come to the defense of a good man whose daughter is a bitch. The community that this man lived in is the ones that care.
And he’s dead. Words can hurt him - other than by reputation. Frankly, how many of us need a reputation once we are dead? (A few people do, but most of us are private people, and when we are gone, will only be remembered by those that knew us when we were alive - those people formed their opinions of us then - an obit isn’t going to change anything.)
It seems unlikely a grown child would write a highly false defamatory obituary of a parent, though possible. There are certainly bad parents, and it’s debatable whether there’s any such thing as a bad small child, if the truly abusive parenting went back to the beginning. However all in all to me it tends to show where the societal convention came from not to do this. There’s no way to know the exact truth and it’s inherently one sided.
Various people identifying with the daughter based on their own bad parents is irrelevant to whether the blame in this particular case was so bad and one sided to call for a public rebuke in an obituary. Although, those comments are more understandable than the one implying that people criticizing the daughter must be doing it because they’re like the father. Yeah OK, through the magic telepathy of the internet somebody can determine that.
She didn’t post it for you. She posted it for people like me who understand and wish we could have been more open about how our fathers treated us. Mine was a truly horrible human being. I am not. I may not be the greatest but I’m a decent loving person who has raised decent loving daughters. When I found out my father died I was GIDDY. And I felt guilty and ashamed for feeling that way, despite the fact that my father molested me for years… and that’s not even the worst thing he did. He had no redeeming qualities, and died alone, not to be found for over a week. There wasn’t a funeral because none of us wanted to pitch in. But we didn’t talk about it.
Reading this reminded me I’m not alone in what I went through. I hope this helped her feel some closure.
And yet, you’re condemning her.
Several of the people my grandfather abused outside the family have been giddy with relief when they found out I understood them. How come I did? Because I’ve met Mr. Hyde too. If neither of us had been able to mention feeling uncomfortable around Doctor Jekyll, neither of us would have known that this other person was part of the brotherhood.
As someone who expressed some skepticism earlier in this thread, I have to note FTR that the fact that the guy has a long arrest records lends credence to the depiction in the obit.
I once knew about a local firefighter, who died when he suffered a heart attack while on the scene of a fire. He’d once been living with a relation of mine. She threw him out when she came home to find him in bed with another woman. They’d had a daughter together.
In the obituary and in news articles this guy sounded like the second coming, praised as “a staunch family man.” Yep, he loved family so much he started three of them, kids by three different women. Other stories I’d heard of him, from those who knew him, said he was a jerk.
But from the news and given the big public funeral procession, he might have been a saint.
I do - several reasons. Mostly emotional. Firstly, because it often feels good to publicly call out someone who was horrible to you. Secondly, because you cannot stand the thought of all those who would rewrite history and cast the deceased as a good person, someone doing their best - you want to contest that (potential) dishonesty because it infuriates you, as you were the victim of that person. Thirdly, because you to cut off at the knees anyone who would voice those meaningless, but nice-sounding platitudes that people so often use to relatives of unlikable people that just make the entire situation worse. And doing so in a public forum of this nature also means that you only have to do it once and then you (hopefully) don’t have to / person who says “he was good man” or just swallow back your anger accept that revisionist history. Because everyone read it, and (again hopefully) won’t try to say those completely untrue, but nice-sounding, things.
He was a firefighter who died in the line of duty. 'Nuff said.
:rolleyes:
You’d think that out of all the people who died on 9/11 that SOMEONE would have had things said about them that weren’t exactly glowing. People who live in that area, and maybe know people involved, have probably encountered situations like this. However, I’ve never even seen so much as “We weren’t happy; if s/he was still alive, I’m sure we’d be divorced now but I sure didn’t want it to end like this”. Maybe they were simply cases of deafening silence?
I could have written brutally honest obits/made brutally honest speeches about both my parents, but I chose not to. This was not based on who they were, but on who I am.
I spoke at my mother’s celebration of life service and hit hard on the themes of respecting and valuing hard work and education, and what a good seamstress, gardener and cook she was. If one analyzed all the speeches, one might have noticed the conspicuous absence of “loving wife and mother, selfless friend…” but no one commented on it.
Those of you with good parents, thank God or your lucky stars, or whatever and call and tell them you love them.
It does, but if her father had managed to avoid arrest by beating his wife and daughter and threatening their lives if they went to the police - so that it was a silent abuse. If he got drunk and drove all the time, but lived in the middle of nowhere, so the worst he ever did is hit a dog - he’d still (apparently) be a shithead and his daughter would still have a reason to write that.
I grew up down the street from a guy with five daughters. As they reached their teenage years, every daughter - between the ages of thirteen and sixteen - found somewhere else to live. Although the girls were around my age (one was good friends with my sister who is two years younger), we all were told never to go into the house. He was never prosecuted - I’m not sure we ever found out what went on in that house with certainty (we all think it was sexual abuse of his own kids) - but eventually his wife died and he shot himself. (When the youngest two hit their teen years, the school administration had them move in - one moved in with the principal, the other moved in with the assistant principal)
If his daughters wanted to write a scathing obituary of a well respected doctor, none of the neighbors would have been anything but supportive.
All true. But for us outsiders, knowing nothing other than that his daughter wrote that obituary, there’s nothing to tell us whether she hated the guy because he was all that or for some other reason. The fact that the guy had a long arrest record is an objective fact that points in the direction of one hypothesis.
