What an odd, yet reassuring thing to find comradeship about on the Internet. I’ve felt alone about this since I realized someone was going to ask me to do a eulogy some day soon, and my recollections might not go down too well.
GFR it is.
Alice, there’s a phrase I hadn’t understood until my father died: te acompaño en el sentimiento. “I share your feelings”, “I am sad with you, I am angry with you, I am relieved with you”.
Te acompaño en el sentimiento.
Another one here. My father died 20 years ago this December and I am ever-grateful that we didn’t end up responsible for him. My siblings still don’t operate well in the world because of his treatment. A tyrant who scared us so badly we still quake about irrational things. He tormented and molested me. My saving grace was running away at 14.
He too was brilliant, could fix anything and smoked 3-4 packs a day. Weird.
I cried at his funeral because it was final; I’d never have a father who loved and protected me. I have anger still, but I don’t miss the drama at all.
I recommend you pour a tall glass of your favourite beverage, raise it heavenward and say, " goodbye you old <insert appropriate expletive here>". Don’t feel guilty for one minute - you’ve done nothing wrong.
Wishing you the happiest of futures.
you needn’t be. Blood may be thicker than water, but only up to a point.
Thanks all. Your commiseration and shared experiences mean a lot to me.
You didn’t answer my question!
Tap dancing might wake him up and I couldn’t take that chance, so toilet paper it is!
Fair enough! Save the dancin’ shoes for me!
Okay, but how will I know where you’re buried?
Oh, you’ve known you’re one of my favorites for years now. You just do a little happy dance for yourself knowing someone is thinking of you.
My ash will be scattered all over Heavenly Valley. Any time now, I figure.
You know what is weird though is how over time we tend to forget the bad points about our “bad” ancestors. Relatives will tend to not focus on a persons bad points so over time they are forgotten.
I mean do we really want to tell the grandchildren how much of an abuser great-grandpa was? Do we pass on dark secrets like how he was a sexual predator or abused his own children? Sadly what sometimes happens is someone does say this but another relative will say “oh that isnt true” and now you have a family argument.
Saint or monster, the persons name will still be listed in your family tree.
I get you 100% Alice, I had threads here about issues with my mom and her passing but I wasn’t sad she died because everyone dies. I was sad even to the end she never showed any bit of love for me, she had money and asked me to abandon my wife and son to come be her minion and give her money. I’m not even sure she felt love or understood it, instead she employed a sort of crass attempted manipulation.
If I mourned anything it was a lifetime of lack of love from her.
I’m sorry your father wasn’t a decent dad.
My FIL was horribly physically and emotionally abusive to his wife and children, though he mellowed out in his 60’s. I hated him for what he did to my husband as he was growing up. I had a hard time at his funeral, trying to appear appropriately solemn. (his children had mostly forgiven him.) My father was also abusive but in a different way and I wonder how I will react when he dies. I do know that from that day on, I will finally be able to walk past the Father’s Day greeting cards displayed every June, and (hopefully) not give them a second thought. I dread picking out a card every year. I stand there and want to cry.
I’ve taken care of that by not having any children. My mother never tired of telling me how it wasn’t worth it to have children. Seeing how miserable she was, I figured she was right. So I don’t have any, and I’m pretty darned happy.
I have to ask, do you ever regret not sitting down and asking them why they act the way they did? Sometimes it reveals alot about their background.
For my dad it was more a mourning of potential. He literally did nothing to help himself or others that last 25 yrs or so of his life. I’m sure it was mainly due to depression. I didn’t mourn because wherever he is now, he has to be happier than where he was. When he did pass, it was like “finally, I’ve been waiting for this since middle school”. I even told my wife that it a huge weight off my shoulders. I didn’t mourn because it didn’t seem he got too much enjoyment out of this life.
She, not they. And there are some people who simply cannot be reasoned with.
Every time we had a shouting match. Nothing was ever his fault.
I thought it might have been his time in the Army that ruined him, but he had actually been that way his whole life.
My dad’s sister was nothing like him and was a very nice and giving person. She pretty much traveled the world to get away from him.
(Bolding mine.) Hell yeah, we do. At least, I do. Keeping things “dark secrets” is what allows them to thrive and continue on. I say expose that shit and hold it up to the light. Because 1)I’m not going to be like my mother and put on a fake smile and pretend that this craziness is all normal and there’s nothing wrong and 2)my children need to know the truth about why that set of grandparents aren’t in their lives and that it’s not because I’m a bad daughter or that they are bad kids that don’t deserve grandparental love.
And no one that knew or even knew of my father will ever forget how bad he was. His horridness is legendary throughout the land. People that I’ve never even met recoil in horror at the mention of his name. He was truly an awful person, you don’t even understand.
With my father, you couldn’t have a rational conversation. When you’re like him, you don’t recognize that there’s even anything wrong with the way you act. If he even did admit that he was mean or anything, he would have definitely rationalized it by saying that the person deserved it, that they made him be like that. Everything is always someone else’s fault and there’s nothing wrong with him, he’s the normal one. I have asked other (normal) people in his family what could have happened, and there’s nothing that’s openly known about that made him like this. His father didn’t beat his mother, his two brothers turned out relatively normal- either something horrible happened to him that someone else is keeping a “dark secret”, or sometimes people are just born horribly broken.