I’d keep it. Not sure if I’d read it…really just depends on what the situation was. I have no siblings but say it’s my mother then no I wouldn’t read it out of fear of it depressing me or causing regret or otherwise altering how I view her.
Yes, I would. At least skim through to see if there’s anything juicy. I love knowing secrets.
Not me. I couldn’t handle changing my opinion/view of my dead relative. I may entrust someone not emotionally invested to read them just to make sure there wasn’t anything weird in them especially if his death was sudden and unexpected.
Hmmm I honestly don’t know.
When my grandpa died there was a skirmish to get his daily journals. But AFAIK there was nothing juicy in them - he did stuff like record the weather and what he ate. It was adorable. He read them aloud sometimes (like “Here’s what we did 10 years ago on the 4th of July”)
I think since your sister has a specific question to which she wants an answer, she should go for it.
I wouldn’t read it. But I wouldn’t destroy it either. Maybe in 20 years or so when others are dead and memories have faded children and grandchildren might be interested.
Well said.
I think it depends on how open minded you are capable of being. If he kept a twelve step journal there is a good chance you will read about a lot of resentments he had. Many of them may be focused on family memebers. It doesn’t really matter what he wrote in his journal he most likely loved you guys just the same. If I did read it I wouldn’t take anything too personnal as it very well may be exagerated.
I read my grandmother’s diaries right after she died. Almost 80 years of history; 1928-2005. My biggest regret was that I didn’t ask to read them while she lived. Her father worked at the railroad; in 1928 they were “poor”, by 1933 they were almost “rich,” relatively speaking, because seniority protected his job. End of Prohibition, when she was in high school, then marriage and Pearl Harbor, then War Work, my mom, V-E Day, a kid at church dying in Korea, I could go on, for, well, like 80 years.
I would read them. If you were close, you already know his thoughts on most things. If you weren’t close, you’re probably not going to be too hurt.
Hell no. I already know more about my relatives than I want to.
So sorry for your loss.
If he didn’t go through a great effort to conceal the journal, then there is an expectation that he either wanted it to be read some day by others, or that he wasn’t that guarded about it.
From my personal view, I think it’s nice that you would want to read it, because it’s a way of honoring your brother to get a better understanding of what he was going through. You also might want to prepare yourselves that in the journal that he might be bitter towards family members and others too. After all, it was his thoughts and how he was struggling with things.
No way. Although an atheist, I’ve always followed that “do unto others” thing.
I don’t know that I’d be able to resist, to be honest. At the same time recognizing I could end up resenting something I read, or feeling I’d betrayed their privacy, or uncovering something best left concealed. Depending entirely on the nature of what it reveals!
On the other hand there are persons in my family I would never read their journals, just because they were all kinds of messed up, their grasp on reality tenuous at best, their journals would be worse yet, why bother? No good could come from that.
All of that said, I would not hesitate to stop reading as soon as things take a turn into awkward or even slightly disturbing. I would close that book and never need to open it again.
This. I might keep them and go back a few years later to read a bit.
It would be nice to have some journals around of some of my family members.
Me, I figure the worst anyone could do is figure out my password and read all of my Facebook posts (including the ones **not **shared with family!).
I’d go the other way, I think. If they didn’t want someone to read them, they wouldn’t have written them down.
They might just not want to deal with the blowback while they were still around to be affected by it.
A very interesting situation…
…that I was faced with 25 years ago when my own brother died.
He was the only family member in the state at the time, so I had to travel with my dad to go clean out his stuff from the house he had been sharing.
In the process, I found a set of a dozen or so colorful blank books, all filled with his neat script. One of his closest friends asked if she could have them, but I really wasn’t too sure what to do with them.
I called my mom (out of state) and asked what she thought–she immediately said “Burn them” without hesitation.
She asked me to promise her that I would burn the journals.
I could understand her point of view–the books were his private thoughts and so on and so on. I told the girl about this and she started crying, begging me not to burn them.
In the end, I did as my mom asked and burned them.
To this day I wonder what was contained in them that my mom knew about. Her response was so strong and immediate that it makes me wonder if she was afraid that I was going to stumble across some terrible family secret.
I do regret burning them because in a little way those books would have allowed me to remember my brother, but then again, it would really hurt to find out some deep dark secret that causes you have to rewrite pleasant memories. Even finding something as simple as “visited my brother today–he is such an intolerable jerk, blah blah blah” could cast a gray pallor over what I might have remembered as a happy event.
My sister died 3 years ago after a long history of illness but had kept diaries almost all her life. She destroyed them herself but left a couple of fairly fat notepads she had written up her last year or so in.
We led quite different lives, mostly in separate cities until her illnesses became too much, and I was happy remembering her without possibly coming across stuff I would rather not have known. As executor I destroyed them without reading them.
I still have a lot of her (pre-digital) photo collection which in theory I’m slowly going through (not looked at any for ages, partly because they’re all slides and not suited for flipping through quickly) and should end up with a couple of small boxes of the best.
Now my father is extremely ill and I’ll probably have to make a similar decision soon. But any diaries and papers he’s left are quite possibly of at least passing interest to others, so I’ll probably have to at least skim them to check.
I would read them.
It’s funny (odd funny, not ha ha funny) how situations can be approached from different angles. It would never occur to me that reading the diary or journal of a recently deceased loved one would be considered ‘snooping’. I keep a journal BECAUSE I want someone to read it after my death. Mostly it contains mundane pointless things I want to share to give a future relative a view into what life was like ‘back then’.
After my mom died I found a few letters she had saved from my dad when they were first married which contained the exact same thing. Just routine musing about how the day was going. In one letter he talked about a new movie he was going to see on a business trip that starred Grace Kelly or something like that. It was very enjoyable. However, as Skald says above in his quote… you have to be prepared that you might stumble across information you wish you’d never learned about.
I agree with this. I really don’t think it makes that much difference whether he’s alive or dead. Reading his journal, you could find out things you wish you hadn’t. But I can’t really imagine a realistic situation where you’ll say to yourself “boy, am I glad I read that, I feel so much better now!”
(Bolding mine) I hope you have mentioned that to somebody already, or if not you should now. I think a lot of people would throw them away unread.