Dad Passed Away this Morning

Hi Dean,

I'm so sorry for your loss. Even complicated relationships can be difficult to lose when it's family.
I hope you can take some solace in friends and people you love.
Sending you hugs. Take care and keep in touch.

 

Maybe he died for you then, and you are morning him, remembering the man as he was. Remember your relationship only when it was good. Reading this is making me think about the relationship between me and my father, we loved each other once. Take care, thank you for sharing and do what you have do to get through this. We are always here to talk.

 

My father hasn't past but I've dealt with some pretty mixed emotions regarding him. Maybe you are mourning what could have been?

 

Hi Dean sorry to here about your dad passing and I know you have had some bad times
Just think of the good times mate because once he was a good man .
And once again sorry to here
Happy thoughts

 

Dear Dean
I am so sorry for your loss. I think that even when people have very troubled or bad relationships with a parent it is often not 100 percent bad. And he was your Dad. I think grief is bound to bring up a mixture of emotions.
I hope you find peace in time. Sending kind wishes to you.

 

Dean, im sorry for the loss of the dad you knew as a child, if possible hang on to those times and release the later years? in any regard, Hugs man.

 

After I was born, in Mexico, my parents divorced when I was a toddler. My father was Mexican, my mother, Canadian. After the divorce we moved to Montreal, he followed us and stayed a while but soon moved back to Mexico. I remember only a few of his visits, it was fun to be with him, but no real bond occurred between us, I never knew what it was like to actually live with him, he was, for all intents and purposes, some kind stranger who would bring me candy and playfully lift me up over his head just for the fun of it...

I didn't see him again until I was 16 years old, in Mexico. I stayed a couple of weeks, it was...interesting...but no more than that, nothing came of it (except he did suspect I was gay...), and I didn't see him after that until I was 39, when my daughter was born...

We didn't communicate often, and frankly, I abandoned any attempt at getting closer, my sister maintained a relationship, but I just felt that I didn't need this complication in my life. In February, 2011, my sister called to tell me that he died. It was only at that moment, that I realized that this fact of my life, this story of the estranged father who lived abroad, had suddenly evaporated, and I felt a rush of sadness I didn't expect.

His family was ready to bury him immediately, but my sister and I asked them to wait so that we could go there for the funeral. While there, we got to know that side of my family, all the cousins, aunts and uncles, all the people in a foreign land who knew about me, who remembered me as a baby, who had photographs, it was surreal, as if I had opened a time capsule. They told me stories about my father, and his father (there is a photograph of my grandfather in a sombrero on a horse (a vaquero, or Mexican cowboy), his resemblance to me was striking), stories about my strong-willed and domineering grandmother, who I was told was a cigar-smoking matriarch...family is a very important thing in Mexico, I had no idea to what extent...

On the day of the funeral, there were the religious services in the church that dominated the village where my family has its origins, but the most memorable part of it for me was the procession from the church to the little mausoleum my father built for his family. It seemed the entire town joined us, my sister and I walked slowly behind the casket on its way to the cemetery, we walked in silence, the whole procession, in the stillness of respectful silence, I will never forget that experience.

I didn't shed a tear when I first saw his body lying in the casket, but the floodgates opened when they placed him into the ground. Those tears were not for the man I knew, but for the man I could have known, not for any love lost, but for the love that could have been...

 

Hi Dean,

I'm sorry to hear about your Dad's demise.

May he RIP.

 

My heart goes out to you, Dean. I never really had to deal with my parents where coming out was concerned - my mom had her suspicions and told me in very general terms that she would be accepting "if one of her children were gay", but she died a few months later, well before I had sorted things through in my mind. And my dad certainly must have had his suspicions, but his death after a 2-dacade illness was actually one of the events that freed up enough mental and emotional space in my head to consider coming out at all. Both of my parents did a lot of psychological damage to me, though, and while they were apparently very neutral or even potentially accepting of gays, they programmed a general sense of mistrust and anxiety and fear that I still struggle with. And yet both had very positive aspects to their personalities that I treasure to this day.

I've found it helpful to think of them filtered through what I know of their childhood and upbringing. Not to excuse them, but more to consider what brought their lives to the point where I entered it, and what baggage they brought into parenthood. Dad had many horror stories of his childhood that he seemed to have blamed on his father, but I could out from other relatives that his mother was a sort of "emergency stepmother" who married Grandpa to take care of his for toddlers (including newborn twins), and while she was terribly abusive to her stepchildren, I know she had felt forced into a no-win situation. Mom's dad was alcoholic and she was the second eldest of nine, and her mother was the "pretty" child who was sent to nursing school in the hopes of marrying a doctor and pulling the family out of poverty, not marrying a frequently out of work immigrant machinist.

Our parents are real people with good and bad personality traits, and sometimes with ugly pasts that turned them into ugly people. But it's a rare person that has no redeeming qualities somewhere. I find that if I remember my parents' bad qualities, and there were plenty of them, I keep running up against the emotional wall of issues I can never resolve, because they aren't here to work through them--even though I know it never would have happened anyhow. I think my brain zeroes in on the positive aspects because they hurt less, and because they are easier for me to make peace with. I can mourn the loving mother who sang to us and read us stories, even if I'm far less mournful of the one whose moods flipped randomly and who paddled me for things I hadn't done, because she couldn't catch my brother and had to take it out on someone.

As long as you know you're not glossing over the hurt he caused you, there's nothing wrong with mourning the times when you saw the person he might have allowed to grow and flourish, and the relationship you might have had. You will probably end up a lot less bitter and angry and hateful in the long run.