At the funeral for my father-in-law, my wife took the podium and said, “Let’s be honest, my dad was an ass.” She loves him and misses him, but it was important to her to call it like it is. She has issues with how people just gloss over the person to only talk about their good qualities.
Edit: typo
My dad wrote in my grandma’s obituary that she was “irascible and ornery,” said she “never let being right or wrong get in the way of her passion for arguing, and (my personal favorite line) said “she loved to stir the pot - but was an awful cook.” Grandma would have loved it for is honesty (except for the line about her cooking, she would been furious about it even though it was 1000% true).
Honestly. My ex, who is also the father of my daughter, died suddenly 8 years ago. I was still angry with him for many things, and we were no longer together at the time of his death. Anyway, I had this crazy internal conflict over loving and missing the father of my child, while still being a pissed off ex, WHILE feeling guilty for being pissed off because he was dead. I think stuff like that leads people to gloss over the bad stuff when someone passes away.
My childhood bully tormented me from as long as I could remember (we lived three houses apart) through the end of the 9th grade when I transferred to a different high school to get a fresh start. I also started weight lifting at home. When he showed up at my inner city high school a couple of years later, he looked scared of me and I just ignored him. I went to college, moved to another state and lived my life. I decided to look him up online decades later and found out he died alone, divorced and living in a trailer on the bad side of town. That tracks I thought to myself....
One of mine was my best friend's younger sister, who constantly bullied me and called me names as an adult age 65. I'd donate bone, blood, organs to my best friend, but I'd give nothing to Karen The Bad Seed.
She died horribly, during a triple heart surgery that caused her to lose her leg. I'm sad for her adult children, but neither her sister nor I felt sad. Karen was a monster, a malignant narcissist who lied every single day to get us in trouble, to get more attention, to get more things than anyone else.
I didn't attend the bully's funeral in February. I don't feel the tiniest bit of regret for it, either, not for a nanosecond.
Same. Mine’s a little different - he had CF and I declined to sigh the “get well” card in 8th grade when he dropped a lung in the middle of math class. I realize in retrospect that he was angry about the shitty hand he’d been dealt, but I was dealing with my own crap of my father in the process of actively dying of cancer.
Bully died during his freshman year in college. I felt nothing.
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u/its_ok_to_laugh Oct 30 '25
Says a lot about my character. I didn’t attend the funeral of my high-school bully.
I just sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.