My Christian, old republican southerner father wants me to attend his Christian funeral with all of his surviving relatives present. I don’t believe in any god, he knows that. He needs a religion to give a meaning to his life? Knock yourself out.
Religion is not the main problem here. The main problem is how close minded and fake people are in a southern small town in GA and above all, relatives. 2 aunts love to pretend everything is fine, they excel doing that on funerals and weddings, then stab you in the back as soon as you’re not within ear distance, either need drama to feel important or have way too much free time.
I wouldn’t mind a small Christian ritual with my mother, my brother, a priest and nobody else, but these women and their husbands? They drag everyone down with their stupid grudges about yard sales and business deals made in the early 2020s and seem to be envious of those who left that place and found something better. Last time I saw them, 7 years ago, they complained I don’t call them. What for?
I’m better off without them and don’t have the bandwidth to deal with them.
Family seems to be an identity issue for my father, the idea that his whole family won’t bury him together scares him. I told them I will honor him my way, with luck on the hospital bed where he dies or at home, that mother and brother are welcome to honor him with me, that I won’t attend a funeral with people I don’t like but he is not listening: he is now retorting to manipulate me (it would be so good, wouldn’t it be nice…?)
My father is not cognitively impaired. The easy way out would be to tell him ‘sure, I’ll come to your funeral with all those assholes you care so much about’ and after he dies, ignore it. I suspect my mother would agree, because she wasn’t born in GA and these aunts always felt superior to her, something my father always downplays because ‘we’re family’.
I like treating my father like an adult and want genuine conversations with him. To me, placating him on a thing like this means accepting my father has become a 5 year old who needs to be lied to so he doesn’t start feeling sad or feels I’m attacking him. It doesn’t feel right.
But it feels worse to pretend I respect those lying assholes or to listen to their boring life I don’t care about.
So what do I do?
In my opinion, your stance is madness. You say you’re treating your father like an adult, but you aren’t acting like one yourself.
Adults tolerate minor discomforts to honor the ones they love. Adults make small talk or avoid people they don’t like at important events while still successfully showing their attendance.
Children prioritize their own small emotions and grievances over the needs and dignity of their parents because they don’t know any better or have any perspective.
So, which kind of son/daughter are you going to be?
On the other hand, it is immature and even selfish to care about the details of your own funeral. Your funeral is specifically an event for people who loved you, to process their grief. You will definitionally not be around to care about any of it, let your loved ones process their grief however they want.
If it was unusually selfish to care about how you were honored after you die, then nobody would be buying grave monuments or fancy urns.
Caring about your funeral at the end of your life seems to be a pretty common human experience. Hearing that your own child can’t be bothered to attend the event that is meant to honor your life is hard. I imagine it makes them feel like their child doesn’t love them as much as they thought they did.
Would I care if my child didn’t attend my funeral? No, I’d be dead. Would I care if my child told me that they were going to skip my funeral because they couldn’t tolerate a brief encounter with my annoying (never accused of actual abuse) sister? Yes, because it would show me that my child is being self absorbed in that moment and can’t muster up the energy to even pretend to care about my feelings on my deathbed.
I wonder how many unpleasant things OP’s father endured while raising them—I’d imagine a lot. Sometimes we bear little burdens for the people we love, and that’s totally normal, in my opinion.
I wouldn’t say unusually, but yes, people are known to be selfish and immature sometimes. Especially when faced with something scary and unavoidable, like death, and backed by culture and tradition.
People receive and express love in different ways. Not understanding and engaging with that is immature. Trying to manipulate another person into doing something uncomfortable after your death for no material reason at all is selfish.
Maybe the father can bear the little burden of not doing anything and not being materially affected in any way, then.
yours is an interesting post, I’ll try to rebut it.
I don’t want to honor an important person by having to deal with people I don’t like, that in the past stated very clearly they don’t like my mother to the point of calling her a gold digger (and worse).
Something I’ll never understand is why my father is so accommodating with people like that for family’s sake. To me that makes him weak and lets others walk all over him, even to the point of disrespecting his own wife for ‘family’. This I’ll never understand.
To me doing what you propose means turning something pure into a show, a theatrical production.
I’ll have to talk to my mother about this. If he goes first, she’s the one who’ll decide.
Welcome to life.
Of course it’s a theatrical production, just like church, weddings, birthday parties, and just about every other human event. The performance is part of the honoring. You dress up nice. You show your grief. You remember out loud. These are all visible signs of the respect you feel for the deceased. It makes others aware of how much the deceased meant to you. It reminds everyone of the value of life, relationships, and to not waste time with people you love because they might not be there one day.
They say you only get one shot at a first impression. A funeral is a time when everyone who cared for you comes together to create the last impression. You, as his son, have a lot of power to make it a good one.
That’s the childish response I was talking about. Nobody wants to spend time with people they don’t like, but a mature realization is that your mild discomfort is secondary to the importance of that moment, even more so, it is secondary to the importance of letting your father know that you love and honor him.
As I understand it from your description, you have prioritized avoiding discomfort over attending his funeral (his final wish), and you’ve prioritized avoiding discomfort by telling him that you’re going to skip instead of even softening the blow by shouldering the burden of a white lie. You chose yourself twice over your dying dad’s feelings and final requests. That is a pretty tough pill to swallow for dad.
Do you like your dad? I got the impression from the original post that you generally had a good relationship with him, but then you put him down here.
People are flawed. People have weakness and severity in them and sometimes lean too far to one side. You dad is dying. If you don’t accept and possibly forgive his humanity now, when will you?
then I’m childish. Note I don’t say that meaning I should change. What I’m tempted to do is to agree with mother what to do with his corpse after he dies because I have the feeling she also hates some family members pretty strongly and would prefer to be her genuine self during a ceremony like this than having to cater to visitors and see the ones that wronged her, pretending all is fine and dandy.
absolutely. As you said, I’m childish and don’t want to change. My father has the good traits and also the bad ones I mentioned. Why should I only mention his good side? Because we’re family? My father cheated on my mother, my mother forgave him. This I’ll never understand.
yes, with the ones I care about, the ones I respect, not with a bunch of rednecks.
Because I don’t know what’s the right call here: do I treat him like the adult he always was, being brutally honest with him when dealing with difficult issues because we all die or do I treat him like a scared child incapable of having sound decisions anymore, a person that only reacts and thinks emotionally?
this is a very good question. How does forgiving and accepting his humanity look like to you? Because to me, now, accepting his humanity means white lying to him, lying to him to hide an unpleasant reality. But this means I’m treating him like a child, means the father I always knew is gone.
I sort of agree, weirdly. Funerals are weird, OP, as is family. As someone with a horrendous family and a very bad social brain, I totally empathise with saying you have ‘no bandwidth’. But you only get one father, and one funeral for him. This need not be a long and drawn out event.
In your position, I’d tell him you’ll go and you’ll have a shitty time and you’ll really hate it and let him know you’re doing it for his sake. That way you’re not lying, you’re just agreeing, in the worst case, to waste a few hours of your life with some unpleasant people.
Even better, tell him you want a nice time out now, like a nice dinner, as payment for enduring his funeral when the time comes.