Quick backstory: He died Nov. 14.
I keep trying to feel something – anything – and yet my mind tends to wander to my ex-wife for that.
I very vaguely remember times where we’d have fun, as with me riding on his shoulders, but the final year Oma came for Christmas, all of that was gone.
A friend and I had split a beer several months back (I think we were 11) when my parents went out for the night and got us pizza.
As 11-year-olds are, we stupidly did not dispose of the evidence. My parents being reasonable people, the punishment was “don’t ever do this again.”
So it is against this backdrop that I’m sitting in my room, and my dad bursts in, furious. In my face like he’d never been before, and I was frozen in shock and confusion. I’d not done anything.
Over the course of the next half hour, the picture becomes clear: Oma had opened a beer thinking it was a V8.
What I never got was an apology. He knew damn fucking well that he’d falsely accused me and scared me, but apologizing was apparently too much.
There were nearly 35 years for that apology. It just didn’t happen.
NGL, dad probably totaly forgot about the event. If it’s one of many “blow ups” they seems to gloss it all over and it fades away.
My own dad separated himself from his family, ran off to California to “find himself” in the early 90’s and died there. Alone. I went out in 2018 to see him one last time and spent 4 days cleaning his filty cottage while he sat in front of his computer and played games. We went out to dinner one of the days I was there and I realized that I no longer knew the man sitting across the table from me. Odd feeling that.
All the love I’d had just had faded away over the years - even before he left, he was notorious for promising to spend time with me and then not showing up. It was always some excuse that he couldn’t make it… 9 times out of 10 it was him just forgetting. It was depressing to be on the end of that indifference, to say the least.
Said my goodbyes and knew that it was the last time I would see him.
Tried several months later to help him get admitted to the VA for medical care and even offered to go out and pick him up and bring him back east to a VA hospital nearby and he made all sorts of excuses. Oh well, I tried.
I miss the man I knew when I was little before my folks got divorced and my mom took me out west… THAT man was long gone by the time I went to live with him for the last three years I was in High School.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it is okay to be ambivalent or have no feelings whatsoever about your parents after they die. It happens to a lot of people.
Of all my relatives now dead, the ones I cry over mostly are my grandparents. They were way cool and I spent time with them - into my 50’s - so I got to know them as adults, as peers and equals, which is an amazing experience.