hi, just wanted to thank you for posting this. Religion is completely secondary to this.

I did mean that the funeral with relatives would still go ahead, but you would only attend something personal, as an extra to the traditional funeral.

this is a great idea.

the optics will be bad and people will talk shit.

no doubt about it, specially in the south.

I’m guessing the people in this thread calling similar feelings “petty” or “insane” just don’t have the same level of trauma.

correct, there is a huge bias on this thread about family, happy family, keeping up appearances… I never expected it to be that strong.

your first paragraph made me laugh.

Good luck to you.

That’s the childish response I was talking about.

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.

People are flawed.

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.

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.

yes, with the ones I care about, the ones I respect, not with a bunch of rednecks.

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.

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?

If you don’t accept and possibly forgive his humanity now, when will you?

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.

You go to comfort and commiserate with the survivors.

agreed, with the ones I care about

Spending 2-3 hours at the funeral home with his open casket, is a more personal way to say your farewells and honour him.

as said, I wouldn’t mind a small Christian funeral where I could vet visitors. I’m all for a personal, even intimate farewell, but he wants the crowd.

Scattering his ashes at an agreed location of shared importance for the both of you, can be a powerful final goodbye.

Things I proposed already:

• burn his corpse, use the ashes to grow a tree, small ceremony with me, mother and brother. Even with a priest.

• burn his corpse to scatter his ashes on a river of his choosing, small ceremony with me, mother and brother. Even with a priest.

• burn his corpse, put the ashes in three small containers so each of us makes his own ritual.

• not burn the corpse, simply put the corpse in a hole, plant a tree over the corpse.

he wants the Christian cross with the crowd next to his mother. And me there, even if I feel is stupid. This is to be taken literally, he has already bought a place for my corpse to be buried next to him.

I feel he doesn’t care about how this makes me feel, which I guess happens to so many families when conflicts like this arise.

Are you even ever going to see these people again?

the only ones I care about are my mother and brother.

Ask your mom/siblings if they need the support, if you like them.

this is the best answer so far. With difference.

I can’t fathom why people want you to engage with people who make your life worse for no gain. Yeah, smile for your boss because you need the paycheck, but this?

cannot upvote this enough

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.

I agree with you, just wanted to see how unpopular this position is

I agree with you but wanted to see how un-popular my take is

He isn’t going to bar his sisters from attending his funeral

true, but my mother might. There is really that much animosity.

As a matter of fact, on one of my great grandfather’s funeral 2 brothers banded together to exclude a third one from the funeral. According to my father, this person had to leave the cemetery but then climbed up a tree next to the wall to watch the ceremony.

So there is already a precedent about excluding unwanted visitors from a funeral in my completely normal family 🤣