Most of us tend to share only exaggerated good times, after the death of a loved one. For a short time, this may help us to some degree. But then reality must be faced, because its not healthy to avoid it. I think it's important to be more honest and I am taking it to an extreme in this post.
I just again looked back at my father's obituary and feel a need to set the record strait on a few important things...
One real truth about my father is that he was a mild form of a pedophile; he had encouraged at least one of his toddler aged children to touch him. And then he later strived to prevent anyone from ever knowing about it - he started brutally mentally abusing one of his adult children (me), out of fear of his shameful act possibly being realized and exposed, even though I had not even known about it at that time. He had strived to keep me isolated from the whole family, and had wanted people to think I was "insane," since I first started looking back at and healing from the tough times in my childhood, in the late 1980s. My looking back at the past became a huge threat to him, but I didn't even suspect or realize what he had done until 2004. Ironically, his own aims to cover up his shameful act is what later exposed it. I realized it because of his mental abuse, and then was forced to speak up about it, because of his ongoing mental abuse.
2004 was a tough year for me. Words cannot express how painful it had been to face the fact that my own father cared about me so little, that he was trying to destroy my sanity, and my relationships with my siblings, in order to cover his own mistake. It still hurts. I forgave him, but his total lack of love for me still hurts. I think it always will. I now sometimes feel more sad for him than I do for myself, because he was his own worse enemy in this whole situation and he must have been miserable - so filled with shame and guilt. If only he had chosen a better path - one that would have been good for him and everyone else. The path he chose put me in a position where I had to either stand up and tell the truth or accept the "insane" label and possibly even be shoved into an insane asylum. In 2006 I chose to save my sanity and tell the truth. I matter too. Then I washed it all away, but he and my sisters raised it back up in an addendum to his will two years ago....again forcing me to tell the truth or accept the false label! I will only accept the real truth and its time to more fully expose it, for everyone's sake. I share this publicly, for all the people whom it could help to validate or save from similar experiences.
Valuable lessons can be learned from my father's mistakes in this situation. Lets learn them, so they will not be repeated in other places.
My father was also not some of the things that my sisters claimed he was in the obituary; the overall truth is that my father did not "raise" his children after our mother died - he abandoned the two who were not already grown up by then - my two little brothers. I was 18 and my other three siblings were older than that and none of us were even living at home anymore. (And I was actually partly raised by two sets of surrogate parents, because of my own father and mother rarely being there for me, through all of my teen years.) My father was a loner who seemed to never really want the children whom he often avoided and rarely even initiated contact with in our adult lives, except for when he wanted something.
My father was actually not a "creative" type of person at all; most of his conversations and writings came from other people's experiences and writings. He was a man who had never really found himself, never fully lived life and never faced or did anything to address or help heal any of the most important family issues that had needed his attention. He was not the head of our family (my abusive oldest sister controlled everything, which is why I left home when I was 15 years old.) My father was actually like a child who just stumbled through the family avoiding all the depths. He was a man who was so filled with shame that he had a hard time facing people; he had mostly isolated himself from society through his whole adult life. He actually had no close friends, except for his brother Jr.
And my father did not really die in a "loving" home; he died after being taken from his own home and kept isolated, against his will, in an emotionally abusive environment. My older sisters wanted most of his money for themselves, and they manipulated many things and even abused their own siblings and father, in order to make sure they got it. I have felt deeply sad for my father, because, with them at the helm manipulating him, he was not only deeply hurt, but also had no chance to have a healthy closure with his two sons and I. This situation was not good for anyone or anything, except for the greed and hate in my older sisters, and that sure did not need anymore feeding.
My father's life and death was not at all like what has been portrayed publicly. Much of it was sad as hell. This is the real truth.
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