"Because he treated people with disdain, there will be no service."

October 7, 2023 1:54 PM

Sudbury, ON woman goes viral for scathing obit about her dead father. Original TikTok here.

Related listicle of other controversial obituaries.

Gentle reminder that not everyone gets good parents.

posted by Kitteh (35 comments total)

I would have written a truthful obit for my father had I been allowed to. Everyone acknowledged that what I wanted to write was the truth but god forbid we speak ill of the dead. It's such bullshit.

Good for her and good for her uncle for sticking up for her.
posted by cooker girl at 1:59 PM on October 7, 2023 [34 favorites]

I was greatly relieved to read her uncle sticking up for her too. It's hard enough to have these feelings, but to have nobody around who shares that truth would have to be terrifying.

The Dolores Aguilar one is remarkable to me. While there's obviously anger, there's also a kindness extended that feels very gracious. "Her family will remember Dolores and amongst ourselves we will remember her in our own way, which were mostly sad and troubling times throughout the years. We may have some fond memories of her and perhaps we will think of those times too. But I truly believe at the end of the day ALL of us will really only miss what we never had, a good and kind mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. I hope she is finally at peace with herself. As for the rest of us left behind, I hope this is the beginning of a time of healing and learning to be a family again."
posted by queensissy at 2:27 PM on October 7, 2023 [29 favorites]

I'm glad they included a screen shot of the obituary, which included most of the last paragraph:

In lieu of flowers or donations, just be kind to your fellow human, spread light and love where you can, and do with your life, what this [remainder cut off]

I'm glad Denis spoke her truth, a truth clearly shared by others who knew him, including his brother.
posted by kristi at 2:29 PM on October 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'm weirdly reminded of Orson Scott Card's Speaker For The Dead, introduced to me by friend and fellow Mefite SaharaRose. It's the only one of Card's "Ender's Game" books I've read, and Card's kind of got a controversial reputation now, but this book....

There's a premise in the book that in some places, instead of a more traditional eulogy, some people opt to have a "Speaker" come and do "A Speaking" after your funeral. The best way I can explain that is: Speakers do a WHOLE LOT of legwork about the deceased person's life for a few days before the funeral, talking to as MANY people as possible - neighbors, family, friends, co-workers - and sometimes even to the people who may have been witnesses to some of the things everyone else tells them. They try to get as complete as possible a picture of the deceased person - and then at the funeral, the Speaking is an attempt to tell the deceased person's life story in a grand-narrative, over-arching, deep-down way. So for instance, in the case of someone who was a serious introvert, instead of a sort of mealy-mouthed "she was quiet and kept to herself and died as peacefully as she lived" or whatever, you may get "she desperately wanted friends, but her parents were so afraid of her getting hurt they made her too afraid to reach out herself, and so she spent her whole life wishing she had friends but not knowing how to get them, and she died in as much loneliness as she lived" or whatever.

I feel like this is a Speaking.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:44 PM on October 7, 2023 [45 favorites]

IIRC, Sudbury is where Letterkenny is filmed, and I can easily picture something like this as a eulogy that Squirelly Dan would write, since Wayne would be too polite and Dary too soft-spoken to say it.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 3:16 PM on October 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

More power to her for speaking her truth. I don't understand the backlash she got from others...not everyone who dies is a saint and not everyone who dies is missed. I think she was rather restrained, honestly. I'd have written a much sharper one; I may still, when my absentee father passes on.
posted by annieb at 3:19 PM on October 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

god forbid we speak ill of the dead. It's such bullshit.

I agree, but have been in a kind of mental funk where I can see the utility in sugar-coating someone's passing. If we had truly honest assessments, I don't think it would generally go well.

I'm thinking of what I'd write about my parents; something along the lines of "They had kids far too young and spent most of their adult lives emotionally stunted because of it. They did grow as they got older, but always seemed to learn what they needed to know a just a little too late to help at key points. They did their best but it's an unfortunate truth about life that an early mistake can derail things forever. Hopefully their grandchildren will do better than their children."

Too many honest obits and everyone would just give up, lay down and die. Better for the living to pretend that things were a bit better than reality.

Sorry if that got a little too dark.
posted by Ickster at 3:26 PM on October 7, 2023 [31 favorites]

not dark Ickster, honest.

This is a thing in families, not speaking ill of the dead may or may or may not mean idealizing vs being honest. There's a lot of space in there, and a lot of people don't want to rock the boat once the waters appear calmer. But the beasts submerged remain for some....

Sometimes admitting that your mom wasn't a great cook is okay.
posted by djseafood at 4:23 PM on October 7, 2023

My father, a minister, built homophobia into his funeral service. I was able to say “well, at least I’m done with grief, here.” It was still a bad time.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:54 PM on October 7, 2023 [23 favorites]

Funerals and eulogies are for the living, and sometimes the living need catharsis beyond the bounds of polite society.

I made a MeFi post a decade or so ago about a heartfelt eulogy that hard SF author Peter Watts wrote for his father Ronald. He had written one for his mother Fanshun as well. That one was impersonal and abstracted to descriptions of anatomical machinery coming to rest after decades of thankless work because it was the only way he felt he could write something kind about her.

In recent years he removed it from his website. I hope it is because he is healing.
posted by infinitewindow at 5:16 PM on October 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

I think one can have grace and compassion and give a less-than-perfect person a good eulogy, and focus only on the best of what they brought to the world after they pass. My siblings and I did just that with our father. We remembered his humor and his generosity rather than recalling just how much pain his emotional unavailability caused us growing up.

But some people are much worse, and deserve little or such grace. Sounds like this woman’s father is very much in this group. Good for her for not sugar coating it.
posted by Frayed Knot at 5:32 PM on October 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

.

"If there is one good story out there with regard to my father, then, quite honestly, I would be happy.
"It's horrible walking around the earth thinking that my father was 100 per cent bad."

Life can be so sad

"be kind to your fellow human"
posted by anadem at 6:31 PM on October 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

You can't hurt the dead so why not be honest? I wasn't asked to give my uncle's eulogy and if I had I would have wanted to say, at least he won't be around to vote for Trump again and teach the younger cousins the racist jokes he loved so much. He was terrible at his many marriages but did love his daughter. He and his brothers did fuck all to help my mom who cared for their abusive mother when she was dying, so thanks for nothing there, bub.
posted by emjaybee at 6:40 PM on October 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

To be dead is to forget what it means to be forgotten.

And we only imagine that they can't and won't be there again.

But we don't know what happens in the ever after. It might be run by them.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 7:22 PM on October 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

A negative obituary (or similarly, epitaph) will cause the person to be remembered perhaps more than they deserve.
posted by Gable Oak at 7:24 PM on October 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

My father died less than a year ago. We did not and will not have a service. If anyone asks, I say that he hurt a lot of people who loved him. But it's complicated. I actually have many fond memories of him, but I have to acknowledge what he did to other people. None of my siblings thought to share our hurt with the world although we do talk about it with each other. As for 'mean' obituaries — people show their grief in different ways. I will probably be spending the rest of my life trying to figure out who that man was.
posted by maggiemaggie at 7:36 PM on October 7, 2023 [12 favorites]

Sudbury and Northern Ontario in general have a fairly "direct when speaking" culture (which people often think is rudeness). Being from there, its not overly unusual for people to speak ill of the dead even at funerals tho we don't always do it in an obit in the paper. Well... it depends how shitty they are - this guy sounds like a piece of work so definitely deserved.

Note: Tho Letterkenny is filmed in Sudbury it really is about Listowel Ontario which is about as indirect of a place as you can get.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:57 PM on October 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

My absolute first memory is of my father beating my mother with an oak dining-room chair as she tried to protect me from him with her body when I was a toddler. He was a handsome smooth-talking con artist who could sweet-talk almost anyone into one of his schemes. He abandoned my mother with 3 children on my 6th birthday, leaving her alone with three children at the age of 22, in 1961. He promptly absconded to California, where Canadian child support laws, as pathetic as they were then, were simply not enforced.

In those days, there were 3 careers that respectable women were expected to have. They could be a grade-school teacher, a nurse, or a secretary. Without any education, she had no other real choice, so she became a secretary. After starting in the steno pool at Carling Breweries, she worked her way up to Personal Secretary to the Western Canada Manager. Basically running the massive operation, she discovered that there was a benefit available to employees that provided reimbursement of tuition fees to employees who successfully achieved a "B" grade or higher at a post-secondary institution. This was intended for the (male) executives but this wasn't explicitly stated.

Perhaps the smartest person I've encountered in my life, she slowly chipped away at her degree, taking two courses a semester, every semester, while raising 3 children on a secretary's salary in the '60s.

My absent father had a fetish for sending really elaborate and expensive gifts for birthdays and Christmas. He would show up unannounced for holidays, typically driving a Cadillac or Lincoln, insisting on buying dinner at Trader Vic's, Benihana, etc. When we became tweens, each one would be invited down in age order, for the summer, to stay with him in his waterfront home in Malibu.

I'm talking sand-in-your-shoes at the bottom of the staircase, and waves washing away the deck furniture during a storm surge here. Jerry Lewis's boat grounded at our dock during one of these. Quite the contrast. To my everlasting shame, I was insufferable after coming back from spending my first summer there. Both of my sisters were less voluble and declined second invitations.

When I was 14, I returned for the summer again, and I started to realize that my father was a sociopathic predator, who suffered from what was then called Manic Depression, now characterized as Bipolar Disorder. He was using me as a lure to draw in victims, who would see this "loving father" as some sort of a noble victim, offering his children a respite from the low-class lifestyle that their mother gave them.

His mental impairment progression manifested itself toward the middle of August when he was arrested for shoplifting at J.C. Penny, (we had a fridge full of Filet Mignon steaks and Lobsters) and then, upon release, he buried himself below the high tide line on the beach by the Santa Monica Pier. I had to go sign his "not crazy" undertaking to get him released. They wanted me to commit him.

Recognizing that the things about my own personality that troubled me the most were things that I probably actually didn't have much control over, (emotional overreaction, inappropriate anger, needless frustration) was when I made a decision to never have children. Because I can't control this half of my gene set that my other half is appalled by.

This decision has ruined every serious relationship I've ever had with any woman. Every single one whom I have explained this to has insisted that I would change my mind. But I refuse to lie to them. I have been eviscerated for this decision all my life, and have been called a selfish, sexist, and misogynist constantly, including on this very forum.

My father passed away after losing his leg in a motorcycle accident 15 years ago. I felt nothing. I've always felt guilty about that since.

My mother was something else. She raised 3 children on a Secretary's salary by herself in the '60s. She put herself through university and never received any mark lower than an "A" until she got her degree, and then she quit her job. The same day,

When I was 15 and in high school, we would split her English 101 essay pile in half. She would mark one pile, and I'd do the other. My mother passed away last night after a decade of suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's.


This article has hit me harder than might be expected. I've never discussed any of this before.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 11:17 PM on October 7, 2023 [177 favorites]

My thoughts are with you, Pareidoliatic Boy. I am so sorry for your loss.
posted by Zumbador at 11:24 PM on October 7, 2023 [17 favorites]

I agree with Anne Lamott on this:

"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:29 AM on October 8, 2023 [44 favorites]

PareidoliaticBoy, I feel honored that you chose to tell your story here. I'm sorry for your loss. I chose childlessness for not-dissimilar but much lower-amplitude reasons.

I wish everyone with good reason to write an obit in the style of Amanda Denis all the peace and healing they want. They deserve it.
posted by humbug at 5:30 AM on October 8, 2023 [16 favorites]

For reasons, David Sedaris is not popular here. But besides that nonsense, his latest book is a jaw-dropping compilation of various, unsparingly brutal stories about his passing father. One such story was discussed here a couple years ago. I suggest readers read it.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:31 AM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I myself have an absent father. Our relationship is not acrimonious but it's never been close and will never be close. I have accepted that. I hope at his passing I will not be asked to say a few kind words because I would really want to say: "Well, he was my biological father, so..huh. That's it?"

(BioDad had a fucking fit at the eulogy I wrote for my stepdad when he passed because I said--and meant every damn word--that he was the man who raised me and my sister, through good times and bad, and to me, that was fatherhood. And I thanked him for being the dad we needed.)
posted by Kitteh at 6:33 AM on October 8, 2023 [21 favorites]

After my uncle's funeral (my grandparents' oldest child) we all gathered at my aunt's house. My late uncle's wife and her family were elsewhere and thankfully did not invite us. As my uncle's siblings gathered, they ended up sharing stories about the few times they actually had the upper hand with him. He was a mean person from childhood until he cut ties with the family. What my aunts wanted to talk and laugh about were the times they put him in his place. It was a kindness, almost, to focus on that instead of telling stories of how mean he was. My grandparents were present and said nothing. I suppose it was painful for them to hear that that's all there was to be said of their son but they had nothing honest to say in his defense.

A story that has always amazed me about my grandmother is that when this uncle became engaged to his first wife, she took the woman aside and told her not to marry my uncle. I never met her but she was apparently a kind, sweet person. My grandmother, in her legendary honesty, told her she could do much better than my uncle and should not marry him - "he's not a nice man". She did marry him, and later died of cancer. I wonder if she came to regret her choice.
posted by Emmy Rae at 7:05 AM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Part of me is waiting for the day I get a call that one of my parents has died. When I came out as trans, I called them to tell them the day before I posted on Facebook, and they said nothing, just hung up the phone. I haven’t tried talking to them since.

I’m not sure what I’ll do. I’m angry about things they did (sending me in my late teens to a therapist who was a NARTH member, trying to “help control that weight” by locking the kitchen whenever neither of them was in there, tossing me out in my mid-20s when they became fundamentalists, then taking me back in when I begged for it and they de-converted) but remember things like them trying to teach me to ride a bike (before we found out I have a balance disorder), or my mother taking care of me when I had my wisdom teeth out, or my father teaching me how to use power tools.

When they’re not monsters (and I recognize some people are to their children), it’s hard to know how to feel. I just know that if I decide I will go to the funeral, I’m going to need a black dress and a new pair of flats for the day, and I will be sitting in the back, because I’m pretty sure I won’t be recognized as “part of the family”.

PareidolicKid, my sympathies for your loss. Your mother was a gem.
posted by mephron at 7:54 AM on October 8, 2023 [13 favorites]

My father was far from the worst, but he was distant and snippy.

When he died, the pre-eulogy talk with the rabbi could have been a great scene for a play about a man who spent his attention on his business and not his family. (Dissociated? Who, me? I mean, I was thinking that at the time.)

At the funeral, someone said he was a good CPA, and that was a considerable relief to me. It was better than thinking the family stuff was all for nothing.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:00 AM on October 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Funerals are for the living. They exist to celebrate the life of the person who is gone and support those who are grieving.

It’s a proxy for connecting with the people the people who share the loss.

Being honest about the departed is being honest with those who are still living. It’s a testament to your character, not that of the departed.

I will have a similar eulogy for my own father, who burned every bridge with his children, abused his children, terrorized his late wife, and scared off most of his immediate family. For me, it’s an acknowledging that such behavior is unacceptable and a lesson for my own children to never tolerate it.
posted by WorkshopGuyPNW at 8:10 AM on October 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Mom's Mabley: "It was a miserable marriage. But he's dead, thank goodness. I was always taught never to say anything about the dead unless it's good. He's dead. Good!"
posted by DJZouke at 8:51 AM on October 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

god forbid we speak ill of the dead. It's such bullshit.

Due to the cascading tragedies of 2021 I ended up with the power of attorney for my father's health care as he is now deep in senile dementia and I am the senior family member with mental faculties mostly intact. I was never in my life ever close to my father and we only got more distant as he got older. So now I am in the situation where I feel a moral obligation to him as a human being who deserves care but I am utterly indifferent about him as a person in my life. It's uncomfortable that I like the dementia version of my father better because he is a nicer person without any memories and without the 50+ years of our relationship dynamic. It's not even a burden. I just make sure he has what his care home says he needs and that they are taking care of him but it is a very weird thing, this strange emotional place that doesn't seem to exist in our culture. I don't love my father and I don't hate my father and there isn't really a script for filial indifference.
posted by srboisvert at 2:37 PM on October 8, 2023 [22 favorites]

srboisvert, you are not alone. My wife and I are caring for her parents, in similar circumstances, with the same indifference. It is an okay way to feel.
posted by Pantengliopoli at 9:37 PM on October 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have a funny feeling that people are going to be pointing to this thread the next time a controversial famous person dies, and we start up with the "no tap-dancing on his grave, please" vs. "but he was a shit-stain" arguments. So in an attempt to short-circuit that -

I think the "no tap-dancing on his grave" position is motivated by respect for the deceased's family; even a shit-stain may have kids who love him. Here, though, the deceased's family is leading the shit-stain accusations - and they absolutely should be able to do so, in my opinion.

(Heh; it's weirdly like this time a friend was in this live-action stunt show thing that was going to tour Japan in the 90s. We had a going-away party for him, and he showed us a tape of the final dress rehearsal. And....it was TERRIBLE. The performances were fine, but the script was messy, confusing, and corny. When the tape was over, the rest of us sat in silence for a good ten seconds, with all of us desperately trying to figure out what we could say. Our friend finally said, "Guys, I know it's stupid, it's okay." And then we all started talking at once - "oh, well, in THAT case....")
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:15 AM on October 9, 2023 [14 favorites]

Luckily, this thread is all about you and your Theatre Freinds™, Empress. Otherwise, this non-sequitur might seem a bit misplaced.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 8:21 PM on October 11, 2023

...I....was using it as an illustrative analogy that it's often best to withhold negative comments out of respect for those closest to a situation, but if those closest to the situation also express negative comments, then let fly.

My apologies if that was not clear.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:35 AM on October 12, 2023

The fault is mine. I was still quite distraught when I read that comment after returning from dealing with my mother's passing. I was overly offended by what I saw as the conflation of the death of a loved one with a shoddy script. Calming down a bit after a glass of wine and rereading it I actually asked for the comment to be deleted. Not my finest moment.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 6:18 PM on October 12, 2023

Nah, it was fair, Pareidoliatic - I could have been a little more clear and a little less folksy. And my condolences to you as well.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:54 AM on October 13, 2023