Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for my Father

August 27, 2024 8:24 PM

That person was in there. I kept digging in the dirt, trying to find him, trying to get my real father out from under the wreck he’d made of himself, and I never did. [cw: death, emotional abuse, suicide]
posted by Francies (36 comments total)

i got 1/4 of the the way into this and had to stop for the night...it's too much. i will finish it tomorrow. but this is absolutely excellent. thank you for posting. (my dad is not like this dad but i have other people in my life who are like this dad...)
posted by capnsue at 10:01 PM on August 27

Ah, an unrelated sibling. Mine doesn't seem to be dead yet, though, and when he goes, it is likely to be in a broken RV illegally parked on crown land, because a motel requires more interfacing with regular humanity than he's capable of anymore. It is good of this author to lay it all out, like a suit on a bed the night before a funeral. It must have been cathartic to finally write it down.
posted by foxtongue at 10:40 PM on August 27 [4 favorites]

There’s a certain meditation that’s supposed to teach you compassion. I believe it comes from the Buddhists, though I am not enough of an expert to say

maitrī/mettā [wiki]
posted by HearHere at 10:43 PM on August 27

This is an amazing piece of writing. Also it needs content warnings for graphic description of death and dying, as well as emotional abuse.
posted by Zumbador at 10:44 PM on August 27 [1 favorite]

Jesus that was powerful. And so well written. I'm going to have to look up more of Doyle's writing.
posted by Hactar at 11:57 PM on August 27

Incredibly good writing. I wish I had a class to share it with. Powerful powerful anti-drug statement. I was reading Ligotti and Ramsay Campbell this week, and this was by far the scariest thing I've read. Fates worst than death...
posted by LeRoienJaune at 12:01 AM on August 28

This practice doesn’t force you to like people. It equalizes them. It helps you to see that the person you love and the person you hate and the stranger are all just people, same as you are, and that all people deserve sympathy, because life is hard.

The older I get, the more confident I've become in the idea that although treating everybody with compassion is a sound and healthy default position, there do exist people whose own actions, attitudes and choices make extending compassion to them specifically completely counterproductive for all concerned.

Some people are just too much hard work and endlessly willing to create more hard work for anybody who makes the mistake of becoming or staying involved with them, compassionately or otherwise. Extending compassion to folks who have made a life's work of refusing to do likewise is just a waste of time.

Cut them off, work around them and deny them the emotional oxygen they'll only ever use for hurting themselves and other people. They like those juices so much, they're perfectly welcome to stew in them; I have much less pointless and more pleasurable ways in which to waste my time.
posted by flabdablet at 12:09 AM on August 28 [14 favorites]

God damn, that was amazing. So much in there to think on, and so beautifully written.
posted by rory at 12:35 AM on August 28 [1 favorite]

There was a part of my father that understood everything he had done to us. So I know why he died the way he did, why he refused every attempt to save him: This death was what he thought he deserved.

He was right.

As is customary for worthless pricks like that, though, his death wasn't what anybody in his orbit deserved. Yet another putrid mess left behind for somebody else to clean up.
posted by flabdablet at 12:46 AM on August 28 [3 favorites]

This is great. Can't really find much else to say, just wow.
posted by ominous_paws at 12:47 AM on August 28

Drugs and alcohol abuse hurts not just the addict but also everyone in their orbit. It was painful to read. For all the emotional abuse her father dished out, his stance that gays should be shot seemed to me was the hardest on the author. It was denying her existence by her father.

Thanks for posting.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 12:48 AM on August 28

There was a part of my father that understood everything he had done to us. So I know why he died the way he did, why he refused every attempt to save him: This death was what he thought he deserved.

Thinking further on that: nobody actually knows what the guy was thinking on his deathbed. Nobody even knows whether he knew that it was his deathbed. He might well have just passed out drunk as was apparently habitual and then failed to wake up.

We often do this kind of thing, making up a Just So story in our own heads in an attempt to coerce reality into complying with some view of it that makes sense to us; those of us who still expect the arc of the moral universe to bend toward justice are particularly susceptible to it. I recommend resisting that tendency every time an opportunity to exercise it presents itself, instead using those occasions to practice sitting in acceptance of uncertainty. Building that skill, becoming comfortable with the experience of uncertainty being unavoidable and clarity the rare and beautiful thing that it is, avoids a lot of otherwise unavoidable suffering.

Time spent musing on what this prick was thinking as he died is time still devoted to him instead of to healing the damage he did while still alive. Which, being as how he's dead now, is the only way he still has to keep on inflicting that damage. He was there for a while, he knocked everybody around and now he's gone, like bad weather; let that be enough to know. What his memory deserves from other people comes with very little uncertainty.
posted by flabdablet at 1:51 AM on August 28 [9 favorites]

In my own experience, the practice of compassion benefits above all the one who practices it, no matter how selflessly directed at the one who hurt us it is. I've called him a prick, my sisters still do. It has left them sore and angry and confused. 'Othering' rarely helps in any walk of life, where we are intensely emotionally involved, especially when it is a parent, it requires us to 'other' a part of ourselves, to cut us off from something of ourselves. My sisters shed scalding bitter tears at the funeral. One of them still does years later. There's no consolation there, other than the dubious comfort of anger. There's hope in thinking him a terribly damaged human being, more damaged than many. Why hope? Because I do not have to cut myself off from my own damage, to hide and deny it. I can accept it and work to be better. I can be better and that's my job.

Just a thought and my experience.
posted by dutchrick at 2:27 AM on August 28 [20 favorites]

the practice of compassion benefits above all the one who practices it

Compassion is inherently a two-way thing: it's not possible to see ourselves in somebody else without seeing them in ourselves as well; the abyss gazes also into thee. So adopting an attitude of compassion toward the irredeemable pricks in our lives does offer clear opportunities to acknowledge and examine our own worst tendencies and seek to limit the suffering that those tendencies might otherwise inflict on people who don't deserve it. Would only that the irredeemable pricks could do the same, but they don't. Which is of course exactly what makes them the pricks that they are.

I've called him a prick, my sisters still do. It has left them sore and angry and confused.

I think there's a valuable distinction between calling somebody a prick while feeling anger or resentment toward them and describing somebody as a prick in much the same way as we'd describe a stove as hot.
posted by flabdablet at 2:58 AM on August 28 [4 favorites]

My father died of a cancer that had gone undiagnosed for years due to stubbornness and fear (but really, he died of alcoholism) a few months ago. He lay incapacitated in his home for days before a family member found him, ant death’s door. Our story is different and it’s also the same. I recognize so many of my own complicated feelings in the weeks after his death in this piece. It feels true in a way that none of the grief books, podcasts and Instagram carrousels do.

Remarkable writing. Thank you for sharing it.
posted by third word on a random page at 3:59 AM on August 28 [6 favorites]

Note that Jude Doyle is non-binary and uses he/him pronouns.

(In my case it was slightly different and the trash took himself out but wow do I relate to the anger.)
posted by I claim sanctuary at 6:29 AM on August 28 [5 favorites]

I really enjoyed this piece, what a dreadful rotting mess to have to carry with you and sort out in life. I couldn't help but think though, that at least as represented in this piece, that being able to exercise compassion for another might include attempting to understand how they got to be the way they were- I wondered what his childhood was like, how was he made to feel as a child, etc. As is, one takes from this that drugs made him so awful and no doubt they certainly reinforced and sustained him in his misery, but there must have been some tremendous insult to set him off on the path he took in life. I spent a while doing some work on my mom who wasn't in any possible way nearly as terrible but who handed down to me some particularly poor coping skills for difficulties in life. As I worked through it, I saw that I wasn't a bad person, but I had learned some pretty bad lessons. And I got as far as saying to myself that my mom tried the best she knew, and I genuinely forgave her for it. Pause a beat, several years, and finally I got to the place where I wondered how she herself had also developed these coping skills (basically lying and manipulating or omitting the truth to avoid pain, conflict and discomfort). I say I "got to the place" but it was with the help of years of therapy, but it did indeed take me a long ass time to get there. And I can only touch that a little bit, like close both eyes, then barely crack one open and squint at what I know of her childhood, how she was parented, etc. I expect to be on this journey for a while longer. "Can you have compassion for the child she was? How she must have been scared?" my therapist asks. If there is a hope of that it comes from my own experience of the same. And I expect this author will be on this path for a while too.
In any case, its searing to read their confrontation with the white hot horror they faced through childhood and young adulthood until they was able to sever ties. Even being ablet to write this feels brave of them. Like staring it in the face, Bravo.
posted by rene_billingsworth at 6:34 AM on August 28 [3 favorites]

Come back here. Come back here and clean up your own mess, for once, so I don’t have to do it. I want an apology. I want an explanation. I want you to have never been alive in the first place. I want, I want, I want you to stop being dead.

Wow. This passage is what did me in. It feels like that push-pull dynamic of "I hate you/I miss you" is there, underneath it all. (Unless of course I am misreading this entirely.)
posted by grubi at 6:36 AM on August 28 [5 favorites]

Speaking ill of the dead is never the recommended thing to do. He's dead and can't defend himself...
posted by Czjewel at 6:44 AM on August 28

I disagree with that sentiment. Whether they can defend themselves shouldn't matter: everyone is eligible for criticism, dead or alive.
posted by grubi at 6:47 AM on August 28 [14 favorites]

He's dead and can't defend himself

For pricks like this, after they're dead is the ideal time to speak ill of them, given that the way they choose to "defend" themselves while alive always seems to involve inflicting violence on the nearest helpless bystander.

There are people whose removal from this world makes it objectively better, and to me that large bucket includes all perpetrators of domestic violence and coercive control every bit as much as your Kissinger and Murdoch and Putin.
posted by flabdablet at 7:14 AM on August 28 [11 favorites]

For what it's worth, anybody who can't stop themself from loving one of these monsters has all my sympathy. That's a horrible predicament.
posted by flabdablet at 7:18 AM on August 28 [1 favorite]

Weighing in as someone who has been told all their life to suppress emotions that make other people uncomfortable: everyone gets to feel how they feel. It’s ok to be angry at abusers. You do not actually have to forgive them. If that’s something you want to do, that’s fine, but don’t fall into the trap of toxic positivity where nobody is enraged or heartbroken and we all must Forgive according to someone else’s preference. You’re not a bad person or harming yourself if you don’t forgive or have compassion toward people who hurt you. You just aren’t. Feel how you need to feel and then if your needs change, you can change your approach.
posted by corey flood at 7:29 AM on August 28 [18 favorites]

pretty sure whoever originally propagated "don't speak ill of the dead" was a piece of shit who knew how people were going to talk about them. when they were gone
posted by kokaku at 8:34 AM on August 28 [10 favorites]

Note that Jude Doyle is non-binary and uses he/him pronouns.

People of a certain age (Gen X on down) will recall the work he did under the name Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown. Honestly I think this essay is the best work he's done in some time. Perhaps he was gestating it all that period--I can only imagine how long it might take to write something like this.
posted by praemunire at 8:46 AM on August 28 [4 favorites]

Some people are better off dead. Sometimes other people are better off when some people are dead.

The damage here is extensive and wide-ranging but at least it's not going to continue.
posted by tommasz at 8:47 AM on August 28 [1 favorite]

You’re not a bad person or harming yourself if you don’t forgive or have compassion toward people who hurt you.

I don't think it makes you a bad person to be unable to feel compassion towards an abuser. It is not some kind of moral requirement. But I have noticed in my own life that any increase in my own ability to feel and express it has made me a kinder and a freer person. Perhaps it's that I'm now old enough, and free enough of the Christian paradigm of forgiveness in which I was raised, to separate compassion and freedom from consequences. It no longer feels like a betrayal of the idea of justice, or of my younger self, to have some compassion for people who hurt me when I was a kid. It just feels like recognizing the broader cruelty of the world in which we are all enmeshed.
posted by praemunire at 8:51 AM on August 28 [7 favorites]

praemunire the Neurodivergent Woman podcast had an episode on compassionate practice, in which they said that compassion does not exclude anger, and that compassionate anger can motivate people to act in ways that restore justice.
posted by Zumbador at 9:41 AM on August 28 [5 favorites]

This is one of the rare memoirs about an abusive person that lets you understand the love the writer felt without romanticizing or glossing over the failings, the cruelty, and the anger. It’s a real accomplishment.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:47 AM on August 28 [7 favorites]

Thinking further on that: nobody actually knows what the guy was thinking on his deathbed. Nobody even knows whether he knew that it was his deathbed. He might well have just passed out drunk as was apparently habitual and then failed to wake up.

Except that passage isn't about what he was thinking when he died. The author says his understanding was demonstrated by the little speech about drugs on the author's 12th birthday. And that the understanding and the guilt are why the father kept making the infinite destructive choices.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:18 PM on August 28 [2 favorites]

That was a hard but beautiful read. Thank you.
posted by signsofrain at 8:22 PM on August 28

I don't think it makes you a bad person to be unable to feel compassion towards an abuser. It is not some kind of moral requirement. But I have noticed in my own life that any increase in my own ability to feel and express it has made me a kinder and a freer person.

I’m genuinely glad that compassion is working for you. My point is that a lot of general and therapeutic advice turns into a tremendous pressure to forgive that then makes many people feel inadequate and invalidated.
posted by corey flood at 6:41 AM on August 29

My point is that a lot of general and therapeutic advice turns into a tremendous pressure to forgive that then makes many people feel inadequate and invalidated.

I'm really not trying to be snarky about this, but taking advice on this most important and sensitive matter from pop culture (and/or interested parties (e.g., family who just want to not have to deal with it all!)) is rarely going to serve you well. Pop psychology is never going to be able to address the nuances of your individual situation or your inevitably changing understanding of it over time. It's pointless even to blame it for that.
posted by praemunire at 7:39 AM on August 29 [2 favorites]

I’m genuinely glad that compassion is working for you.

...BTW, just to be clear, when I say "increase" I mean "a gain of a few basis points." (It's just that it's added up a bit over the decades.) I am in no position, personally, to preach universal lovingkindness as a lifestyle or ideology!

And, while I'm rambling on the subject a little (but will get back to the article), compassion is an important tool for the curious. Judgment says: this far and no further, I'm not interested in considering this more or from another angle. And that's still a mode I use in life with some (*cough* considerable) frequency, I think it's a mode that most ordinary people have to use just to manage the cognitive and affective load in life. But I'm egotistical enough that times when I realized later that my judgment had genuinely made me stupider really bothered me!

I suspect Doyle might say something of the like himself. Notice that his compassion came at a moment when he was feeling a sudden, particularly vivid understanding of the unrelenting difficulty of parenthood, that is, the position his dad was in. Which I think made writing the piece (or, at least, this version of the piece) possible!
posted by praemunire at 7:59 AM on August 29 [3 favorites]

Very powerful piece. The dad is well and truly a piece of shit. One who clearly suffered enormously for most, if not all, of his own life. And who could not but inflict that suffering on everyone around him.

I found this particularly heartbreaking:

There are terms for this kind of thing — enmeshment, parentification. One book uses the yikesy term emotional incest, which I object to, if only because I don’t think you can show up to the incest survivors’ meeting and say, yes, but I was emotionally incested. I think that has to be a hands-on experience, so to speak.

The author's immense aversion to this term feels heartbreaking because of the fear that the disgust implies. With such an intense degree of psychical fusion in that parent-child relationship, I might at points question whether there was incest that was more than emotional, were I in the author's position. And that would be a thought too unspeakably painful and confusing to bear, especially coming on top of all the other mess the dad created. I'd be terrified for good reason, to consciously consider the possibility.
posted by obliterati at 9:33 AM on August 29

Eulogy Attempt #3, voicing all the rage... the lines about Field of Dreams and Pet Sematary and the animatronic and the tire iron...
I know I am biased, because of the years I spent angry at my father for his alcoholism and short-sightedness, but I absolutely think that section is brilliant.

And the rage in #3 comes chronologically after the meditation moment in #1, bringing back to me that it's always a process, and there's never a finish line.
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 2:59 PM on August 29 [1 favorite]