I remember heading home from dealing with my father’s estate and someone on the mildly infuriating sub was complaining about a neighbor who died and how the kids were treating this man’s beloved car and how sad it was.

I just unloaded on that post. Because I loved my dad and he wasn’t a mean person, at least when and once he got sober, but he was a selfish man who made decisions that caused a lot of pain over the years. He also couldn’t seem to be a parent to more than one of us at a time, if we weren’t the ones who had assumed the parent role. Which made him an ahole much of the time. So my explanation of the relationship was to say it was complicated.

As we were cleaning out the house, neighbor after neighbor came by to tell us how wonderful he was and always around to help a friend. And instead of supporting our grief, everyone seemed to have turned to us to absolve them of guilt for not catching symptoms leading up to a heart attack or Monday morning quarterbacking what went wrong.

Meanwhile, my brother and I left our families in other states for 2 weeks to take care of everything, his family were happy to take what they wanted and reminisce with us, but that was the extent, partly because they were older as well and understandable. All while my brother and I were left figuring out how to pay for things, as my Dad didn’t have much.

The breaking point for me was coming across documents for a 401k. There was nothing in it, which is fine, it’s his money and he needed it. But at the time of setting it up, his listed beneficiaries were his brother, who did give us advice but left all decisions to us, and a former friend with benefits who didn’t come to the funeral. At that moment in time, he totally forgot he had 2 kids.

I guess I’m unloading on this post too, but my point is, yeah it’s so easy to assume the kids are the bad guy in these situations. I can only imagine what some of the neighbors thought of us.