Confused

[Celona]

I've been going back & forth on whether to write anything on here or not. There's no way this is going to be short so bare with me. My dad died April 11th 2016 at 3:21 am on his kitchen floor. My sister who had been living with him  (more like leeching) came home at 2am & found him on the floor. I live only a few blocks away & was the first person she called. I told her to call 911, ran as fast as I could to his house. I performed cpr on my dad for 15 minutes before the ambulance came & took over. After 45 minutes he was pronounced dead. My world unexpectedly crashed. 

Let's back up a little bit though. He wasn't my biological father. He married my mom when I was 2 & raised me from there. I've only seen my biological father 3 times in my life so he was more my dad than my step dad. We had a great relationship when I was real young. I have lots of good memories swimming & wrestling with him. Then one day things changed & my childhood became hell. My mom & dad began fighting all the time & began taking it out on me & my younger sisters. To make a long story short I became homeless at 17 because I refused to go home, my younger sisters were placed in foster care & never returned to either of my parents custody. They also were divorced around this time. When I was 18 my dad was brought up on child molestation charges. He bought a really good lawyer & won the case in trial. But everyone believed he was guilty. I was never able to leave him alone with my children or fully trust him. He was hard to get along with & even harder to love. I honestly thought I wouldn't miss him when he died. Well I was wrong. 

The whole first week I felt like I couldn't catch my breath & everything didn't feel real. So many people showed up to give their condolences & talk about what a good man he was. The same people that talked about what a terrible person he was before he died. While I'm grateful for the kind words it was as if everyone had forgotten who they were talking about. Maybe this is why I'm so confused over being so upset over his passing. 

Now onto the mess of the estate. My dad was terrible with money & owed a lot of people. One of them being my mother who has a  $30k lean on my dad's house. I've tried talking with her but she is going to push to collect "her" money. Unfortunately to pay all these debts, we're going to have to sell the house. It sucks but there's no options. My sister that lives there is refusing to cooperate. She wont let us on the property, & is selling his stuff off without telling anyone. We suspect she is using the money to live since she refuses to get a job. My other sister & I are now forced with the decision to walk away & let her drown in the mess herself, or hire yet another attorney to fight her. 

I'm exhausted there's just too much drama. I feel like I don't even really have time to grieve. Feels good to write it out though I suppose. 

[kayc]

My father also died April 11, but in 1982.  Your dad was very handsome!
In reading about what you're going through since his death, wow, I'm just so sorry.  It seems like there's nothing like a death to bring about the best or the worst in people!  Can you file an injunction to get your sister to stop selling things?  They should go through probate unless he left everything to her.  If you walk away you might not get anything, but you might have more peace of mind, it's a decision only you can make how best to handle it.  Some are fighters, some want peace, but ultimately, you will need to do what you feel is best for you.

Life can be so complicated sometimes.  Some may have believed him to be a molester, some may not have thought so, but the fact remains, he was pretty much the only dad you knew.  Sometimes relationships with flawed people as our parent can get really complicated.  Not all parents are wrapped up in a nice neat little package, but they're still our parents.  We can hate some things while loving others, both of them valid.

I'm just sorry for your loss and all you are going through these last two months.

[Clematis]

On June 8, 2016 at 0:31 PM, Celona said:

... He was hard to get along with & even harder to love. I honestly thought I wouldn't miss him when he died. Well I was wrong. 

The whole first week I felt like I couldn't catch my breath & everything didn't feel real. So many people showed up to give their condolences & talk about what a good man he was. The same people that talked about what a terrible person he was before he died. While I'm grateful for the kind words it was as if everyone had forgotten who they were talking about. Maybe this is why I'm so confused over being so upset over his passing...

Celona, I'm sorry to hear about your dad and that everything is in such a mess. I think everyone is a mixed bag and some are more than others. Like you, I adored my dad when I was little and then there were  a number of years when I was very angry about somethings he had done. Fortunately, I had plenty of years to work things out with him - years of psychotherapy, telling him how angry I was with him, hearing what he had to say about his own childhood, working at rebuilding a relationship with him, and ultimately coaxing him into moving across the country to live very close to me, like you and your dad did. My sisters never dealt with what happened when we were younger or my mother's death or anything else, as far as I can tell.

When my sisters came out west to his memorial, my older sister became very agitated and angry with me, telling me over and over that she was not going to be forced to lie at his Celebration of Life, and didn't want to have to listen to anyone else lie about him either. I think she was worried about the same thing you are talking about. No one had anything bad to say about him at the memorial, or anywhere else. My dad and I became very close during his last ten years when I took care of him - he had Parkinson's Disease - I have grieved him a lot more than my sisters did, because they were not so close and also they hadn't been around him much for ten years.

I think when you lose a parent who has not been a good parent, you grieve the person you lost and you also grieve the fantasy of the parent you wished you had, but never will since they are gone. For me, I lost the very cool and fun and interesting dad I had when I was little, the dad who taught me stuff when I was an adolescent but also had a rash temper and was sometimes inappropriate, the guy I barely saw for years but tried to make friends with for years, and also the sweet old man who struggled to get around for his last ten years. 

When he moved to AZ, people all told me the same thing - "Oh, I just love your dad-he is the sweetest man!" I had coaxed him out west since I saw good things I had never seen in him, but I kept thinking, "Sweet man? My dad-sweet? Are we talking about the same person?" Eventually I came to see him as all of those people rolled into one, and rolled with the punches as they came. And now that he is gone-I focus on what was in the present. Yeah, he sometimes drank too much. He had a short fuse, which he got over. But he was a brilliant man with many skills. We had so much in common and is loss is profound to me. It will be six months on July 13, and I am staggering with the effects of grief. 

Nevertheless, I do know with all of my being that he absolutely loved me, he was proud of me, respected me, had my back, looked after me, and was there to pick up the pieces when I stumbled. He was not perfect, but I miss him so much I can hardly believe I will ever be ok without him.