The Funeral I May Not Attend
On estrangement, boundaries, and mourning people who didn’t see you
There’s a funeral I haven’t attended. Not yet. And maybe I never will.
It hasn’t happened. He’s still alive. Ninety and counting. But in many ways, he’s already gone.
Not in the way the body leaves. Not in the way mourners gather in stiff suits, exchanging gentle lies and lukewarm tea. But in the way someone disappears from your life long before they disappear from the world. In the way a father becomes furniture. Present, but unfeeling.
There’s a funeral I imagine. Sometimes with guilt. Sometimes with peace. Sometimes with nothing at all.
And I wonder, when the day comes, will I go? Will I sit through the service, a stranger among relatives, pretending the bond ever held? Or will I stay home and honour the truth instead of the man?
He is not dead. But he is dying. And my brother is watching.
The same brother who grew up cast as the black sheep. Too loud. Too angry. Too real. He knows what it was to reach and be met with retreat. He feels what I feel. And still, he stayed.
He sits at the edge of our father’s decline. Maybe that’s his reckoning. Maybe that’s his form of closure, not found in forgiveness, but in witnessing.
There’s something off in that. And something deeply human too.
We loved our father. Or tried to. But love, when unreturned, becomes labour. And he made us work for every inch.
He stopped trying a long time ago. He stopped laughing. He stopped growing. He stopped parenting.
A man who gave up on himself, and so gave up on us. He offered routine, not relationship. Shelter, not safety.
He thought his job was done once the bills were paid. That putting food on the table meant love had been delivered. But we were starving in other ways.
And my mother. She didn’t shrink beneath him. She stepped up in his absence. She carried what he had long since dropped.
She became the one who made things work. Not because she wanted the weight, but because someone had to. She kept the house upright while he sat in it fading.
She never got to soften, not because he smothered her, but because he disappeared and left her to keep everything from falling apart.
She died first.
I went to her funeral. And I wept.
But not for the death. I wept for the life she was never allowed to live. I mourned not her passing, but the version of her that never had the chance to breathe, the version of her not burdened by his withdrawal.
She bore the load, and never stopped carrying it. Even when it broke her.
He should have gone first. But he didn’t.
And now I sit with a grief that doesn’t know what name to wear. I have already buried him. In pieces. Over decades.
I buried him in every moment of silence where there should have been love. In every year he stopped trying. In every room where he was physically there but emotionally absent.
And I don’t know if I’ll go when the time comes.
If I do, it won’t be for him. It will be for the boy I was. The one who tried. The one who offered his heart and got only routine in return. The one who learned to grow without a guide.
And if I don’t go, it won’t be out of malice. It will be out of mercy. Mercy for myself. Mercy for the man I’ve become, in spite of what was missing.
Estrangement isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes it’s two people sitting in the same room and still never meeting.
And my brother. He stayed. That was his path. Mine was to leave.
We came from the same silence. We responded differently. Two kinds of courage. Both honest. Both painful.
There’s a funeral I haven’t attended. Not yet. And maybe I never will.
But I already know the eulogy.
It does not begin with his virtues. It begins with our survival.
A boy unloved. A mother overwhelmed. A father who left before he died. A man who walked away without ever walking out.
And still. Here I am.
Not angry. Not bitter. Just no longer waiting to be seen.
That is the ending. That is the grace. That is the kind of peace I can live with.