The Step-Grandfather

I had to spend ca 11 h and 40 min in air planes and on airports in order to attend your funeral and when I stood outside the church, greeting strange relatives I hadn't met in a decade or more and making awkward small talk somebody mistook me for my mother. That's right, somebody genuinely thought I was my mother. Not merely that I looked a lot like her (which people insist on reminding me of. There's a genius way to instil daughterly affections in somebody) but that I was actually her. They asked me where the children were. I told them I WAS the children and then things were as awkward as they could possibly be, until they said I looked very much like my mother and I said that I'd come to understand they felt that way and we broke the sound barrier of polite conventions.

Additionally, you never liked me. Or my brother, or my mother. Our entire family was anathema to you as far as I've been able to discern. So you'll just have to forgive me when I say that I did not attend your funeral for your sake and that in fact, I did go in equal parts because I wanted to support my father but also because I was pretty sure you wouldn't have wanted me there.

It was tangible proof of something I've known for a very long time. I'm a better person in my twenties than you were your entire life.

I've always known your lesser qualities. You were dishonest. You cheated on your wife with the Girl Next Door for Seven Years before you were caught and subsequently filed for divorce. You were cruel and calculating. We celebrated one Christmas with you. Our cousins were given expensive hockey and riding equipment. Me and my brothers were given small, porcelain garden gnomes. Fucking GARDEN GNOMES. I remember this, even though I didn't understand the significance at the time, but my mom did and to her your feelings very pretty clear. We didn't celebrate Christmas with you again, which was what you had hoped I'm sure. You were elitist and unaccepting. We never got to call you Grandpa, you made it clear that you had no relatives unless they were blood-relatives. You felt that we prevented our dad from having children of his own. You tried to make my dad feel ashamed about us.

You were a fucking Scrooge.

I learned more about you and your life on your funeral than I had known all my life.

You were a hard worker. You had money, you paid your ex-wife a monthly allowance so she would never have to worry about money of your own volition. You loved your grandchildren and loved to spend time with them. And you liked reading and learning. I got to know where you grew up, see a picture of your house. Your eyes were far bluer than I remembered them in your picture.

I'm sure nobody would've talked about the lesser qualities you possessed on your funeral, but I don't think any of the things mentioned were false. To the people you considered your "real" family you displayed an entirely different side of yourself that I never had an opportunity to know. We would have had much in common if things were, as they say, different. If YOU had been different.

Pardon me if this sounds like an accusation. It is one.

I don't regret losing the opportunity to know you. I don't mourn your death because it doesn't affect me. You were never a good man. The way you differentiated between people, your refusal to accept the family your youngest son chose for himself speaks more for your character than all the good deeds you did perform and all your affection for those who gained your approval. My mother never wanted to have additional children with my dad because she knew you would treat them differently. Through your own behaviour you ensured that my dad would never have the family you felt he had a right to. It's pretty damn close to poetic in justice.

When I think about you, I don't feel anything in particular. I don't ask myself what either of us could have done differently. You were never a lack in my life. You did not create an absence or a hole. I never missed you, but I do wonder about things. I wonder why you didn't want us in your life, how you justified the way you acted. There are a lot of things I don't know about you and why things turned out the way they did. My assumptions are constructed on a few scarce events. I don't know how my dad felt about it all, if he said anything to you about it, or if he just accepted things as they were. It's not the sort of thing you can really ask about. I'll probably never now and you were about as likely to answer me before as after death.

Sleep well, Scrooge.