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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

I agree with all of what you say, and while I thought the author was very good, I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness. For the same reason that no one can ever know what's inside another person's mind, much less a child understand their parents.

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> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness.

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.

In the process of grieving, when the emotions are at their rawest, it is difficult to not have knee-jerk reactions to the emotions that are piling-up fast and strong.

Except for that very slip, I actually found the piece impressively objective, level-headed, compassionate and open-minded.

I'd have to agree with you here. I often tell people that while we have control over our actions, we don't really have control over our emotions in the same sense. Feeling anger, happiness, sadness, bitterness, resentment, or anything else is something that will happen regardless of whether we want to or not, and all we can do is learn how to process our emotions to be able to learn how to react in ways that will hopefully hurt others less. I can't even begin to imagine the magnitude of emotions that the author has dealt with both the initial loss and the flurry of findings after the fact, so their reactions in both of the posts were quite mild all things considered. I'm lucky enough not to have lost either of my parents yet, and even with the hope that I don't find out anything anywhere close to as drastic as these revelations when I inevitably do, I still don't have any trouble imagining acting far more vain and bitter based just on the sadness I feel without needing to add any of the other bombshells into the mix.

Having taken some flak here for my reaction to that line, I'd clarify that I don't blame the writer for feeling that way. That's perfectly natural. My critique is that the injection of a summary opinion cheapened the writing and flattened the complexity. In a literary sense, the author was doing a great job of showing, rather telling the reader what to think, up to that point. The reader may very well have drawn the conclusion that the father was a coward. In a legal sense, the flash of bitterness actually harms their case. It draws into question their reliability as a witness. Calling it a "slip" was insightful, as it implies both.

I think she absolutely has a right to her judgment. She clearly has empathy for her father, but the rest of her family also suffered--greatly, it seems--from how he went about his life.

She wrote most of it centered on his perspective (as she understands it). And if you take that line as such, then you're right. I took that line as bringing another perspective to show the damage he caused. She has a lot to unpack and showing those conflicts demonstrated it.

So when can we judge someone a coward then?

> I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness.

I think given that the writer, who lived in the same culture with the same dangers and expectations, decided to accept the risks by coming out, I don't think it's vanity. They did what their father was too afraid to do.

It is absolutely bitterness, but I don't think you're in any position to judge the appropriate level of bitterness for a child to have towards their deadbeat parent.

He was so afraid of coming out that he FORCED his wife to never divorce him and kept a lover on the side while cheating on him as well with multiple partners at the heights of the AIDS epidemic while lying to him that they had a future that he was too scared to ever make a reality. If that's not a coward, then I don't think you and I can agree on very simple definitions of words like "coward".

"Coward" is really not the kind of word that admits "very simple definitions" that people can agree on, no.

It is their own dad, they are allowed to be bitter.

It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.

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