Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for My Father (2024)

Damn. As a commenter on the page put it, this was “compulsively readable”, I didn’t expect to read the whole thing.

Definitely a great read if you have a parent that has had severe failures. This essay is a great example of taking a confused and fragmented mess of childhood experiences, expectations and emotions and crystallizing them into something digestible.

Ok that was a bit of a more challenge than my own, posts like this make me see the bright sides of my own upbringing.

The post made me think of what I could say about my own father, who's 83 now and still kicking, but obviously we're thinking about when he goes.

It's really hard to find something positive to say of a man who clearly was autistic, but raised at a time and in a place where any type of psychoanalysis and self-improvement was considered alien, or even blasphemous.

It's even more complicated when you and your siblings see yourselves in that man.

But after all he was a man who in spite of a handicap that left him limping his entire life, he escaped communist jugoslavia by stealing his brother's bike, survived the refugee barracks and a murder attempt, started his own business, bought a house for his family, and started a legacy in a new country. He will hopefully be missed by 4 children, and 5 grandchildren and 4 great grandchildren, so far, and numerous other relatives in many different countries.

I feel obligated to warn future readers that this post contains decaying corpse imagery and is therefore not suitable for breakfast.

I find it interesting that they gave the father a funeral. So there likely was a proper eulogy given. People in that position often don't get a funeral.

Now that's writing.