J
Grief sucks, but grieving the death of someone who nearly completely sabotaged my whole life, is even harder. I was surfing facebook today and came across my dad's page. He died last June and no one has taken down his page. It's all so complicated. He disowned in January, but I flew to his bedside the moment I found out he was in the hospital. I sat there and prayed, pronounced forgiveness, and offered him the throne of grace as God directed me to. I sang over him as he breathed his last breaths. I planned his funeral, made the medical decisions, held my family together, am still trying to help my siblings get along... but alas, my own grieve has caught up with me. I miss the daddy I never had, or that I'm not sure I had. He was so perverted that I the few food memories I can recall, I remember with an eerie since of wondering. I can't trust that his motives were pure in almost any of the good things he did for me. In some ways I guess I long for the naivete I once knew. But I also grieve that the last words I heard from him were that I had just killed him and he wanted nothing to do with me. I grieve that he can't ever say yes to Jesus. I grieve that he will never ever be better than he was, that he will never be proud of me, never appreciate what I do or the talents that I have. I grieve that after all that was done to me, I was the only one willing to stick with him during his most trying times. Everyone else left the room. No one could handle it. And even in his last days, I grieve that he lived such a life that I was the only one there to try and get my family to take their bickering over him outside the hospital room. I grieve that I am the only of my 8 siblings that is not listed on his facebook, that he wrote me out of his life, and that he ceased to see me as any part of his family. I am grateful however that the Lord enabled me to be there for him despite me being the least likely to even want to be there. I am grateful that the Lord gave me the words to speak, and that though my dad couldn't speak, I'm sure my presence was a powerful testimony to His work in my life. How do you grieve the death of a father who was never really a father, or a man that was more monster than man? Grieving feels like denial of the abuse he put me through.