Sorry, going for romp and getting pregnant does not garner respect from me.
Beating me in the head with my steel toed boots, nah, that does not do it either.
Taking my sisters for regular dental checkups, and leaving my pre-teen butt at home unless I came up with the money for my portion...does not do it either.
Mom, you almost had me when as a still too young to be employeed teen, you would take my money from my full time job and split it into envelopes to teach me about budgeting. That was until my savings account that you also had your name on all but disappeared.
Even Casey Anthony would get an hour out of her cell everyday, why did I only get 20 minutes?
OK, now I understand the posts which say the obit should not have been written. Some mothers do not deserve the recognition...PERIOD!
I will have to save this to copy and use when my bio mother dies. Wretched woman.
I refuse to print this out and send it to my siblings. I thought about it, but they would really do this whenever our mother goes. Thank goodness I don't live near all of them, in that small town, where everyone knows anyway. I hope that the author and/or family found this to help them with their healing process, I don't know if it helped or not.
I certainly do not subscribe to the belief that you can only say nice things about the dead but there is a place and time for everything and a public obituary might not be the best place to list all your grievances. Obituaries are for the living, they can't hurt the dead person any more but they could hurt some living ones. Not everyone likes to have their dirty laundry aired in public, their painful childhood memories printed out for everyone to read, or have themselves associated with a mean ole sloppy neglectful granny on Snopes for evermore whenever someone googles their name.
I could be wrong but my impression was that very likely it was not the case that everyone agreed. When there is a list of so many names it's not possible for everyone to be on the same page on any remotely controversial issue. Some may be small children and not yet able to even understand what's it all about. The Snopes article gave me the notion that the text was the work of one daughter only and they never mentioned that anybody else was consulted, and although the obituary seems to speak for everyone at places it looks like an assumption ("I think everyone probably feels the same") more than an assertion ("this is what everyone feels and what we agreed to say"). The obituary says explicitly that it's a torn apart family that couldn't come together for a funeral and the writer is not even sure if she remembered everyone who belongs to the family so it doesn't sound like a cooperative situation in which everyone comes together to edit and approve the text for an obituary.
Who's he? :waitasec:
I think this is perfectly ok as long as the whole family agreed to it. I don't understand why yesterday I could talk to someone about a person and call them every name in the book, but if they die today I have to be nice.
To use a very extreme example I don't know why people should be expected to say nice things about Hitler soon after his death.
Let the truth be known if it makes you feel better. JMO
My problem isn't with talking badly about the dead who deserve it. My problem is with never talking badly about the dead to their face, when the are still alive, but only after they are no longer here to hear it.
I believe the writer. I believe her mom was probably a wreck of a human. The obit seems sincere. But she is not here to defend her reputation, so I cannot know 100%.
I mentioned Mommy Dearest before. Christina Crawford didn't write her book until she found out she was cut out of the will. She never stood up to her mother or disagreed with the glowing reports about Joan Crawford, when Crawford was alive. While I also tend to believe there may be truth in at least some of what Christina says, because there are independent corroborations of Joan's bizarre behavior toward her older two children, Christina lacked the courage to speak the truth until after her mom could not reply and after she was cut out of the will. Something about that bothers me a lot.
I will say this, though. I watched some sort of Pacific Islander funeral rite where the people come up to the coffin and speak to the dead. Often, it involves yelling, crying and a listing of how horrible the dead person was and how much the people who were alive wished he or she could have been different. For example, one man was crying and yelling at the corpse. "You were a drunk! You never worked and you let us go hungry! You beat our mother! Why couldn't you have been a good husband and father?" It was pretty intense.
I guess something like that can be very cathartic for a person who has suffered intensely at the hands of a relative and who now wants to put an end to the suffering and walk away, finally free. But I'd rather see that happen when the person is still alive and they can hear firsthand how their behavior wounded their family.