So, my Dad died. As I said in the other post, we weren’t close by any stretch of the imagination, the last time I saw him in person was in maybe 1997 or 1998 when I was in my early twenties, the last time I spoke to him on the phone was in 2019 on Jake’s birthday (I didn’t actually have any desire to talk to him, but I accidentally answered the phone), and the last time I sent him any kind of message was in 2021 after what I considered to be the final straw, the last lie I was willing to let him tell me.
Since then, I found out that he had named me as executor of his Last Will and Testament. Without even asking me. At first I tried to perform the role, thinking it would be easy enough, but as time went on it became an emotional drain on me, for a few reasons. The first was that I felt like he really should have asked me first. Considering how far apart we were, both in terms of our relationship and our physical location, it was a laughable decision on his part. Us living so far apart was also a contributing factor – I couldn’t really do anything given the distance, I could’t just pop round his flat and grab his bank statements to cancel his direct debits, or organise things like his death certificate. Another reason was the cost involved. I can’t afford to pay £800 even for the most basic cremation. I know I could have paid it and then had it paid back to me from his estate once that had been sorted out, but I can’t go for six to eight months being eight hundred pounds out of pocket. And even then, there may not be anything in the estate anyway.
He very generously left £500 to “Guide Dogs for the Blind”, and then requested that the rest be split 50/50 between me and my brother, David – but the thing is, there may not even be £500 in there to cover the donation to the charity. So I could potentially never see that £800 spent on a basic cremation again. And then there was solicitors costs as well – they were pestering me to allow them to help, badgering me for bank statements (which I never even saw in my two weeks as executor), for no other reason than to see if there was enough money in there to cover their potential fees. Absolute parasites. But yeah, if I agreed for them to help me then they would want their fees, which would come out of the estate eventually, but then if there was no money in there then I would be liable for the costs. And I really can’t afford that. And to be quite honest, I don’t think there is any money in his estate. I’ve gone back through the old messages since his passing, and stumbled upon him mentioning his will back in 2017, and his comment was that at that time, his total estate roughly amounted to a fart in a crisp packet. And he didn’t work or have a job at all since then, he had just been going from benefit payment to benefit payment. Even his rent was paid for by benefits. The housing association have contacted me to say that since he is now dead, his rent won’t be paid for by benefits, so his flat needs to be emptied before a certain date, and that’s just more cost, causing me more emotional trauma. More emotional trauma from someone that had contributed almost 100% of my total emotional trauma over the course of my life.
In the end, I felt no sense of duty or responsibility to pay for these things, for someone that was estranged to me.
He wanted to tell me that I was his Executor. He wanted to tell me on his deathbed. He wanted me to go and see him, when he was terminally ill. His carers phoned me one day, asking me to come. He wanted David to come as well. He had not been there for me or my brother for the vast majority of our lives, and he wanted me and David, he wanted his sons, his “pride and joy” as he always described us, to be with him one last time. I felt no sense of responsibility to do this either.
By this same token, I’m not at all bothered about any gift he left me in his will, or having half of his “estate”. As far as I am concerned, and this may sound harsh, but not having to worry about him turning up on my doorstep one day is more than enough compensation for me. I never used to have that fear – I used to wish he would just turn up one day and explain things. He had his chance when we were younger, he could’ve turned up on our doorstep, or waited for us at the school gate to talk and catch up, he knew where we were, what school we went to. He had his chance to come to us, make amends, get to know the men we had become. He joined Facebook before I did, but it was me who found him, it was me who added him and got that ball rolling. He was quite happy to live with his other family, the one he chose over us, and that may be the one thing that I regret – I never really told him how much that fucking hurt. I never told him how much it messed me up while I was going through a formative period of my life. Puberty, with all those hormones flying around, without a father-figure to guide me through it, all I had instead was a void, a void filled with a swirling mix of anger and confusion. But as it was, I did have a fear that one day he would turn up here, expecting hospitality and a warm reception. He would not have got one. I would have turned him around and sent him right back. Another variation of the fear was that he would turn up unannounced when I was at work. I don’t think Jane would stand for his nonsense, and she would turn him around and send him right back as well, but the fear remained. It is a weight off, to say the least.
…
His funeral is today at 10am. I wont be going. I felt no grief when I found out he had died and don’t have any desire to pay any kind of respect to him now that he’s died. The funeral was organised by “Katya”, some random eastern European woman he met several years ago that he “helped greatly”. The reason he helped her was probably because he wanted to have sex with her. Don’t forget, I knew him and how he thought. Russian and Baltic women were his favourite. He had a long term “girlfriend” named Tatiana or Tetiana, and she lived in Russia or Ukraine, I was never really sure where or who she was because my father was a compulsive liar, and could never seem to keep his story straight. She was going to be my mother-in-law one day apparently, but I never saw one photograph of my father and her together, I’m still not actually sure if she ever even existed. Anyway, going back to Katya, my father always portrayed her as a “great niece”, a long lost relative, which always confused me. It has since transpired after his death that she is not related to him at all, but she was a victim of one of his lies. When he “saved” her, he told everyone that she was his niece. And she just went along with it. Over the years, more and more people came to recognise her as his niece, and it became harder and more awkward for her to say that she isn’t his niece, and that she never was his niece. Such was the nature of knowing him, you just got caught up in his lies, and eventually they became true. And now it is causing issues because he is gone, and all this time she’s gone along with it – she has to make a decision whether to tell everyone the truth, or just keep going with it.
One thing is for sure now – I’m not going to wait any longer for him to teach me how to drive. He made that promise to me a long time ago. And I know I shouldn’t have, but I held him to it. It is one of the reasons why I can’t drive now. He only ever seemed to teach me things by showing me how they are not done – one key lesson learned was: “Don’t make promises that you can’t keep.” The other main reason that I can’t drive now is because lessons are expensive, and due to me having to do the school run every morning, I’m stuck in a minimum wage, part-time job with no future prospects. I am working to get out of this – but the catch 22 is that to further my development in the realm of life coaching and counselling, I would need a car to travel to training venues, but I can’t afford to learn how to drive right now because I’m stuck in that job, but to get a better job and afford driving lessons I would need to better myself by getting further training – you get the idea. I’ll get there one day. But then that’s another thing he has taught me by being an awful role-model: “Don’t just say you’ll do things, actually do them”. It’s a slight variation on “Don’t make promises that you can’t keep”, but slightly less official, he was always saying that he wanted to do this and that, but he never got around to most of it. Another thing he taught me was to spend time with Jake, my son. I will be there for him, and listen to what he says, be interested in his activities and join him on adventures, because my father was never there for me when I needed all that. One key way to maneuverer through childhood trauma is to re-parent yourself, or imagine what you would have needed back then – I’ve done a fair amount of work on myself and am very vigilant that I be for him what I felt that I lacked in my masculine parental figure when I was younger.
All things considered, I’m not going to miss him. He was not a part of my life. He was in the background, sure, always there, sending me awful shorts from Tik-Tok, which I ignored, or telling me about these grand adventures of when he was in the Royal Air Force and they saw aliens (he was never in the R.A.F.), or telling me about the last lie I was willing to let him tell me. I mentioned this in the first paragraph, but the lie that made me want to cut contact with him was the one where he put on Facebook that he’d got married to a dentist from Kazakhstan. Then, when I shared the news with David, he asked our father about his new bride and knowing David wasn’t on Facebook, he denied being married. I sent David a screenshot of his status, which he showed to the Father, and he still denied all knowledge. I knew he didn’t actually get married. Randomly publishing a “Got Married” life event on Facebook to some woman he’s never mentioned before, let alone mentioned being in a relationship with, just didn’t ring true. And I decided that it was going to be the last lie he would ever tell me.
