This Daughter’s Brutally Honest Obituary Has People Furious, But It’s Actually Refreshing

Pop’s ex-wife was my biological grandmother, and there is no generation in our family that was not touched by her emotional, physical and financial abuse. In 1980, she kicked my teenage parents and me out of her house when I was an infant. She’d decided on a whim that my underemployed father and postpartum mother were able to make it on their own, without a single resource to their names. Family lore tells that the motivation for this decision had something to do with an argument over an untidy bathroom. 

Much later, years after the unthinkable position she put us in, my grandmother publicly and shamelessly took credit for what my parents were able to overcome in their early days as a young family. Her lack of self-awareness will never not be breathtaking to me.

When I was a young child — after my parents had reconnected with my grandmother (reconnection with abusers is often a feature of the dysfunctional family cycle) — my father felt it necessary to supervise my grandmother’s visits with my little sister and me, citing how physically and emotionally hostile she’d been with us when she thought no one was watching or listening.

Years later I turned to trauma-informed therapy to come to terms with my own upbringing, and it was only then that I began to understand just how far-reaching and insidious my grandmother’s influence was. 

This woman’s most morally corrupt (and sometimes criminal) behavior was often carried out in private — reserved only for those who lived life under her toxic thumb. Therefore, I can easily understand why casual friends, acquaintances, distant family or anyone else on the periphery of her life would find such nasty details hard — if not impossible — to believe.

This is precisely why society’s stance toward obituaries requires rethinking. Those who were not previously aware of a person’s traumatic experiences at the hands of a family member may gain some important insight into what actually took place, and survivors of abuse can lift the veil of silence under which they’d been living and hopefully move towards healing.

They say that the best revenge is a life well lived. Upon reflecting on my grandfather’s life, I considered how leaving his abusive marriage and finding happiness as an Elvis devotee in the Sunshine State was perhaps Pop’s biggest accomplishment — a detail I noted when I began drafting his obituary. He was also a veteran who found his post-service calling in restoring cars.

In writing about his life, I wanted to capture his triumphs and trials, but was shot down again and again. The newspapers wanted to hear nothing about the abuses he’d suffered and all that he had overcome on his path toward peace. My only option was to write something palatable and half-true — an easy-to-swallow fairy tale readers could easily and safely digest. 

As much as I resented being silenced, the life Pop lived gave me plenty to work with. He was a truly beloved member of his community who unconditionally loved his family.  

My grandmother died last fall. As far as I know, she remained abusive to her last breath. I don’t believe there is any way to honor her life as she chose to live it and, for this reason, no one in the family has written an obituary for her. Perhaps this essay is the closest I’ll ever get to telling what I know to be the truth about her and the pain she inflicted.