Recently I’ve been contemplating how to best say goodbye to my father. I’ve had a difficult time for the last 10-15 years with what to do for myself relative to our relationship. He is still alive but I have no contact with him due to his crimes and his behavior. For many of these years, I thought that there might be a way to salvage some portion of our previous relationship. At this point, I don’t see a path back towards each other. I wish that things could have gone another way. I miss the enmeshment. It was familiar. It was what I understood fatherly love to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So it’s time to mourn that loss, and the loss of all those expectations. I think I’m going to have a funeral for them, and for the previous version of him. I might even have someone preside over it. Do all the songs and other rituals that accompany funerals. I might just construct it on my own. I might involve other family members. But I think that I need to say my goodbyes in a way that will be a bit more public, or at least sharing with the community that knew him, or maybe the community that knows me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The challenge with this process is that I feel like I’m betraying him by saying goodbye to him before he is ready. He defined my life and my choices. I didn’t make any major decision without his approval. So to define my life as a space without him in it feels like the ultimate betrayal. So I think that I’ll have to tread carefully, so that I don’t push too far, too fast. Only work on this when it feels right, when I have the right energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My current thoughts are that this is also going to be a commencement. It sounds strange, but I think it’s my acknowledgement that my life is my<\/strong> life, not anyone else’s. So maybe it will be part funeral and part emancipation. I’ll need to think on this for a bit more, but I’m proud of myself for this beginning, feeling like it’s the first day of a new life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I’ve been contemplating how to best say goodbye to my father. I’ve had a difficult time for the last 10-15 years with what to do for myself relative to our relationship. He is still alive but I have no contact with him due to his crimes and his behavior. For many of these years, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemplation"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194,"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engineeringharmony.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}