Frustrated

I think pissed off is more apt, but I went with frustrated in an attempt to not fume at the very beginning of the post... oops, I guess that didn't work so well.

Today was my grandfather's funeral service. To hear the members of my family talk...the second cousins, the great aunts, uncles and even some of the neighbors that showed up...you'd have thought my grandfather was a fucking saint. Even my uncle...who admittedly is so full of shit his eyes are brown and he is such an attention/image whore that he'd say or do anything if it made him look good (before he goes off to beat my cousins or my aunt in a fit of rage with a smile) (he's just that great a guy!))... said, "I couldn't have asked for a better father." What a crock of shit that is.

Granted, a funeral service is not the time to trash my grandfather about what asshole he was, but for fuck sake don't lie about what a great person he was when he really was just a bitter old ass who made everyone's life so miserable that no one cried except out of show and/or just pure relief at his finally being dead. But I have to take that back. Some people (the aforementioned second cousins, aunts etc.) actually did cry because of the great memories they had of my grandfather. That's why I'm pissed.

Where was that great guy when he was screaming at every person who attempted to help him in any way given that he did nothing to help himself? Where was that guy when my grandmother...his wife of 53 years...just decided that it was no longer worth listening to him bitch about the cost of her blood pressure medication so she quit taking it and stroked out less than a month later? Where was that guy when he called my brother a thief? When he told my father that he was never good enough? Where was that great guy who these people who spent so little actual time with him, who seemed to be the light of someone's day? In the 30+ years I've been spinning the sun on this planet, I can count maybe two occasions where I remember going a whole day without hearing him criticize someone for something and that someone was usually a member of the family...and that's stretching it.

I'm not sad he's dead. I'm sad that I never saw the great person that those who didn't actually know my grandfather remembered in some image of himself that he projected for the short spans of time he was with them. That just irritates the living shit out of me.



P.S.

Special thanks to my great uncle who bored the living shit out of me for more than forty minutes discussing the greatness of jesus and god. To you I say, "I've accepted that you think that, now please shut up the fuck up because you've lost your audience who no longer cares."....one of my great aunts and I were exchanging glances and rolling our eyes! Sinners...