Not to hijack your thread, but we kind of had an opposite experience when my mom passed away.
It was hard for me to attend my mother's funeral. Here were a lot of people, about 250 of them, and about 20 or 30 lined up to stand up at the front of the church to say all these wonderful things about her. They spoke of her kindness, gentleness, patience, and generosity. I remember sitting there in shock thinking to myself, "I think I'm at the wrong funeral! Who is this wonderful, generous woman all these people are talking about?? Wish I'd met her... I would have LOVED to have had a mother who was the kind of person these people are describing!!"
I loved my mother very much, and we tried to have a good relationship, but she made it nearly impossible. Loving my mom doesn't mean I'm going to pretend she was a nice person or a good mother. It is amazing I even have one positive thought left in me because my mother was the single most mean-spirited, cold-hearted, malicious person I have ever known in my life. Every single one of those people there, she had said gawd-awful things about every day for 40 years and even done things underhandedly to mess with many of them and created problems in many of these people's families with her lies and gossip. But when someone dies, people like to pretend they were a different person in life than they really were. Kind of the opposite end of the spectrum, but I've never understood that, either. I expected my mother's funeral to be poorly attended, but apparently many of the people in the small town where she lived and worked saw her "fake" side and never knew who she really was and what a truly horrible woman she had been or the things she said/did behind their backs. Even my sister tried to pretend like my mother was some sort of saint (I moved out of my hometown at a young age, and my mother called me twice a week for 20 years to tell me constantly how much she hated my sister and her 6 kids that she had and raised on welfare, which shamed my mother in the community something awful). Mom had 3 children, and treated all of us horribly. She played mind games with us from the time we were little kids and looked the other way while my step-father beat my older sister senseless, sometimes until there was my sister's blood all over the house, all the while telling my sister she deserved it (it started when my poor sister was only 7). When I was 15 and my sister moved out, my step-dad took to hitting me instead, and I had to leave home at 16 to keep from becoming my mom and step-dad's next victim. My younger brother, whom our mother had with our step-father, was treated differently... he could do no wrong, and he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. As a result, my brother's been strung out on drugs since he was 13 (he's now 44 & we are surprised he is even still alive). My mother paid his way his whole life, and now that she's gone, my step-dad has paid my brother's rent and utilities and insurance every month since my mother's death in October of 2005.
Even into our adulthood, my mother's abuse of us did not stop. When I was 39 years old, I met my current husband--and my mother said to me, "Oh, I can't WAIT to meet THIS ONE and see what's wrong with him! I mean, there's gotta be something wrong with him if he wants YOU. Just look at yourself... you're so old and so fat and so ugly." (My husband is 6 years younger than me, and she said it was just morally wrong and dirty for me to enter into a relationship with someone younger than my little brother.... seriously, she said that to me.) She never stopped being mean to us, even in the last days of her life.
I never understood why people like to pretend after someone has died that they were wonderful when they weren't. I honestly didn't think there'd be much more than immediate family at my mother's funeral, but I was surprised at all these people who came and said all these wonderful things about her.
Come to find out, Mom pretended in the community to be something completely different than she was. The day we buried my mother, I was telling my cousin Ronnie some of the things my mother had done and expressing in private conversation my confusion at how these people could not have known the kind of person she really was. Even my cousin said he couldn't understand how I could say such horrible things about her, how I could "make up such awful lies" about the kind of person she was. Seriously. How did they not know?
I know my mother must have had severe depression and a pain inside her that made her so mean and awful, and as I said, I loved her very much and was deeply saddened when she passed. But there's no point in pretending she was wonderful and generous and warm when she was mean and cold and tight-fisted--anything BUT generous! (Except with my brother.)
