re: Have any of you been distanced from your Dad and he passed away during that time?

There were multiple reason why he did it, but we had become distant in that last year, and it took a long time for me to get over my last words to he being "keep your arse at home." Not knowing what would happen, my anger and/or frustration was justified, but try using logic and reason in such an emotional time.

I wouldn't wish that experience on anybody.
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Sorry that happened to you.

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My response was "if that's the case, then keep your arse at home. Don't even think about coming." Two days later, he killed himself. There were multiple reason why he did it, but we had become distant in that last year, and it took a long time for me to get over my last words to he being "keep your arse at home." Not knowing what would happen, my anger and/or frustration was justified, but try using logic and reason in such an emotional time. I wouldn't wish that experience on anybody.

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My heart hurts for you right now. This is a brutal thing to experience. While your words and directive to him may have effected him, that suicide was going to happen regardless. He wasn’t at that place because of that moment. He was there for many moments that built up inside him over time. He was a lost soul, and unfortunately nobody recognized that to get him help in time. He clearly didn’t reach out for help.

It’s hard not thinking how you think though. I absolutely would if in your shoes. You know that you shouldn’t, but emotions trump reason more times than we would like it to.

My prayers for you and your family. That is a gut wrenching life experience for all of you involved.

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Mike + The Mechanics - The Living Years

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Song pretty much says it all. Dad and I weren’t estranged at all.
After my Mom died, Dad remarried. His wife-I refuse to call her my stepmother-worked overtime keeping Dad and I from seeing each other. She got angry, threw fits, and made him pay for the times he and I did manage to get together. He was at fault some for letting her push him around.
She’s dead now too, so peace to her. I’ve forgiven her as best as I’m able.

Not really relevant to the thread premise but I was extremely close with my dad and lost him last month. The last few months and weeks were absolutely heartbreaking, we were hoping death would come soon. But now I feel guilty for feeling that way as if there was another miraculous recovery in the cards, which he had made previously.

I’m 33 and still single and it absolutely haunts me that he will never meet my future wife and kids, although at this rate that might never happen anyway.

He loved soccer and him passing just before the World Cup sucks. I wanted to call him up after some of the penalty shootouts so badly.

There’s my free therapy for the day.

I’m 44 years old. My dad passed away in 2020 when he was 64 and I was 42.

My dad and I were very tight up until around 2012. Not only was he my dad, but he was my high school football coach and we later coached together for five years. Won three state championships together.

Long story short, my dad lost his mind to the bottle. He always drank but kept it under control around my mom and me. However, a job change required him to spend his weekdays out of town. Without my mom around to keep him in check, he became a terrible alcoholic and never recovered. He was verbally abusive to my mom, who was a saint, and I wrote him off completely around 2018-2019.

My mother died in March 2020. The last time I saw and spoke to my dad was at her funeral. He passed away himself less than two months later an absolutely broken man in every way.

Although I was extremely angry with him in the last years of his life, I gave him a damn good eulogy at his funeral by focusing on the good man he used to be.

Alcohol is some evil stuff. My dad’s father spent his last years in jail after getting drunk and t-boning a car at an intersection and killing a man and his two young sons.

Sounds like you did it for the money/will? Did they leave you anything?

Where do I start.

My sperm donor (thats' what I've called him all these years) died this past Feb. I'm 50 and haven't had a relationship with him since I was 15. My parents were married, only after mom got pregnant. He never wanted to be a father or to be married to her. But in those times, in that area, he married.

When I was young, he would miss work and chase a married women so much that he got fired from his coal mining job. He pawned everything he owned to have money to drive to TN to see her. He would steal tools from coal mines and people and take me with him to sell the tools. I usually played in a creek while he was making his deals. I saw him beat my mom.

Once that hoe dumped him he tried coming back to my mom and she said no. He bounced around doing little odds and ends jobs, barely working. My mom had to get a job as a janitor to raise me.

I once asked my dad if he would quit smoking in order to help pay child support but he refused. He lived here and there, on someone's couch, at his parents, at one of his brothers places. When I was 10 or so he met a younger woman and she moved him into her parents house. A grown arse man being shacked up at his girlfriends parents house. I hated going there. They were night owls and I was an early bird. I'd wake up hungry early but couldn't eat until noon. Everything in the kitchen was labeled with peoples names of who's milk or cereal it was. He didn't have shite in there with his name on it. I called my aunt to come get me one day. She still tells that story of how hungry I was when her and my uncle came and got me. My dad continued to steal.

He and his new wife came to our place once for Halloween to show me his newborn daughter. In KY it could be hot or cold at Halloween and that year was cold. I didn't have a coat, so I asked him if he could buy me one. He replied that he already bought me one and he would bring it to me...37 years later I still haven't seen it.

I was at his girlfriends apartment downtown Harlan one day when the Sheriff's Office came beating on the door to arrest him. They broke down the door and that SOB jumped out of the 2nd story window and left me there for the cops.

People back home would ask "when's the last time you seen you dad" and I'd reply, "when's the last time you think he paid child support?"

He got arrested for selling prescription drugs. Spent a little time behind bars.

I hated him for most of my life. There's very little good memories. A few years ago, at one of his sisters' funerals I approached him to say I didn't hold any hard feelings anymore and that I forgave him. He apologized for his life choices but we didn't speak again after that. We were too far apart.

I went to and paid for the majority of the funeral costs. His three other kids paid some. It was almost like going to a strangers or someone you barely knew funeral.

There has always been a hole in my soul because of him. I've done everything opposite of what he would've done. He was an embarrassment. I moved to AL to be a father to my kid that was here. He wouldn't have done that. I've always worked and put family first when he didn't. Id didn't steal or sell drugs or have kids I couldn't pay for. Sometimes I think if I'd been closer to him, I'd have turned out like him. It still bothers me.

Haven’t talked to mine in around 7 years. He wouldn’t work and was a controlling narcissist. To this day he tells my brother he doesn’t understand why I don’t have anything to do with him, which proves the point. He’s incapable of self reflection. Blames his every life circumstance on someone else. Fact is my life is peaceful without him, and I genuinely tried to develop a different relationship with him as an adult. My mom too. They eventually divorced but I still harbor some resentment for her not holding him accountable. Worst of all, he used religion as his tool to control. I struggle in church because I correlate too much of what I hear to the things I’ve heard in the past that were twisted by my dad as a vehicle for his emotional abuse. I still keep my mom at arms length but we have a much better relationship these days.

A relationship is a two-way street, both parties need to have at least some interest and act on keeping it going.

That said, my dad's drinking started getting the best of him as I entered high school. By the time I graduated I had spent my 18th birthday visiting him at a rehab and when he got out he decided to move to his buddy's camp and sulk instead of coming back home and trying to repair the family.

He went into construction then used that as an excuse to lose contact with us. Fast forward a decade and we haven't heard from him in years (he was no longer calling even just on holidays/birthdays). My sister (who doesn't accept letting go of people) had a P.I. track him down so she could invite him to her wedding (I was against it, he had been a very charismatic person and people still asked after him, my concern was his presence would have overshadowed hers on her big day). She sent him a letter, he called and left a message on her machine (she was out), but he never responded again regardless of contact attempts (she sent him an invitation with a self-addressed, stamped returned envelope and he couldn't even check a box and return that). Over the next few years my sister and one of my cousins (whom he was more of a father to than their own) wrote him and sent him gifts. At no point did he ever attempt to respond.

We get to the early 00s and mom gets a call, he had left the house number as an emergency call in case something bad had happened. He was in a coma in a hospital out of state, he had been found dehydrated and in poor shape by the Meals on Wheels driver (who was apparently bringing the only meals he was getting, and of that he was eating only the Jello). We spent the next couple of months going back and forth from our homes to the hospital he was in, when we first got there he was fairly conscious and somewhat lucid, but wasn't speaking. A couple months later we got the call that his organs were shutting down.

I was sitting with him as his breathing became slowly sporadic, then eventually stopped and he died.

He had never truly wanted a family, had wanted to live in that college-years stage of life where everyone still drinks a lot, chases arse and maybe has some shitty job in order to facilitate that lifestyle. He was incredibly engaging, smart and active, but he just never grew beyond that stage of life.

So my regret isn't for me, it's for him. He chose to continue drinking even after he realized it was an issue (he had even gotten clean for 6 months before everything went to hell, just to prove to mom he could do it, and then he went right back into it). He chose to cheat on my mother. He chose to go back to drinking after getting out of rehab and he chose to leave us in a sad and pathetic attempt to live out his life in some warped, modern-day version of a Louis L'Amor character.

I regret he wasn't a better man.

My father was a verbally abusive alcoholic that tormented my brother, sister and I throughout my teenage years.

He was a good father for a long time and then one day the switch flipped and alcohol took over. I went out of state to college just to get out of it. Never had much of a relationship after that. I despised him. He had a stroke that took the right side of his body, some of his speech and memory. I never let myself feel sorry for him, couldn't get past my childhood. The second stroke killed him and that's how things ended with him.

My grandmother told me a number of years later that my grandfather beat my dad and his siblings and locked them in a closet. She said my dad would take most of the beatings to protect his younger brothers and sister. That knowledge changed everything I thought about my dad, his alcoholism made sense to me.