My father had a fall in September 2025. And by December he was in hospice. He passed away on January 9, 2026.

His funeral and celebration of life was this past weekend.

It’s been a few days since my father’s celebration of life, and if I’m being honest, I’m still pissed.

Time has a way of sanding down the sharpest edges, but it does not make the truth any less true. If anything, it gives the truth room to stand up straighter and be counted which is why I’m still pissed.

So let’s just go ahead and say the quiet part out loud.

My father died of cirrhosis of the liver. He died from years of drinking and drug use and those years of choices eventually caught up with him. You cannot church that up. You cannot cover it with pretty language or photos set to piano music. And you certainly can’t cover it up in the litter box and pretend the smell won’t eventually hit you.

That truth does not erase the other truths though.

My dad was a professional piano player. He was talented and super charismatic! My husband always called him Good Time Tony, because if he was in the room, you knew there was a good time coming your way. He had a way of making an ordinary night feel like something memorable.

He loved my mother deeply. Their story was very messy and very human. It was never simple outside of the love they had for each other. They married young, divorced young, and then, as he used to say, Dad really got into the 80s. He would laugh and call them the lost years. He laughed when he said it, but there was truth there. Those years carried choices that led to very separate lives.

They found their way back to one another though – as great loves often do.

More than twenty years later, they remarried. When Mom got sick, he was by her side every step of the way, and he was there when she took her final breath. That devotion deserves to be remembered and honored.

But let’s not confuse remembering someone lovingly with rewriting them entirely though.

The day of his funeral and celebration of life had beautiful moments. There was music and stories. And good memories. There were moments where the room genuinely felt connected.

And then there were the moments that made me wonder if we were all expected to collectively ignore the imbalance in the room after the memorial video.

Yes, the video mentioned that he had children.

Once.

Not by name though. And not as people with history and decades of lived experience with him. Just a passing acknowledgment that he had children.

The rest of the video carefully curated a version of his life that somehow managed to make his children feel like a footnote in our father’s story.

And his granddaughters, my Amelia and my Haley, weren’t mentioned at all. Amelia is 17, so not like she just hit the planet. Same with Haley. She’s 15. Not exactly new here.

That part sat really heavy.

Regardless of how the last months unfolded, regardless of the boundaries I had to put in place to preserve my peace, it doesn’t erase the twenty years that we were a family again with Mom and Dad. It doesn’t erase birthdays, holidays, births, stories, late-night phone calls, shared grief, and all the ordinary moments that make a family a family.

It was the kind of thing that leaves a room full of people quietly looking at one another, because everyone feels it even if no one says it out loud.

That was a huge miss with no apology.

And if I’m being honest, that felt perfectly on brand for the people most willing to critique the day while somehow remaining completely untouched by their own contribution to the glaring omissions of the day. Some people love accountability as long as it belongs to someone else.

Now, let me say this clearly: my brother and I are not a footnote. Neither are my daughters.

We are not a line item in someone else’s version of events or a single mention in a memorial montage.

We are not optional. We are part of the story of our family.

We were the children left behind when our parents divorced. Our mother raised us damn near single handedly. Even after she remarried, she still carried all the parenting. I can still remember her at Waddell Park throwing a baseball with my brother so he could be ready for little league. She had to be both mom and dad for a long time.

That memory does not make me bitter at all. It makes me honest.

When my parents remarried, my father and I found our way back to one another. Not in the fairy-tale father-daughter sense, because life doesn’t work like that, but in a way that was real and worked for us.

We became friends. We had long conversations about nothing and everything. We understood each other and appreciated the similarities in our personalities. He had a soft spot for Haley and loved how creative Amelia was.

After Mom died, I spent a few years holding space for his grief while quietly shelving my own. I did that while raising children, finishing graduate school, navigating my career, and later surviving cancer.

So yeah, I am still angry that the people most invested in curating an experience for the optics of grief somehow forgot the people who actually lived the hardest parts of it.

But this is not really about anger anymore, really. It IS about refusing to participate in revisionist history.

People are complicated. So is addiction and grief.

But consequences are not. Not in the grand scheme of things.

You don’t get cirrhosis by accident. You also don’t lose years to substances and expect people to be inspired.

I loved my father. I also loved him enough to see him for who he was.

That means remembering all of it: the music, the devotion, the addiction, the absence, the choices, and the consequences.

I am no longer interested in softening my own reality so other people can feel more comfortable in theirs.

Sometimes the most peaceful thing you can do is say the quiet part out loud and let the room sit with it.

So here it is.

The truth still counts.