Family Feuds·
THE FUNERAL FALLOUT
During a classmate's funeral, a mother defies a fearful wife to accompany her daughter, triggering a tense online confrontation over who failed the grieving child.
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A middle school girl lost her classmate, and the person who was supposed to get her through the funeral backed out at the last minute.
"I am waiting in the airport and I need to know if I fucked up or not," the poster wrote, sitting in transit while their daughter faced her first experience of someone she knew dying. This week, the girl's classmate died, and the whole class was excused from school for the funeral. The child was devastated. The poster said they tried to be there, but "my PTO was denied and we cannot lose this job." They were flying back after a Wednesday night trip, while the funeral and mass were happening right then.
The plan had been simple: the wife would take their daughter to the service, then to the grave site. The girl had been a friend of the child who died, and the poster expected the wife to step in. On Wednesday, the wife agreed.
But the wife has never been comfortable around death. The poster said she is more spiritual than average, hates "all things with the dead," believes in "ghost," and will avoid funerals "like the plague." When the daughter called sobbing because she wasn't going to the funeral, the poster called home and got the wife on the phone.
The wife said she "can't do it" and that she was "scared to go."
So the poster called their mother.
The mom left work and took the daughter to the funeral. As of the post, she was there with her. Then the phone calls started.
The wife called crying because the mom had "tore her a new one." According to the wife, the mom called her a "bad parent" and said it was "so fuck up" that she couldn't take their child to the funeral of a classmate. The wife wanted the poster to "make her apolgoze."
The poster refused. They told the wife their mom was right, that the daughter needed this, and that the wife had "fucked up." They said the wife "wasn't acting like a parent" because of her fear of the dead, and that all she needed to do was stay through mass.
That set off a "huge phonecall agrument." The wife called the poster "a huge dick."
The poster also checked on the daughter's situation, telling their mother not to let the child know about the fight and asking her to "look after her for the day." Their mom agreed. The daughter stayed at the funeral, while the adults argued over who had failed her more.