I remember the day my dad died. Not the way people usually mean when they say that. Not the moment itself, not the news or the numbness or the weird, hollow ache that settles somewhere between your chest and your stomach. I mean the room. The way the air felt. The way the so-called mighty family members swooped in like vultures who’d been perched just out of sight, waiting for the signal.
They had a playbook.
God help me, I didn’t know it at the time but I saw it unfold before my eyes. Like a script they’d rehearsed for years.
Bully couldn’t help himself.
That man never met a vulnerable moment he couldn’t turn into a power grab. While the rest of us were still reeling, still trying to make sense of the silence where my father’s voice should’ve been, he was already staking out territory, laying claim to things that didn’t belong to him, speaking louder than anyone else in the room like volume made him important. Like he was owed something.
And Fanny.
God, Fanny turned it on so thick I thought I might choke on it. Sweet as syrup, eyes wide with that over-practiced look of sympathy, reaching out to touch hands, to pat shoulders, to tell everyone how much Dad ‘meant to her’. You’d swear he was her personal savior the way she carried on.
It wasn’t grief.
It was performance.
Theatrics for the living.
For whoever was left watching.
And maybe, deep down, for themselves, so they wouldn’t have to feel what was actually there. Or because they didn’t.
And I remember standing there, feeling like I was the only one in the room who wasn’t following the script. Like I’d missed rehearsal or refused the role. Watching it play out around me, grief being turned into a transaction, a performance, a power play. It made my skin crawl.
How in God’s name are people so fake?
That’s what I keep asking myself, even now.
How do you wrap yourself in someone else’s death like it’s a cloak to make you feel important?
How do you turn mourning into maneuvering?
And how do you look someone in the eye, someone whose heart is breaking and serve up a smile you don’t mean, words you don’t feel and sympathy you can’t even spell without a cue card?
I’ll never forget that day.
Not because I lost my father – though I did and it ripped something out of me I’ve never fully gotten back.
But because I saw who people really were when there was no one left to pretend for.
And maybe that’s the worst kind of grief.
Not just losing someone you love but realizing who never really loved them the way you thought.
I don’t care what anyone says, death doesn’t always bring people together.
Sometimes it shows you exactly who’s been circling all along.
And I’m writing this now because maybe, somewhere out there, someone else stood in a room like that. Someone else saw the playbook come out, the power moves start, the phonies crank up their charm. And if you did – you weren’t crazy. You weren’t wrong. You weren’t overreacting.
You saw it too.
Grief doesn’t always bring people together. Sometimes it exposes who they’ve been all along. The day my dad died, the playbook came out, the masks went on and I saw more than I bargained for. This isn’t a pretty story. It’s a true one.
UNDER THE WILL... OVER THE DRAMA... 
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