Funeral Games

The worst part about my father’s death wasn’t the death. It was the circus that formed around it — a slow-moving horror of corridors, signatures, wards, and messages filled with venom.

He’d been shipped from unit to unit like misaddressed post: neurology to geriatrics, geriatrics to palliative care. Somewhere in between, he stopped being a person and became a case. A set of failing systems. But I couldn’t even focus on that — because every moment I tried to sit with the grief, there was my stepbrother, clawing at the walls of it.

He didn’t give me a second.

It was as though my father’s dying was just a minor inconvenience, something to be dealt with quickly before we got back to the real business of hatred.

He left threatening messages on my phone. He accused me of engineering the will, of hiding money, of planting seeds in my stepmother’s already-clouded mind. He claimed to have found letters of complaint — women my father had allegedly harassed. Secret stashes of pornography, drugs, evidence. “He was a pervert,” he hissed in one voicemail, “and the whole family knows it.” Then came the part about the money. That Dad had burned through her accounts, siphoning her estate for years — and that now, with her mind gone, she couldn’t fix any of it.

I blocked him eventually.

But by then it was already too late.

At the funeral, he arrived late and stood at the back. He brought his two Weimaraners, long grey ghosts with empty eyes. He let them shit just outside the chapel door. The stink followed the congregation like a second sermon. Some guests stepped in it on their way out. I saw one elderly cousin slip slightly, smear it into the old flagstones.

He stared straight ahead. Smiling.

His mother was, by that point, a ghost with a heartbeat. Locked in a care home — well-fed, well-medicated, well beyond reach. The will was frozen. The house, barred. Neither of us had access. That, at least, was a relief. The house could rest. The silence of it.

I hoped she lived for years — long enough to bleed out the last of whatever imagined treasure he thought he was owed. Let it all go to incontinence pads and night staff and lavender-scented soaps. I wouldn’t touch a penny. I just wanted him to starve on the illusion.

A few weeks later I saw him again — purely by chance. He was drunk, staggering outside a grim pub near the station. Picking fights, yelling across tables. His dog — only one this time — barking in that desperate, human way some dogs learn when their owners talk too much nonsense too close to their faces.

He didn’t see me.

Or maybe he did, and didn’t care.

I stood for a moment in the shadow of the doorway, watching. He didn’t look real anymore — just a collection of angry habits held together by beer and bile.

I thought about going over. Saying something. Maybe even ending it.

But then I saw it — the truth of him.

He was just a sour fuckup. A man who’d never known the safety of a loving family, who didn’t know how to behave in a way that might make anyone love him. I saw the child in him. Kicked too many times to learn how to speak without shouting.

And maybe, I thought, that made two of us.