There's a moment — you know the one — where your dad did something so embarrassing you briefly considered changing your name, your school, your zip code. Maybe your city. You replayed it on a loop for weeks. You told him, with great conviction, that he had ruined your life.
Now you'd pay real money to watch it happen one more time.
That inversion is one of the strangest parts of losing a dad. The memories you spent years trying to suppress are the ones that survive everything. The cringe stories, the bad jokes, the moments that made you wish the floor would open up and swallow you whole — those are the ones that get passed around at wakes, texted between siblings at midnight, told to kids who will never meet the man. They travel. The polished eulogies don't.
The Dish Soap Incident (And Why You Have One Too)
Every family has a version of this story. The one that gets told every time. The one where everyone already knows the ending and laughs anyway.
One of the stories that came up on Dead Dads — told by someone who clearly still loves it, years later — involves a camping trip, a nasal congestion problem, and a very poor labeling decision. The dad in question was practical about packing. Didn't flaunt money. Used what was around the house. He had a nasal spray bottle — the kind you'd use for congestion — and at some point before the trip, someone had put dish soap in it. He hadn't checked. He gave it the quick wipe-and-sniff, apparently decided that was sufficient quality control, and applied a healthy dose directly up his nose.
What followed was a scene of a grown man breathing soap bubbles out of his nostrils in the middle of a campsite.
He was a doctor. A respected one. The kind of man who'd earned genuine professional authority. And there he was, foaming gently from his face, in front of his family, in the woods.
That story gets told. It will keep getting told. It has survived because it is too specific and too weird to forget, which is exactly what makes it valuable. The dignity stayed intact, oddly. Because a man who can blow soap bubbles from his nose in front of his kids and not collapse from shame is a man who is comfortable in his own skin. That's not embarrassing in retrospect. That's kind of remarkable.
Your version of this story exists. The bad joke at the wrong moment. The outfit he wore to pick you up from school. The thing he said to your girlfriend the first time he met her. Whatever it was, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you let yourself sit with it for a minute, you'll notice the memory doesn't make your stomach drop the way it used to. It makes you smile first. Then the smile does something else.
What Embarrassment Is Actually Telling You
A stranger making the same joke at a hardware store doesn't embarrass you. A colleague saying something oblivious at a meeting doesn't make you want to disappear. But your dad saying the exact same thing in front of your friends, your girlfriend, your in-laws — that's a full-body experience. You feel it in your face.
That's worth paying attention to. You can only be embarrassed by someone you're deeply connected to. The discomfort is relational. It comes from being seen — from the fact that he knew you so completely that he didn't bother performing. He was just himself, fully, in front of you, and you were stuck in the blast radius.
What you were reacting to wasn't actually bad behavior. It was intimacy without filter. He wasn't thinking about how he looked to your friends. He wasn't calculating impressions. He was just there, being himself, the way you are only when you're completely comfortable. The embarrassment was proof of closeness. Most people don't get that until after.
Scott Cunningham, co-host of Dead Dads, has written about his dad's Dairy Queen ritual — the way his father would pull him aside in hushed, conspiratorial tones to ask whether they might slip out for a "quick snack" before dinner, because his wife's pescatarian cooking, while genuinely excellent, didn't align with his dad's firmly held belief that a meal without meat wasn't technically a meal. Every visit to Vancouver, same conversation, same tones, same guilty pre-dinner burger. Mortifying in its transparency. Completely lovable in retrospect.
The ritual wasn't embarrassing because it was reckless. It was embarrassing because it was so nakedly him. No pretense. No adjustment for audience. Just a man who wanted a burger before a fish dinner, and wasn't going to pretend otherwise. That's someone who is fully himself in front of you. Losing that is losing something specific and irreplaceable.
Grief Flips the Polarity
Here's what nobody explains beforehand. Before he's gone, those stories live in the "things I'd rather forget" file. After he's gone, they move to the "things I'm terrified of forgetting" file. The shift happens fast and it's total.
The cringe dissolves first. What stays behind is the laugh, the face he made, the way he moved through a room without apology. You stop seeing the embarrassment and start seeing the person. The specific, irreducible, impossible-to-replicate person. And you realize the stories that embarrassed you are the ones that prove he was real — not a flattened version of himself, not a eulogy, not a framed photograph. A full human being with unchecked nasal spray and a covert burger habit.
Humor has always worked as a handrail in grief — something to hold onto when the ground feels unstable. The ridiculous stories aren't a way of making light of loss. They're a way of holding onto someone. When everything else starts to blur and soften with time, the weird specific details stay sharp. The soap bubbles. The Blizzard before dinner. The terrible joke delivered with total confidence at exactly the wrong moment. Those details are pegs in the wall. They keep him from becoming vague.
This is worth reading alongside You're Allowed to Laugh: Dark Humor Is One of Grief's Most Honest Tools, because the same logic applies: laughter in grief isn't avoidance. Sometimes it's the most direct route to what you actually feel.
The Eulogy Version Is Not Enough
Most of what gets said after someone dies is polished. We smooth people into their best moments. The tributes and the speeches and the social media posts build a version of a person that is easier to present but harder to actually love. You can admire the eulogy version. You can't really miss him.
The embarrassing stories do something the polished ones can't. They restore dimension. They prove he was an actual human being who made questionable decisions about camping supplies and had opinions about burgers that he held with quiet, immovable conviction. That's not diminishing him. That's the opposite. A person without flaws, without quirks, without the occasional spectacular miscalculation — that's not someone you miss. That's a Wikipedia entry.
There's also what happens to your kids when you sanitize him out of existence. When the only stories available are the respectable ones, what they inherit is a silhouette. A man-shaped outline. They know he was good. They don't know he was him. The embarrassing stories — told with the full specific detail of the original incident — are the ones that give him texture. They're the ones that make kids ask follow-up questions. They're the ones that make him feel like someone they'd have actually liked.
Scott has written about how Dairy Queen became a ritual for talking to his kids about their grandfather — how the kids now prompt him weeks in advance, excited for the tradition, asking when it's time. That's not just a nice memory. That's an anchor. A place where the conversation happens naturally, where the stories come out without forcing them. The story of the secret pre-dinner burger fits perfectly into that ritual. It's exactly the kind of thing a kid can picture and laugh at and feel something about — even a kid who never met the man.
If you're thinking about how to keep your dad present for your own children, What Your Kids Inherit When You Stop Talking About Your Dad is worth reading. The argument is simpler than it sounds: silence doesn't protect kids from grief. It just removes the person from reach.
Tell the Specific Story
The impulse to protect a dad's reputation after he's gone is understandable and completely counterproductive. Protecting his reputation means editing him. And editing him means losing the parts that make the memories worth having.
The dish soap story gets told because it's too specific to generalize. You can't round it off. You can't make it vague. It happened exactly that way, to exactly that man, in exactly those woods, and the specificity is what makes it stick. That's also why it does more for the people who hear it than any summary of his professional accomplishments ever could. You can forget an accomplishment. You don't forget the soap bubbles.
So tell the embarrassing story. Tell it with the exact detail intact. Don't soften the moment where you wanted to disappear. That discomfort is actually part of the point — it proves how much you cared what people thought of him, which proves how much he mattered. The embarrassment was always evidence of love. It just took losing him to see it that way.
The stories where he was completely, unguardedly himself are the ones that prove he existed. And that he was yours. And that you were his. No eulogy gets to that. The soup bubbles do.
Dead Dads is a podcast for men figuring out life without a dad — one uncomfortable, occasionally hilarious conversation at a time. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and wherever you listen.