The Eulogy Got Him Wrong: Why My Dad's Flaws Are the Best Part of His Legacy

Every eulogy makes the same guy. Steady. Selfless. Gone too soon. He loved his family, worked hard, and left the world better than he found it. The room nods. Someone cries. And somewhere in the back, you're sitting with the version of him you actually knew — the one who burned everything he cooked, gave advice that was wrong half the time, and would argue a point into the ground long after he'd clearly lost.

The gap between the speech and the man is where the real grief lives.

We've built this whole cultural machinery around flattening the dead into their best moments. It's well-intentioned. It's also a quiet form of erasure. And if you're trying to actually grieve someone — not perform grief, but actually move through it — a marble bust doesn't give you much to grab onto.

The Eulogy Is a Lie We All Agree to Tell

The script is rigid. You talk about what he built. What he gave. How hard he worked. You hit the highlights and leave out the parts that made him difficult, or complicated, or occasionally infuriating. The people in the room mostly know better, but nobody says so. There's an unspoken agreement: today is not the day.

The problem is, there's never a designated day. The complicated stuff gets deferred indefinitely. And grief that only has access to the saint version of someone is grief without traction.

This is exactly the gap Dead Dads was built around. "We talk about the stuff people usually skip," as Roger and Scott have put it. The paperwork, the garages full of junk, the grief that blindsides you in a hardware store. The podcast exists because the sanitized version — the one the eulogy delivers — isn't working for most men. It doesn't match what they're actually carrying.

In 2017, a woman named Sheila Smith wrote an obituary for her father, Leslie Ray Charping, that went viral precisely because it refused the script. It called him out — explicitly, by name — for a lifetime of harmful behavior, and described his two children as "relieved." A lot of people were uncomfortable. A lot of other people recognized, for the first time, that honesty at the end of a life was even an option. The piece was brutal, and it was clearly written from a place of real pain. But it pointed at something the standard eulogy never does: the truth, complicated and all.

Most of us aren't in Sheila Smith's situation. Our dads weren't villains. They were just human — which is its own kind of complicated.

Roasting Isn't Disrespect. It's the Opposite.

A roast requires that you actually knew someone. You can't roast a stranger. You can't land a specific, embarrassing, true story about a person you only knew from the highlight reel.

When someone stands up at a funeral and tells the story about the time your dad got completely lost on a camping trip he'd been planning for months and refused to admit it for four hours — that story carries more love than any formal tribute. It says: I saw you. The real you. Not the version you performed for the room. And I'm still here.

The Humor as a Handrail post captures this precisely. Roger writes about using humor as armor — and how, at the funeral home when they went to see his dad before cremation, humor was what the room needed, even if it wasn't what was expected. The director, Jesse, was "kind and precise in the way professionals earn your trust." That's the institutional decorum side. And then there's the raw human need to say something real, to crack something open, to laugh because the alternative is to stop breathing.

Humor at a funeral isn't deflection. It's proof that you're still present. If you want to go deeper on why that instinct is worth following, You're Allowed to Laugh: Dark Humor Is One of Grief's Most Honest Tools lays it out.

The Moments Nobody Puts in the Eulogy Are the Ones That Keep Him Alive

Here's what actually locates a person in your memory: the specific, weird, unrepeatable stuff.

Not "he was a hard worker." But the fact that he'd duct-tape anything before he'd spend money replacing it. Not "he loved his family." But the running joke that only your family got, the one that started from some dumb misunderstanding twenty years ago and never stopped being funny.

A man without flaws is a marble bust. You can look at it. You can't really know it.

Scott's Dairy Queen or Bust post is worth reading if you want to see what this looks like in practice. His dad died about five years ago. His kids were young. He watched them cycle through the same few core memories every time the subject came up, and he could already see the future: a date not far off when the only one who actually remembered this man would be Scott himself. So he built a ritual. Every March 14th — his dad's birthday — they go to Dairy Queen. That's it. It's specific. It's tied to a real person, not a general idea of a grandfather.

Now his kids give him weekly countdown reminders months in advance. They want a Blizzard. They want to talk about Papa. The ritual works because it's specific enough to be his dad, not just "a dad." That's the entire difference.

Why We Protect the Dead from Honesty — and Who It's Really for

We tell ourselves we're being respectful. Protecting his reputation. Letting people remember the good parts. That's the story.

The more honest version: we sanitize for ourselves. Admitting your dad was difficult, or stubborn, or sometimes wrong, can feel like betrayal. Like you're saying something that can't be unsaid. And for men especially, who were often raised to sort out their own feelings quietly and privately, speaking those complications aloud in front of a room of people is close to unthinkable.

But grief avoidance dressed up as reverence is still grief avoidance.

Roger has written about his dad choosing Medical Assistance in Dying on March 30th, 2021. That's not a eulogy-friendly detail. It's complicated and layered and emotionally difficult in ways that don't resolve neatly. It also happens to be true. Sitting with that complexity — rather than editing it out — is part of what makes grief something you actually move through rather than something you carry intact and unexamined for the next thirty years.

The hard truth isn't that your dad was a bad person. It's that he was a real one. Real people are messy. Acknowledging the mess isn't a betrayal of who he was. It might be the only honest tribute left.

Giving Yourself (and Your Family) Permission to Tell Real Stories

This doesn't require a formal ceremony or a structured event. It's more like deciding to stop editing.

Start with the specific stuff. Not the qualities — the incidents. Not "he was generous" but the time he gave away the thing your mom had specifically asked him not to give away. Not "he was stubborn" but the argument he lost so badly that the family still brings it up at holidays. These details don't diminish him. They locate him. They put him back in the room.

If you're the one who remembers things nobody else does, say them. Write them down. The Dairy Queen ritual works partly because it creates a recurring occasion with low emotional pressure — nobody has to cry, there's ice cream, and it becomes the place where stories about Papa are expected and welcome. You don't need Dairy Queen specifically. You need something particular enough to be his.

For families navigating complicated histories — where the man was loving and also absent, or supportive and also difficult — the permission to hold both truths simultaneously is the work. JP Aguirre, writing about his own father's eulogy, quoted this: "If you love someone, remove them from the pedestal that denies the fullness of their humanity." That's the whole thing, really. The pedestal is a kind of cruelty. It removes the person and replaces them with a symbol.

What Your Kids Inherit When You Tell the True Version

When you stop protecting the myth and start telling the man, the next generation gets something they can actually use.

A real person they can argue with in their heads. A real person whose choices they can examine and learn from, rather than a bronze statue they're supposed to admire from a distance. A model — imperfect, specific, human — of what it looks like to move through the world.

Scott's kids know that Papa loved Dairy Queen. That's a detail. But it anchors a real person in their understanding. As those conversations grow, as the stories accumulate, that anchor holds more and more weight. It becomes the thread that connects them to a man they barely knew.

And there's a quieter inheritance too. When you're honest about your father — his flaws, his contradictions, the things you're still working out — you model what honest grief looks like. Your kids watch you hold complexity without collapsing. That's not a small thing to pass on.

For a longer read on this, What Your Kids Inherit When You Stop Talking About Your Dad is worth your time.

The eulogy got him wrong. That's almost guaranteed. But you don't have to. You still have time, and an audience — even if it's just your kids at a Dairy Queen in March — to tell the true version. The one with the burnt dinners and the bad advice and the running joke. The one where he was a full person, not a saint.

That version of him is the one worth keeping alive.