We Don't Want the Eulogy Version of Your Dad — We Want the Real One

Every eulogy makes the dead man sound like a saint. That's fine for a funeral. It's useless for everyone sitting in their car six months later, still trying to figure out how to feel about a man who was more complicated than that.

The tribute version of a father — the one that gets read aloud at the wake, shared on Facebook, printed in the local paper — does something quietly damaging to the men who don't recognize it. If the dad you lost doesn't match that portrait, you start to wonder if your grief is broken. Or if you're even allowed to have grief at all.

That's the conversation this show exists to have. And it's why we're specifically not looking for the eulogy version of your dad.

The Grief World Has a Greatest Hits Problem

Most grief content — podcasts, books, online communities — defaults to tribute mode. The best stories. The best qualities. The legacy carefully edited for public consumption. This makes sense in some contexts. It's genuinely comforting to remember someone at their best when the loss is still raw.

But it creates a real problem for men whose relationships with their fathers were anything other than straightforward. When every piece of content you encounter frames the death of a father as the severing of a beautiful bond, and your experience doesn't look like that, you don't feel included in the grief. You feel like an outlier.

You go quiet. You assume something is wrong with you. You stop bringing it up.

And then you carry it alone, which is exactly the wrong thing to do with something this heavy.

The Unlikable Stuff Is Where the Real Grief Lives

When we say we want the complicated version, we're not looking for villain stories. We're not recruiting people to come on and air grievances about abusive men, though that kind of loss is real and deserves its own space.

We mean something more ordinary and more common than that. We mean the dad who never once said he was proud of you, even when he clearly was. The one who disappeared when things got hard — not maliciously, just constitutionally. The dad who was funny as hell and completely unreliable. The man who turned out to be a better grandfather than he ever managed to be as a father, and you're not sure how to feel about watching that happen.

We mean the dad you had to start taking care of before you were ready to, because dementia or illness started hollowing him out years before he actually died. The one you'd already partially grieved before the phone call came. We mean the guy you were in the middle of a long, unresolved stretch with when he went — no final conversation, no closure, just a gap that's now permanent.

These are the stories men are actually sitting with at 11pm. And almost nobody is talking about them out loud.

What Happens When Your Grief Doesn't Match the Template

There's a specific kind of isolation that comes from having a complicated loss in a world that only makes room for clean ones. You watch other people grieve fathers who were their best friends, their heroes, their steady north stars — and you feel like a guest at someone else's party.

You don't know what you're mourning, exactly. The man who's gone? The relationship you never had with him? The version of him you kept hoping would show up someday? The conversation you were going to have eventually, that you kept putting off until eventually wasn't an option anymore?

One listener described it this way in a review: "It's the type of pain that I bottle up and keep to myself." That's not a personality flaw. That's what happens when the grief you're carrying doesn't fit the categories the world offers you.

Silence becomes the path of least resistance. And silence, in this case, is genuinely costly — not just to your own processing, but to the people around you who are carrying something similar and also saying nothing.

This is what the show was built for. Not to fix it. Not to offer a framework. Just to name it, and let someone else hear it named, and feel a little less like they're losing their mind in isolation. Sometimes you don't want answers. You just want to hear someone say, "Yeah, that part sucked for me too."

What We're Actually Looking for in a Guest

The guest suggestion form on the Dead Dads site asks two questions that aren't accidental: "How would you describe your relationship with him?" and "What's one moment you still think about a lot?"

Those questions are designed to get past the prepared version. They're not asking for a biography. They're not asking you to summarize the man. They're asking you to show up with one real thing — a relationship that was what it was, and a moment that stuck.

That's the whole bar.

The show's guest policy is blunt about this: no PR pitches, no polished bios, just real people with real stories. That's not a stylistic preference. It's a structural decision about what actually helps a grieving man listening in his truck on the way to work. A polished story doesn't help him. An honest one does.

The conversations on the show aren't therapy sessions and they're not performances. They're closer to what happens after everyone else has left the room — the side conversation, the one where you say the thing you didn't say at the wake. Roger and Scott have both been through it. When you sit down with them, you're not being interviewed by journalists or counseled by professionals. You're talking to two guys who know what this feels like from the inside.

Look at what that kind of conversation produced with John Abreu — a man who received the call about his father's death and then had to turn around and tell his family. Or Greg Kettner, who came on to talk about his grief journey in ways that most men never get to articulate out loud. Those aren't polished stories. They're real ones. And that's precisely why they land.

Why Talking About the Hard Stuff Isn't Disrespecting Your Dad

This is the part that stops a lot of men from coming forward. They think that telling a complicated story about their father is somehow a betrayal. That it dishonors him. That if you say anything that isn't flattering, you're speaking ill of the dead, and that's off-limits.

But silence doesn't protect a complicated man's memory. It erases him.

If the only version of your dad that you're willing to speak out loud is the sanitized one — the eulogy version, the Facebook post version — then eventually that's all that's left. The real man disappears. The frustrating parts, the funny parts, the parts that made you who you are by pushing against them — all of it goes quiet. And then you're not actually keeping him around. You're keeping a portrait of him. A flattering one that doesn't quite look like anybody real.

The men who talk honestly about their fathers — the whole picture, the good and the hard and the inexplicable — those are the men who actually keep them alive. Because the stories they tell are specific enough to be true. A complicated man, described honestly, is still a man. A sanitized one is a greeting card.

For a deeper look at this, What Your Kids Inherit When You Stop Talking About Your Dad gets into what that silence actually costs — not just you, but the people who come after.

There's also something worth saying about the men who are still in the middle of a complicated relationship with a living father who's declining. If dementia has already started taking him, or illness is making him someone different from who he was, that anticipatory grief is real and disorienting in ways that deserve a conversation too. The loss is already happening, and there's no clean moment of before-and-after to point to. That story belongs on the show as much as any other.

Who Should Submit — And the Actual Bar to Clear

If you're reading this and thinking about whether your story qualifies, here's the honest answer: if you have one moment you still think about, you qualify.

Not a polished narrative arc. Not a resolved relationship. Not a grief journey with a visible destination. Just a moment. The last conversation. The one that almost happened. The afternoon in the garage when he said something unexpected. The thing you overheard. The way he looked at you when he thought you weren't watching.

If you have that, you have enough.

This isn't a platform for people who've processed everything and arrived at peace. There's nothing wrong with being in the middle of it, or being unable to fully name what you're feeling, or not knowing whether what you experienced counts as grief in the conventional sense. The show is specifically not for people who have it figured out. It's for everyone else.

And if you're not ready to be the guest yourself but you know someone who should be — a friend, a brother, a guy you grew up with who lost his dad and has never really talked about it — you can suggest them. The form asks for their story, not a sales pitch. It's designed for people who are real, not people who are prepared.

You can find the guest suggestion feature at deaddadspodcast.com.

If you want to hear what these conversations actually sound like before deciding, the show is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Start anywhere. You'll know within ten minutes whether this is a place that feels honest enough.

The eulogy version of your dad is already done. What's still unfinished is the real version — the one that's harder to say, more specific, and the only one that actually does anything for the men who need to hear it.

That's the one we're looking for.

For more on what it means to carry a father's story forward without forcing it into something tidy, read How to Carry Your Father's Legacy Forward Without Forcing It.