He Was an Asshole. I Still Miss Him. Both Can Be True at Once

Nobody brings you a casserole when your dad was a difficult man to love.

There's no casserole brigade when your father was absent, cruel, selfish, checked out, or just chronically, exhaustingly disappointing. You still get the condolence cards. You still stand at the funeral in the same clothes everyone else is wearing. But the script handed to grieving people doesn't fit your situation, and you know it the second someone says "he's in a better place" and you find yourself thinking: yeah, okay. sure.

Grieving a complicated father is one of the strangest, most disorienting things a person can go through. Because the grief is real — undeniably, physically real — but the story doesn't go the way it's supposed to. And when the story doesn't go the way it's supposed to, most men do what men do best. They go quiet.

This is for the guys who went quiet.

The Grief Nobody Has a Script For

The standard grief protocol assumes you lost someone you straightforwardly loved and straightforwardly miss. That the hole left behind is shaped exactly like the person who was there. It assumes the hardest part is the absence, and that everything before the death was worth keeping.

But what happens when the relationship was jagged? When the memories you're sorting through are a mix of real warmth and real damage? When the honest answer to "how are you holding up?" is something too complicated to say in a funeral home parking lot?

You get silence. Or you get a version of yourself performing grief that looks right from the outside but feels hollow. You stand there listening to people talk about the man they knew — or the man they thought they knew — and you feel weirdly alone in the room. Not because you're not sad. But because the sadness you're carrying doesn't match the one everyone assumes you have.

That silence is where a lot of men stay. One listener who wrote in to the Dead Dads reviews put it directly: "It's the type of pain that I bottle up and keep to myself." — Eiman A., January 2026. That's not unusual. That's the default setting for men grieving difficult dads. Bottle it, carry it, and assume it means something's wrong with you.

Nothing's wrong with you. The situation is just genuinely hard in a way that most conversations about grief aren't equipped to handle.

You're Not Missing Who He Was — You're Missing Who He Never Became

Here's the thing that hits people later, often sideways, sometimes in a hardware store on a Tuesday: you're not necessarily missing the man your father was. You're missing the man you kept thinking he might still become.

The call he never made to apologize. The conversation that kept getting postponed. The version of the relationship you kept a small corner of hope open for, even after it became clear he wasn't going to change.

Psychologists have a name for this. Disenfranchised grief — loss that doesn't fit the expected form and therefore doesn't get the expected recognition. The death of a difficult parent falls squarely inside it. Because what ends when a complicated father dies isn't just the relationship as it was. It's the relationship as it might have been. The door closes permanently on a future that was always unlikely but never quite impossible.

That's a specific kind of pain. Mourning something that never existed is somehow more disorienting than mourning something you had. There's no memory to anchor it. No specific moment you're missing. Just the accumulated weight of all the times you'd hoped, and the knowledge that hoping is finished now.

It's worth reading How to Carry Your Father's Legacy Forward Without Forcing It alongside this, because the complicated fathers are exactly the ones whose legacies are hardest to figure out what to do with. When the inheritance is mixed — when what he left you is both useful and heavy — there's no clean answer about what to keep and what to put down.

Anger and Grief Are Roommates

One of the reasons this type of loss is so disorienting is that grief and anger don't cancel each other out. They move in together. They share space in ways that feel contradictory and exhausting, and they have no interest in taking turns.

You can be standing at a graveside genuinely relieved that he's not suffering anymore, and furious that he wasted so much time — simultaneously, in the same body, on the same afternoon. You can laugh at a story about something he did, feel the warmth of it for a second, and then hit a wall of grief for everything he never said. None of that is a contradiction. It's just what this particular loss feels like.

The problem is that we've inherited a pretty narrow idea of what grief is supposed to look like — sad, linear, eventually resolved. Anger doesn't fit neatly into that picture. Neither does relief. So men who feel both tend to assume they're grieving wrong, or that their anger means they didn't really love him, or that their sadness means they're somehow excusing what he did.

None of it means any of that.

There's a reason the Dead Dads podcast has a post about using humor as a handrail — because dark humor in grief isn't avoidance. It's not a failure to take the loss seriously. Sometimes it's the only honest response available when a situation is genuinely both terrible and absurd. When the complicated feelings don't have clean language, a dark joke sometimes carries more truth than a solemn statement. It's a way through, not a way around.

For more on what the anger specifically does to you — and what to do when it's more present than the sadness — Why Losing Your Dad Makes You Furious and What to Do About It goes deeper into that particular piece of this.

The Stuff You'll Keep Anyway

Here's what surprised a lot of men who've gone through this: even the difficult fathers leave traces. And you don't always get to choose which ones stay.

There are phrases you'll catch yourself saying that came directly from him. Habits you built around his habits. The way you hold a tool, or check the weather, or size up a problem before speaking. The grudging respect you have for something he built or survived or endured, even as you resent the way he went about it. These things don't go away because the relationship was hard. They're already wired in.

And then there's the murkier stuff. The parts of him you recognize in yourself that you're not sure what to do with. The temper that flares the same way his did. The tendency to shut down when things get uncomfortable. The capacity for stubbornness that you've told yourself is determination. The inheritance is real whether you claimed it consciously or not.

What this grief eventually asks of you — and it's not a quick ask — is to figure out which parts of him you want to carry forward intentionally, and which ones you want to put down. That's not the same as forgiving him, or excusing what he did, or pretending the relationship was something it wasn't. It's just the practical work of being a person who was shaped by him, trying to figure out what to do with that now.

That work is harder when the man wasn't simple. When you can't just lean into the clean version of his legacy, because the clean version would be a fiction. The complicated fathers force a more honest reckoning — not with who he was at his best, but with who he actually was, which parts of that you inherited, and what you plan to do about it.

Some men in this situation find that talking about it — out loud, to someone who gets it, without having to explain why it's complicated — is the thing that starts to move it. That's the conversation the Dead Dads podcast was built for. Not the polished, already-resolved version of grief. The version that's still tangled, where you're still figuring out how to be angry and miss him at the same time, and you need to hear that someone else has been exactly there.

The Weight Doesn't Require a Verdict

You don't have to decide whether he was a good man before you're allowed to grieve him. You don't have to issue a final ruling on his character before your feelings get to be legitimate.

He was complicated. The loss is complicated. Those two things belong together.

Some of the hardest grief that exists is the grief that doesn't come with a clean story — where the loss and the anger sit on top of each other, and the condolence cards don't quite say what you need them to say, and you're standing in a hardware store on an ordinary afternoon and it suddenly hits you in a way you weren't prepared for.

That's real grief. Even if nobody brought you a casserole.

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Dead Dads is a podcast about the conversations most people skip. Hosted by Roger Nairn and Scott Cunningham — two guys who lost their dads and couldn't find the conversation they were looking for. Listen wherever you get podcasts, or find every episode at deaddadspodcast.com.