My dad passed away over the weekend he was in hospice with cancer. My dad is known in my family as the rebel but growing up he still support my three older brothers and I to go on missions and follow the church. He bad mouthed the church every day of his life and would curse out god and jesus whenever something bad happened to him. I myself discovered the truth of the church about 10 years ago and shared it with my dad. He sort of had an idea the church was not really what it claimed, but having been immersed in mormonville utah, he played on both sides of the fence.

At any rate, we are planning out his funeral and yesterday a discussion broke out with my TBM brothers and my closet mormon mother. They started the ole "can you imagine dad is now in the spirit world just seeing without a doubt there is a god and the truth of the BoM etc..." My mom, the hypocrite, plays along with them and says "he believed in god, he used to pray for his pets etc.." Then another brother chimes in "well dad told me back in 1979 he felt the spirit etc..."

All of these claims were way way out dated and dad had evolved so much since then. Especially, when I stumbled on to the truth. That start all new discussions between my dad and I about how silly this church is and how it messes with people's minds. One brother in particular was with me while I was discovering the truth and he listened for a while with me but his wife then got in the way. Later, he said he doesn't care and chooses to believe b/c what else is he gonna do?

I left the conversation stating "I am in the wrong place at the wrong time". Later I sent an email to my mom telling her that she is not helping my brothers by supporting their delusions. My mom, when I was a kid, would talk about JS and the Masons to her mother. They all knew the church was bogus before I was even born. Hell, my mom and her family tried getting my dad out of the church as a youngster. I don't know, it is just so upsetting to me to see the hypocrisy and bullshit being thrown around. I continued to tell my mom, that dad is at peace and he is not standing at anyone's judgement seat.

Frustrating when people who refuse to listen to facts but claim they know the church is true, WTF? If you won't examine all facts then how can you know anything at all?

Funerals are not for the dead. They are for the living. And when dealing with a death, people get a little weird.

I don’t have great advice for dealing with the weirdness, except to brace for it. In a week this will be over and at least the acute weirdness will subside. Your family will probably be permanently cursed with some chronic weirdness. That is the gift of Mormonism.

I should mention that my mom had my wife go out and buy brand new underwear to put on my dad. What is wrong with the ones in his drawer? Is he going to be uncomfortable or will there be people who can see his underwear?

Geez!

I want to go commando. Let the boys hang free for that short ride from the embalming room to the cremation chamber.

Sorry to hear of the loss of your dad. No matter what beliefs, it's always hard.

Like BoJ said, things get weird when someone dies. The person becomes a source of faith promoting stories that defy what the person was actually like. No one likes to rock the boat and set the record straight. Somehow many deaths become about the religion or fear of death by those who remain.

I understand how frustrating it is when people refuse to listen to the facts and flip flop all over the place. Good luck and sorry that your mom is not making sense.

Losing your father is tough even when they are sick. I was so exhausted taking care of both my dad and mom I didn’t want to deal with the funeral. Exactly, the funeral is for extended family and friends. My dad was popular. Enough people came to fill the chapel and most the rec hall. What pissed me off is the stake president sat on the stand and my parents didn’t like him. He wasn’t invited but he sits on the stand during a family funeral.

I hear you. They don't listen to you. I'm an unbeliever who hopes my death wish of being cremated is honored. It probably will be a Mormon faith promotion funeral later of a nice family gathering to remember me in a room with my ashes.

I'm sorry. It is a bad situation. I hope your memories are better.

It is very annoying how often our memories are slandered by the religious after we are dead and gone. It is, however, consistent with their general faith-based mental mode of operations. They choose to believe things that comfort them, because that is how they deal with reality; whereas somebody likes me wants to know what's real even if it doesn't make me happy at first and then get over myself and accept it.

Death is not something I will ever experience, because I will be dead, which to me means I will be as extant and conscious as feeling as I was before I was born, which is to say -- not at all. Dying in the present tense sucks, but nothing even in religion will save any of us from that experience. The closest we can get to that is hoping for an instant passing or to go in our sleep. There is no veil of forgetfulness placed on your mind when you're born: you're just born, and you don't have memories because you didn't exist until just now. What's left of me after death will be so many hundreds of pounds of ape meat in an unrefrigerated box going bad. I will cease to matter as living, breathing person, and I will begin my stage of existence as a biohazard in need of quick and proper disposal. Nobody can hurt my feelings in the grave. However, the moments of anticipation I have had about what happens here on earth after I die have caused me to think that I do want my memory to have some dignity and I do want to leave behind a legacy approximating something like, "he loved truth, wherever it took him, and even if it disadvantaged him." I almost want to be cremated just to prevent my family from mocking my memory with a Mormon funeral, weeping over how damned I am or distorting their own dogma finally like I asked but only after I'm gone to accommodate me... bastards. I'm only 33 years old, and writing a last will and testament at this stage is kinda suspect, so I haven't.

I have family members whom I feel I have a special bond that the main mass of religious dupes in our family will never appreciate or even know existed. They don't know everything; even if they pretend to. After a loved one dies, I suppose their memory belongs to each and every person still around who loved them in life. These loved ones will honor that memory in whatever way seems good to them and you can't really stop them, unless you can bitch slap with facts somehow. Undocumented memories are easy to dispute. Maybe write down and articulate in detail who the man was and how he felt about things; try to be as thorough and as objective as you can. Try to make something that will outlast the current social context. This might be very cathartic for you and help you treasure up the most meaningful memories you have of your old man.

Life is not meaningless just because it finite. To the contrary, since it is so rare and so fleeting in the cosmic scheme of things, it is to be treasured every waking moment and regretted as little as possible. I don't just mean eating, drinking, and making merry. The most rewarding moments it is possible to have in this life is when you make a genuine connection with someone and establish a sort of unspoken mythology about how things are informed by your shared experiences that only the two of you understand implicitly. Those are strong bonds, and they last with you for the rest of your life. We create things when we form relationships with people: the way two minds dance is something that never happens the same way twice. Treasure what you remember of your father, and honor him by remembering him honestly. Religion isn't everything, even when the religious dominate everything.

My Grandmother never believed and was vocal about it. At her funeral, her son (TBM) starting talking the same way, blah, Blah. One of the cousins leaned over to me and said, "Are we at the wrong funeral?" I still laugh about that quote

Before she died her son (my uncle) asked if she wanted to marry her deceased husband via proxy in the temple. Unabashed, she quickly replied, "I didn't like that SOB when he was alive and I won't in the after life." Go Grandma go.