'AITA for backing out of giving a speech at my stepdad’s funeral after reading a letter he left me?'
"AITA for backing out of giving a speech at my stepdad’s funeral after reading a letter he left me?"
Honestly, I’m still confused about how I feel. I’m not even sure if I did the right thing or totally overreacted. I’m 24f. My stepdad passed away last month after a long illness. He came into my life when I was six.
My real dad wasn’t around and my stepdad basically raised me. He taught me how to ride a bike, helped with homework, showed up to every school thing. We didn’t always see eye to eye but like… he was my dad, y’know?
When he got sick, I helped out a lot. I visited every week, helped mum with care stuff when I could, even used some holiday time from work to be there more toward the end. Before he died, he asked me if I’d say something at his funeral. Nothing formal, just a speech. I said yes straight away.
The night before the funeral, me and mum were going through some old boxes to set up a little memory table. In one of them, she found a sealed letter with my name on it. She said he wrote it a few weeks before he passed and asked her to give it to me. She’d forgotten about it til that night.
I took it upstairs and read it alone. It started off sweet — stuff like thank you for being a part of my life, proud of you, that kind of thing. But toward the end, it shifted. He said that when he first married my mum, he didn’t want me around.
He wrote that he’d tried to convince her to let me live with my grandparents because he wasn’t ready to raise “someone else’s kid.” He said that he didn’t know how to handle it, and honestly just resented how fast everything changed.
He said eventually he came to love me and that our bond became one of the most important things in his life. He mentioned that writing it down was his way of being honest and showing how far we’d come.
I stared at it for like an hour. I tried to just brush it off, like okay yeah it was a long time ago and people change, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. All these years I’d believed he chose me. That he wanted to be my dad. And suddenly it felt like that wasn’t true. Not at the start anyway. It made me feel… fake. Like the speech I was supposed to give would be a lie.
I didn’t sleep that night. In the morning, I told my mum i couldn’t do it. I didn’t say why, just said I wasn’t in the right place emotionally. She said okay, but I could tell she was disappointed. My uncle ended up speaking instead.
Now, some family are saying that I was cold. That I let him down on the day it mattered most. My mum hasn’t pushed, but I think she knows something’s up. I still don’t really know how to feel.
Part of me feels like I let him down. But another part of me feels like he let me down first. And it didn’t feel right to stand up there and talk about how much he meant to me when all I could think about was how, at the start, he didn’t even want me in his life. So yeah. AITA for backing out of the speech after reading that?
Here were the top rated comments from readers in response to the OP’s post:
NTA—But I think you are missing exactly what he was saying to you. He is confessing to you that in the beginning he was selfish and did not understand how much he would really love you. When people know that they are going to die they will confess things that haunt them.
This man was telling you he couldn’t have known in the beginning how much he would love you and you made him very happy. Please stand up tall and know that you were loved so much he felt great guilt for ever doubting your worth.
That is the way I took it also. He didn't want to be a dad at first, but he said their relationship became one of the most important things to him. He realized that he loved his stepson. No one is going to love a stepchild like their own immediately. But they usually grow to love them like biological children.
So sorry for the loss you are going through. I don't think you are the AH here. I think the letter was meant as something that was --hey look at how far we've come. I think any first time parent is really scared and your step dad was no different.
You may want to consider showing this to your mum. Talking about this with her may help you. You are not the AH to not want to speak at his funeral. You are grieving not only his loss but the loss of the relationship as you saw it and experienced. And all of that is okay to deal with on your own time. Wishing you peace.
"On the day it mattered most" Not to sound cruel but nothing matters to the dead. Funerals are for the living. You didn't do anything wrong, people are just weird about funerals. It's not on you to soothe them.
No. You’re not the AH at all. What you’re feeling is completely valid. Grief is already complicated, and that letter just cracked your world open even more. That’s a huge thing to dump on someone, especially the night before a funeral, even if it was unintentional.
It doesn’t undo everything he did for you, and it doesn’t mean the love wasn’t real in the end, but you were a child when he came into ur life, and finding out he didn’t want u there at first? That hurts. It shifts how you see your whole relationship. Of course you couldn’t just flip a switch and pretend everything felt the same.
You didn’t stand up and lie. you didn’t fake a smile and say words you weren’t ready to say. That’s not cold, that’s honest. That’s protecting yourself in a moment where everything was already too much. That’s brave.