*I’ll try to be kind. A gentleness you never extended to me.
I’m writing this as a eulogy.
Not for your body—
But for your soul.
For your heart.
For the version of you I trusted with my life.
Because that man is gone.
When I saw you last,
you were playing with my daughter.
Your eyes softened.
Your voice changed.
And you looked up at me and said,
“You know I would be a good father.”
And I said,
“You already are one.”
Because you are.
Even if just in blood.
Even if she never calls you it by name.
Your greatest dream was of a family, a home—
as it’s rotting right in front of you.
You gave up on becoming a man with a spine.
And instead, you became… this.
A hollow imitation.
A version stitched together by avoidance and existing in the shadows of your own life.
Who whispers through locked phones and late-night texts.
A secret to his own bloodline.
But I remember you when you were still climbing toward the light.
Scared.
But brave.
Terrified of becoming your pain,
But with qualities that inspired me.
You hated lies.
You always tried to be kind.
You were so deeply traumatized by cheating—
that the thought of it made you physically sick—
Because you’d seen what it did.
You swore you wanted different.
But now?
You lie without flinching.
You vanish without consequence.
You are disloyal as a reflex.
You protect the people who use you—
and without hesitation, you destroy the ones who would’ve stood by you forever.
You have chosen to hide instead of grow.
Silence over integrity.
You built a cage inside of your own worst fears,
and then convinced yourself it was where you belonged.
You became a man who doesn’t fight.
Not for his kid.
Not for the truth.
Not for himself.
And you don’t get to pretend you don’t know that.
Because I knew you before this.
I saw how hard you tried to be better.
I saw you become softer in a world that told you not to be.
I watched you fall apart,
but I thought you’d come back.
I thought you’d return stronger, with more conviction, more clarity.
But instead, you let your cowardice calcify.
And it’s too late now.
You’re not who you were.
You’re not who you could’ve been.
You are a walking shell of what almost was.
And that version of you—the one I loved,
the one your daughter could’ve been proud of calling “dad”—
he’s dead.
And this?
This is his funeral.
I don’t hate you.
But I will never chase a ghost.
And I will never speak to you like there’s still a fire inside your chest.
Because for the first time ever, I see you differently now.
And I’ve buried the man I knew in the ground.
You killed him.
And you chose to live in his place,
as a hollow, forgettable thing.
No backbone.
No truth.
No courage.
Just a man who almost became. And then gave up.