My sister scattered my stepdad’s ashes without me. I am still livid. Am I being selfish?

My stepdad died suddenly in March and my half-sister (his only biological child) chose to scatter his ashes when I was still locked in one of the hotel quarantine rooms in New Zealand. Missing the funeral and the ceremony was a brutal thing to experience during the pandemic. While some things were out of my sister’s control, she could have waited for me to be there for the final goodbye. Because I don’t have a “claim” to him, I felt as though I couldn’t speak up. I helped her plan the funeral and went through gargantuan efforts to be there to support her but she even “forgot” to stream the ash scattering after promising to get footage. Because the funeral was outside, I couldn’t hear a single word on the video stream.

My sister is finally ready to “talk” but I am still so livid that she would display such disregard for my feelings. A bereavement is difficult for all. I feel that our relationship (she is my closest friend) has shifted irrevocably. This is devastating but I can’t be close to someone I feel so hurt by. I feel bad for feeling bad. Am I being entitled and selfish? I’d really like to improve my own behaviour in this and not make the situation worse than it already is. (This question has been edited for length.)

Eleanor says: This is so very tragic, it’s not surprising that you’re angry. Death makes us angry when it extinguishes our best people with immediate, unblinking finality. These quarantine laws make us angry with the brute reality that harsh rules apply whether we can bear them or not. Being discounted makes us angry – and your sister seriously discounted you.

As long as all that anger is sitting on your chest, trying to “improve your behaviour” is going to be tough. In my experience, anger denied is anger fed: it eats whatever it was objecting to in the first place, and each subsequent day of pasted-on smiles. It will burst out in unexpected snarls or firmly draw shut the part of you that was once warm and fond.

Sometimes I think that staying in an acute feeling is a way of insisting on whatever that feeling is about. We stay angry as proof that something was worth being angry over; we stay torn in two as proof that it was worth being bereft about. Particularly when nobody around us seems to agree, our own acute suffering can become a form of proof – our only proof – that what happened was real and that it mattered.

If you want to feel this anger and grief less acutely – and I stress, if, because you don’t have to – you might find it helps to have some recognition of the things your feelings testify to. This memorial took something from you. At the moment, that truth seems to live only in you and in your pain. Getting it recorded or acknowledged might give it somewhere else to live.

You could try talking to your sister to make it feel real; seen. You say she’s ready to talk. I’m not sure whether that means you’ve been in silence until now but if she doesn’t know she hurt you, I’d tell her. Don’t yell or be insulting; expressing anger doesn’t mean being angry. The goal is simply to have another person hold the feeling, so it doesn’t live in your memory alone. To that end, I also wouldn’t litigate who’s right. I’d just say “this hurt me a lot”.

She might not be up to the task – not everyone is. In that case, I wonder whether you could have some kind of ceremony. One for your dad. And a different one for the hurt that your half-sister caused you. You could formally acknowledge your grief for him with friends of yours, or family if it feels right. You could remember him with the adoration of a daughter – which shines so much in your letter.

Separately, you could honour your grief about his cremation – go up on a hill and write on little bits of paper how this treatment made you feel; ignored, second-best. Grind them up with rocks or tear them up into little tiny bits and jump on them. This pandemic, and your family, have so far kept your grief and anger from having anywhere to go. But you might find you can give yourself the ceremony and recognition that so far you’ve been denied.

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