Funeral QuestionsMy estranged brother — no contact for 15 years — just posted a long tribute on Mum's memorial page. Am I wrong not to just delete it?
Asked by papercut_wren ·
I moved in with Mum three years ago when the diagnosis got serious and did basically everything: appointments, meds, the last six months of round-the-clock stuff, the funeral, all of it. My brother lives four hours away and hasn't spoken to either of us in about fifteen years, since a falling-out with Dad that never got resolved even after Dad died. He didn't call, didn't visit, didn't come to the funeral. I genuinely didn't expect him to and had made my peace with that.
Set up Mum's memorial page two weeks ago so people who couldn't get to the funeral could still leave something. It's been lovely, actually: old workmates, her book club, a niece from overseas. Then yesterday my brother posted a huge tribute. "Mum was my whole world, I think about her every single day, I wish I'd told her more how much she meant to me." Three paragraphs of it.
I'm the admin, so I can just delete it in about ten seconds. Part of me wants to, because it feels like he's performing a closeness for anyone reading that page who doesn't know he wasn't there. But he's still her son, and I keep going back and forth on whether removing it makes me the petty one instead of him. Is there a right answer here, or am I just going to be annoyed no matter what I do?
3 Replies
There isn't a universal right answer, but there is a genuinely useful way to separate the two decisions you're actually facing, because right now they're tangled together.
The first decision is a moderation one, and it's entirely yours to make as admin: does the post violate anything you've set as the page's ground rules: is it false, does it misrepresent the family, does it contain anything actually harmful? A tribute that's emotionally overstated but not factually false or aimed at anyone doesn't usually meet the bar most families set for removal, even when it's maddening to read. Most platforms, including Forever In Our Hearts, give the admin full control to hide or remove any post, so you're not asking permission. You're deciding what standard you want the page to hold itself to, once, so you're not relitigating it every time something like this happens.
The second decision is the one actually keeping you up at night, and it's not a moderation question at all: does his presence on that page misrepresent your mother's last years in a way that matters to you. That's worth sitting with separately from "can I delete it," because the honest answer might be that removing the post doesn't actually resolve what's bothering you, it just makes it invisible to strangers, while you still know it happened. Some admins in your position leave posts like this up precisely because a permanent, honest record includes the complicated parts of a family, not just the polished ones; others remove things that don't sit right with the person actually maintaining the page, and that's a legitimate call too. There's more on the reasoning behind who gets to write what, and for whom, in what should you write on an online memorial page, worth reading before you decide, because it may change which way you land.
What you're circling, "am I the petty one," is a very common trap for the person who did all the actual caregiving. You're not wrong to feel it, and I'd gently separate the feeling from the decision, because they don't have to point the same direction.
The anger is legitimate grief, not pettiness: you gave three years of your life to your mother's care and his absence, and now there's a version of events on a public page that erases that gap entirely. That's a real loss to sit with, on top of the loss of your mother, and it deserves to be named rather than managed away by either deleting or keeping the post.
Practically, whatever you decide about the post itself, it might help to write your own honest entry on the page, not as a rebuttal, just your own true account of the last three years. Not for him, for you and for anyone who was actually there. It doesn't need to mention his post at all. If the estrangement and what it's stirred up feels bigger than this one page, GriefLine (1300 845 745) is a good place to talk it through with someone outside the family.
Been on your side of almost exactly this. My take, for what it's worth: I left the version of this up, and I still think that was right for me, but not for the reason you'd expect. It wasn't generosity. It was that deleting it would've meant checking that page every day wondering if he'd post again, and I didn't have the energy to police it on top of everything else. Leaving it up once and then not looking at that section again was less work than fighting it.
One thing I'd push back on gently: you don't owe the page a single "right" tone. Some families keep a fully open wall precisely because they've decided the page belongs to everyone who ever knew the person, warts and absences included, and that's a genuinely fine choice, but so is deciding your mother's page reflects the people who were actually there for her, and that this post doesn't meet that bar. Neither of those is the petty option. The only genuinely bad outcome here is spending real energy on a decision about a page, when the actual grief is about a brother who wasn't there and probably won't explain why.
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