You Don’t Have to Forgive an Abusive Parent on Their Deathbed

Telling me to forgive my father means erasing the years of abuse I suffered at his hands

Bobbi Dempsey
Human Parts
Published in
5 min readAug 13, 2019

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Photo: Karl Tapales/Getty Images

My father was a bad person.

There are plenty of ways to sugarcoat it, or use lots of needless words to make it sound a little less harsh. But that would mean burying the truth under a…

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Bobbi Dempsey
Human Parts

Writer whose recent work includes essays and op-eds on poverty and social issues, but I also love fun stuff like the 80s, bargain-hunting, and bad reality TV.