Anonymous wrote:NP, and yes, I'm aware this is long. It's mainly for OP anyway, so feel free to keep scrolling.
I am the kind of person who tries to see everything from all sides and give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and I just couldn’t disagree more with any of the SIL defenders here. I think they are the ones lacking in perspective-taking. And I mean even those mildly defending her. No one may be able to change her. And maybe her motivations were not intentionally evil. But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t done something that is even marginally okay.
1) This is not a general discussion of how different families and different cultures mourn, especially not in terms of judging one way as better than another, but really at all. Any adult living in the US should be able to at least recognize that many people don’t see funerals as a time for joy and celebration, especially the funerals of their mothers. Most people in the US probably don’t find much joy in funerals, especially those of their mothers. But that doesn’t matter, and that’s why I said “many” instead of “most.” Clearly at least SOME people don’t, and not some tiny minority. I.e., no matter her culture, it cannot or should not be a surprise to SIL that OP might have found her mother’s funeral and reminders of it painful.
THIS IS A THOUGHT THAT SHOULD HAVE CROSSED SIL’S MIND.
Can anyone truly argue with that? If she’s “clueless” or neurodivergent or whatever relatively innocent explanation, okay, maybe it didn’t cross her mind. But it is entirely logical and at least SHOULD HAVE. No one can seriously argue “How could she possibly have known?” Which gets me to…
2) Let’s say SIL’s family just loooooves funerals and she wouldn’t blink an eye if OP’s family took a picture like this at SIL’s mother’s funeral and blew it up and gave it out as a gift in front of her. Fine.
Has SIL… met OP? Has she any feel for how OP might think of her own mother’s funeral? Is there any sort of, say, event SIL could have attended to gain insight into how OP’S FAMILY THINKS OF FUNERALS? Ooh, ooh, I know what would have really helped SIL understand how OP might think of her mother’s funeral! Attending OP’s mother’s funeral!
Those of you talking about how Italians or Victorians treat funerals… you realize that OP’s (and it’s implied, OP’s family) doesn’t seem to share the same sentiments and traditions, right? This wasn’t a photo of the IL family at their own family’s funeral, handed out only to the IL family. It was a photo of another family’s funeral, handed out in front of the grieving daughter and given TO her and her husband, or at least her husband. (And please spare me the “ILs are all family”— of course they are, but that doesn’t mean they share the same cultural or familial traditions.)
I don’t care what SIL’s family does at funerals! Or any of yours! At most, it would be relevant to establishing how much of a monster SIL was being here, but OP doesn’t feel SIL was being a “monster” anyway. What it doesn’t do is make this any less insensitive.
“Oh, I did this thing FOR MYSELF (or my family) because it wouldn’t bother me if you did it to me, but I at no time took into consideration how you would feel, even though I have copious evidence that you don’t handle these things the way I do.” Yep, sure, sounds good.
People don’t have to have evil intentions to achieve mildly hurtful results, WTH— but it doesn’t make those results not hurtful, and it certainly doesn’t make them unpredictable.
3) I don’t even know how to respond to the PP who said SIL was “clueless, but the sentiment was right.” The sentiment that led her to attend the funeral was absolutely right! The sentiment involved in taking a photo of her own family, but especially sending it off to Shutterfly to get mounted and framed, and then presenting it to/in front of her grieving SIL… was not right.
And it’s not canceled out by her (laudable, or at least respectable) funeral attendance. “I threw you a birthday party at my expense! Then I got drunk and threw up on your presents. But the sentiment was right.” What. Even if it wasn’t that extreme or that proximate— “I came to your birthday party and brought a present! Then at the party, I met and later Facebook-stalked your coworker and made them really uncomfortable and now they’re avoiding you. But the sentiment was right.” Why does one excuse the other?
4) OP, based on the fact that you’ve just mended things with her over another “family feud” that has something to do with her “cluelessness,” I’d suggest cluelessness is not the word here. You haven’t given enough details, but there usually aren’t family feuds over even rude or ignorant behavior if it’s not also undergirded with narcissism or some other nonsense. It sounds like something else is going on here if she can’t take a gentle but fair criticism without throwing a massive, family-damaging tantrum, which is what I’m inferring.
5) I really don’t understand the point of Ms. Sweetie Honey Dear saying that OP only knew the photo was taken at her mother’s funeral because she saw it being taken or recognized the clothes or whatever. …yeah? So? What does that even mean? If she didn’t know it was taken at her mother’s funeral, she wouldn’t have a problem with it? Yes, that’s right. Because it wouldn’t have been at her mother’s funeral (or at least she wouldn’t have known it was). That’s just tautological.
It’s also true that OP was inevitably going to know, and it was intentionally handed out in front of her, so…? Ms. Sweetie, are you saying that the SIL probably didn’t realize OP would recognize the photo? If so, refer to point #1 about what SIL should have known.
If you’re just saying the only reason OP has a problem with this gift is that a photo of her mother’s funeral was presented joyfully by a person who treated that funeral and her mother as incidental at best, then yes, congratulations, you got the point. OP would not have been upset by the gift of a family photo taken at a cousin’s wedding instead, good job. And also probably wouldn’t have been upset if they’d had all surreptitiously changed clothes and taken the photo a block down the street from the funeral, at least if she didn’t think about it too much. So? What’s your point?
6) That’s the last bit, really, above. This was not a photo of a family taken at their own family’s funeral, intended to honor the deceased and include happy memories of her, shared in order to keep those memories alive. I gather it was an opportunistic photo shoot to which OP’s mother and OP’s grief was completely incidental. And I say opportunistic in a neutral sense.
But to make a show of gifting it to other people who didn’t have a major connection to OP’s mother— in front of OP? Just purely self-centered at best.
Phew.
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