Why does Eddie mentally curse his father for dying?

Carrying the Weight of a Father’s Legacy

Eddie never voiced it to his wife, nor to his mother, but deep down, he cursed his father for dying too soon—for leaving him alone in a life he’d always tried to outrun. It wasn’t just grief that haunted him; it was the bitter irony of inheritance. The very world he’d spent years resisting—the routines, the expectations, the quiet resignation—was now his, not by choice, but by absence. His father’s death didn’t bring closure. It brought responsibility.

There was a cruel echo in the silence left behind. Eddie could almost hear the old man laughing from the grave, a dry, knowing chuckle that seemed to say, “Now you’re good enough for me.” The words stung, not because they were spoken, but because they’d never needed to be. Eddie had spent his youth measuring himself against a man he didn’t understand, only to realize too late that the judgment had been internal all along. His father’s approval, once desperately sought, now felt like a trap sprung after the fact.

What made it worse was the realization that he was becoming him—walking the same streets, speaking in the same tone, carrying the same quiet burdens. The escape he’d imagined had been an illusion. Death hadn’t freed Eddie; it had tethered him more tightly to the past. And in that tethering, he found not peace, but a strange, reluctant kinship.

He didn’t hate his father. He resented the silence between them—the things unsaid, the forgiveness unoffered, the connection forged only in absence. Cursing him wasn’t about anger. It was about grief wearing the mask of rage, about loving someone too much to ever admit you needed them while they were still alive.