I have been trying to process this for days and it's still driving me mad. Maybe this will be a good place to get it out. My mum died in October. She was with my dad for 50 years. She was a truly wonderful person. Didn't suffer fools but was so kind and patient and just great. Many times through my life I thought she should have left my dad. He was at times emotionally abusive, though he was also very loving a lot of the time and loved my mum a lot.
My dad is a complicated and difficult person. I've had countless arguments with him throughout my life and he is responsible for a lot of the unhappiness I've experienced in my life. But again, he can also be fun, loving and supportive. He had a crap childhood but has no insight into how that affects him.
Anyway since mum died my siblings and I have rallied around him. He's barely been left alone. I've taken less responsibility for spending time with him than my 2 brothers as they have less fraught relationships with him but I hosted Christmas. Usually mum and dad would host. So I did it, at great effort, to try to make everyone happy, especially my dad. In doing this I fucked up and let my husband down. He's ND, burnt out from working too much and was never going to cope with so many visitors and people in our house. Also my dad swapped his staying arrangements with a brother without telling me, done with good motives but it meant he was in my spare room for 5 nights. I've not spent 5 nights in the same house as him since I left home 25 years ago.
basically my dad developed a problem with DH. DH didn't do anything apart from be ND and detached from the group. But dad doesn't get ND and there must have been some other stuff going on in his motivation too. He was angry with my DH and picking at him about something. Maybe money (he brought up my will a day or so earlier) or maybe as my DH thinks it's jealousy that he has his wife (me) and my dad lost his. It resulted in my DH leaving the house for 2 days and not saying goodbye to dad. Dad feeling remorseful but incapable of apologising. I don't want DH to have to spend time with someone who makes him feel bad but I also want him to be the bigger man and put it past him. And underneath all of this is a crushing sadness and shame and responsibility for my dad being so lost and miserable. He's a sad, lonely, grieving old man. He's out of his depth in the world without mum. I have been trying for days to work out why I feel responsible for my dad's feelings. I don't understand it. But it's triggering so much for me. Related to childhood, my emotionally abusive previous marriage, and my own grief. I don't know how to resolve this or how to stop feeling so desperately sad and crushed about my dad's sad face. One sibling is going to stay with him tomorrow for 2 weeks so I will have a reprieve from the guilt I feel about him being by himself. But after that I don't know. And my Dh doesn't want to see him, which I know is fair, but also feels like he's not supporting me when I need him. I feel so dreadful about all of it.
I don't really expect any answers from anyone. Thank you for reading if you have. I just need to process what I'm feeling and I hope that by writing it out I might make some sense of it.