Sorry this is long, I've never told anyone the whole story. You don't have to read it or respond, I just really need to get this off my chest tonight.
To give some background: my dad has always been an aggressive nasty man who used to beat my mum and siblings black and blue when he was younger. He has been drinking for the last ten years, currently it's about a bottle of vodka/rum a night. My mum died almost three years ago from terminal cancer and he was horrible throughout her illness, drinking and being abusive to her, not getting up til 8pm, threatening her, being aggressive towards the dog until mum would have to get out of bed and come downstairs to "rescue" her, and dad would draw mum into a row etc- Basically he's just a complete hateful bastard.
She was the most special person and wonderful mother you could hope to meet, and the hub of our family. So of course after she died he got even more self pitying, and while the rest of us have picked ourselves up and moved on in the three years since, he just sits and broods and does absolutely NOTHING from one week to the next. Nothing at all, just sits and watches TV, drinks and phones people to moan about his shitty life.
His house is like something from How Clean Is Your House, it stinks and he has no self respect, wears dirty clothes, doesn't wash or shave very often and soils himself. (Needless to say we never go to his house because we have a young baby and it's incredibly unhygenic)
He causes trouble in the neighbourhood, staring out local youths and shouting threats at them if they happen to stop to talk outside his house or drop litter, until they egg his house, smash up his car or throw things at him from passing cars like a drive-by. He leaves the eggs on his house year round so passersby will ask what has happened and he'll get the sympathy vote.
Wherever we've lived in the last ten years the local kids have called him "paedophile" because he has to be over friendly with the local little girls. He'll happily chat to them for hours outside his house. I don't believe anything untoward has gone on but he doesn't seem to be able to stop himself from speaking to them, no matter how many times he's been called a paedophile for doing so.
Sometimes I wonder about his attentions on me in my own childhood. I have vague memories of things which I'm not sure are real or imagined. I don't really want to try and remember, the thought of what I might find scares me.
In the past he was overfriendly with my niece, asking her inappropriate questions about her own father simply because she said she had seen her dad naked, and because he disliked the guy for having an education. He put two and two together and decided she was being sexually abused (she wasn't) so kept on drawing her and her toddler brother into the back room and questioning them about what their dad had "done" to them. He didn't tell anyone what he was doing -not even his own wife- until one night he drove over to their fathers house drunk and tried to fight him.
The impact of this blew the family apart for a while, then after a couple of years when things had finally calmed down, there was another incident where he was alone with the children and my nieces little brother came in and told us "Ugh, Grandad just kissed my sister's boob" (niece was about 11 at this point) which caused obviously LOTS more uproar. He isn't to be trusted on any level.
So anyway, there's this whole horrid history, but even after all that, things eventually calmed down again. My sister and I were caring for my mother for two long drawn out painful years with dad being a pita at every opportunity. So when she died, because dad let the house and himself deteriorate, and didn't get up til 8pm, my sister quite rightly said she wouldn't be bringing the kids over to his house but he was welcome to come over anytime he wanted to see them. (FAR more than he deserved after his behaviour)
Of course he took this to mean "I hate you, I'm taking my kids away from you" So he fell out with her and hasn't spoken to her since. But at every opportunity he bangs on about it to me and it makes me extremely uncomfortable. He's literally obsessed with it, it's very creepy. He replays it all in his head but his own twisted version to make it look like my lovely generous reasonable sister is evil. (She's a wonderful person, a healer)
He tells me he thinks about it constantly and he's always thinking up sly reasons to question me as to what she's doing and what her kids are doing, brooding about it all and manipulating me into telling me things about her.
Recently we were all going to a family bash which he was invited to, but he said he wasn't going and then he tailed my sisters car all the way to the event, and when he got there, he snubbed my sister and beckoned her kids into a corner to speak to them. It was his big chance to repair things and he did nothing, but he's constantly whining to me that she's keeping him away from his grandchildren, and he's deeply hurt. SHE HASN'T DONE ANYTHING!!! and actually I think it's a very good thing he doesn't regularly see those children as he acts like such a fucking weirdo around them.
Anyway, sorry this is so so so long. I'm getting to the main issue here- As I said I've just had my first baby, and as I have my own little family now I've invited my dad round for christmas dinner, but despite coming round once a week for his dinner and getting one or two calls a week from me, it's never enough, and he's just called me drunk and depressed the shit out of me, telling me he has nothing to live for, nothing to get up for, that he just lives in one stone cold room and never has hot meals, and he's so desperately sad about "not being allowed to see his grandchildren" (despite the fact that, as she does every year, my sister has sent him a christmas card and an open invite to see them) and went into this massive rant about it. I tried to get him off the subject but he just said "it's alright for you, you've got a partner and a baby, I've got no-one and nothing"
I want to scream at him that he had my mother for nearly 40 years and beat her black and blue and terrorised his kids, but I'm too scared of him to answer him back (before anyone asks, I'm 26) He acts like he's the only one who lost mum. He can get a new wife, I can never get a new mother, ffs. I'm so angry that he's making me feel guilty for having a little bit of happiness after all the shit in my life so far.
I have so much guilt about my dad living alone in that big cold empty house, and his drinking worries me so much as I know one day I'll be the one to break into his house and find him dead on the floor. He tells me he has nothing to live for, and that he "probably has lung cancer" etc to get attention and sympathy. He loves it when I go away from a phonecall sad and feeling guilty for having a nicer life than him (not saying much, we're on the breadline and can't even afford a christmas tree)
Bless you if any of you have read this far, it's a grim story and it weighs heavy on my shoulders. There's no way out of my situation as I'm very very soft, and empathic to a fault, I'd feel too guilty to freeze him out of my life as he only has us and my brothers, but nothing is ever enough and I'm tired of his manipulation and using me to offload his depression onto.
Bless you if any of you have read this far, it's a grim story and it weighs heavy on my shoulders. I'm so down already, he makes me feel so bad I can't stop crying, can't cope with the weight of the sadness. And now my sister is off on holiday for two weeks, so my support is gone and I feel so scared and bereft.