Photo Credit: Eminem/Instagram
This isn’t going to be an easy day for Eminem as his father, Marshall Bruce Mathers, just passed away at 67 near Fort Wayne, Indiana. While losing one’s parents is never an easy thing, it especially won’t be for a man who never met his father. Eminem is a few years away from being 50 and yet he’s never met his father, even after several attempts to do so. He wrote him letters as a child that came back as Return to Sender all the time. His father would call to speak to other relatives but not Eminem. This might be the fact that he married so young. He was 22 when he married Eminem’s mother, who was 15 at the time.
Some of Eminem’s best work was about the grudge he had against his father in songs such as My Name Is and Cleanin’ Out My Closet. The latter quoted Em as saying, “My fa**ot father must’ve had his panties up in a bunch ‘Cause he split, I wonder if he even kissed me goodbye. No, I don’t, on second thought, I just f**kin’ wished he would die. I look at Hailie, and I couldn’t picture leavin’ her side.”
In 2001, his dad told Mirror, “I desperately want to meet my son and tell him that I love him. I’m not interested in his money. I just want to talk to him. I want him to know that I’m here for him if he lets me back into his life.” Around that same time, Eminem said, “I don’t know anything about my dad and I don’t care.” His father said it was his mother that was keeping them away from each other, but Eminem wasn’t no part in hearing that or wanting anything to do with him.
The problem with Eminem’s mindset about his father is that once they’re gone, that’s it and now he’ll never have a chance to repair the relationship with his dad. If there’s anything to learn from this, it is that while our parents are on this Earth, we shouldn’t try and freeze them out of our lives with the assumption that you’ll be able to correct things later because that later may never come.
