30 Chilling Truths Hidden In Plain Sight That Only Got Exposed After Death

After my grandmother died, I learnt that the bar she owned when she was younger was more like a w***ehouse. Also, she was almost sent to prison for another reason.
I learnt so much this year that I now call this part of my family "the bloody news family".

My grandfather, who we called Opa, was a carpenter his entire life; built half the houses in my hometown, and loved to give them away AT COST to young couples getting a start in life. when my grandmother passed, Opa began building his own coffin, and it was beautiful. he asked my mom to put in nice red satin upholstery, and when it was finished, he stood it up at his 90th birthday party and asked us all to pose with him in it.

we'd always known that he'd served in WWII, but like many men he never talked about it. we learned after his passing that he'd signed up when circumcision was still required, and he volunteered for the procedure so he could go fight. once enlisted, they put his carpentry skills to use building bridges, but for the most part he spent his time making coffins, to send boys home.

Uncle died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. So it came out that he was into auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Not necessarily disturbing, but my grandfather knew he had cancer six months before he passed away. Even when his health declined rapidly the last two weeks, he never said anything about it. I kind of knew that was going on. He's to stubborn to let his family take care of him or be bedridden.

My great grandmother was most likely a lesbian and a cleptomaniac.

The most shocking to me was my grandfather who was all about the Marines. Everything was about the Marine Corps. I always thought that he was a long term Marine and had fought in WWII. Turns out he was in for less than a year and did maintenance on docked ships. My (gay) partner that was kicked out for being gay served a lot longer. My family makes fun of the fact that he (my partner) was ever in the Marines, but still act like my grandfather single handedly won the war. He was buried with full military honors.

My great-grandfather had another family that wasn't revealed until after he passed in his late 90s. He lived til I was in my mid-twenties and not once would I have ever suspected it. He was present at every family party, took me for haircuts once a month, I cut their lawn every week. It turned out my great-grandmother knew but hid it from everyone in the family. She actually knew his other kids and families. She told my dad while in Hospice. The real kicker was when doing a family tree on one of those sites, it kept suggesting a public family tree I did not recognize. Turns out it was his other family.

For years we blamed my cousin's wife for ordering a hit on him because he was cheating on her (this is all within bounds for that side of the family, which is shady as f**k on a good day). My cousin was found with a headshot wound inflicted by his driver's firearm. Turns out he'd committed s**cide because he owed a lot of bad people money; we only found out because said bad people eventually came for his kids' money a few years later. S**t was f****d.

Not necessarily disturbing, but surprising. My dad did one of those genealogy DNA things and found out that my grandfather was not actually his father. It appears that both my grandparents had multiple affairs and my father was the product of one. They stayed married to each other for more than 50 years though.

My dad passed away a year ago from a heart attack, upon trying to set all his paperwork straight, I found out he had been spending around $600-1000 a month in slot machines at the hotel in the next town over(he was taking out money at the hotel ATM). Not sure how much of that he got back, if any. It had been going on for at least 2 years according to my uncle.

I never knew he had a gambling problem, didn't see him often enough to notice. :( He also was retired and didn't cash out that much from his retirement.

My grandfather in law (who has the same name as my father in law) had another secret family. He saw them every weekend when he was "golfing". Apparently he kept in touch with them for most of their lives until he had a stroke and couldn't. A year after he died, one of his daughters contacted my father in law thinking he was the same man. That's when we found out. Never told his mother the truth though, although we don't know how she wouldn't know.