Was is the history between Ryan and his deceased father, and was he abusive with him??
This is always a touchy subject & I’m only going to state facts and quote interviews here, because we actually don’t know that much about Ryan’s relationship with his father, apart from the fact that it has always been strained.
His father was an ex-Marine and worked hard to put him in Catholic school, even though Ryan has always been an atheist. He also thought it was stupid of Ryan to throw his scholarship away.
I don’t think Ryan’s father had a problem with alcohol until Ryan’s late teens, actually.
Here’s an excerpt from a Rolling Stone interview from february 2007
“He was pretty much dead set on me going to college and I got a scholarship,” he says quietly. “He thought I was stupid for throwing that away. His problems with alcohol magnified and skewed things even further. I was not staying at home for weeks at a time. I was staying with my girlfriend, staying with the other guys in the band. There were times when I almost had to sleep at our rehearsal space, ‘cause I didn’t have anywhere to go. Obviously I loved him and I cared about him, but when you’re getting kind of abused by that person, at the same time it’s really hard to try to help them.”
“The day of his funeral, it was raining and… it was strange to be raining that time of year. After the service, I went back and put my hand on the casket and kind of said goodbye. Right then, it stopped raining. The clouds blew away, and the sun came out, and it got warm. I spoke at the funeral and said that I think the one thing my dad cared about since I was born was that he wanted to raise me. I think he felt like he was done with that and had nothing else to do, so he just let go and stopped living. It’s almost like it’s better this way because it’s what he wanted. I miss him, but I feel like everything’s all right now. It was sad, but I got back out on tour and only missed three shows.”
I don’t know whether he was ever physically abused, and it’s not really our place to make up hypotheses about it, either. So I give you facts, facts only.
