My mom never sugarcoated anything. She believed the truth—plain, sharp, and unwrapped—was kinder than lies that rotted slowly. When my dad passed away in a hospital room when I was twelve, she sat me and my younger brother at the kitchen table, folded her hands, and said, “Your father was a good dad. But he was a terrible husband.” That was it. No dramatic pauses. No villain speeches. Just that single sentence, heavy but solid, something she had carried alone for a long time. She did not let us go to the funeral. When we asked why, she knelt to our eye level and said she wanted our last memory of him to be the man who built birdhouses in the backyard and let us hammer crooked nails while he smiled as if it were the most important job in the world. She did not want us remembering a box in the ground.

After that, life moved forward unevenly. My mom worked more and laughed less. She never spoke badly about my dad, yet she never softened the truth either. He had loved us fiercely. He had failed her quietly and repeatedly. Both things could exist at once, she said. Growing up I carried a split loyalty I did not know how to name. I loved the dad who taught me to ride a bike and showed up to school plays even when exhausted. But every time I missed him, a flicker of guilt followed. Was I betraying my mom by loving him? We never visited his grave. Years passed. I told myself remembering him at home was enough. The truth was simpler and uglier: I was afraid of what I might find there—bitterness in myself or carved into stone.