I attended a memorial service for a friend’s dad this weekend. I was there for her, as the only things I knew about her dad were from our adolescence, some 20 plus years ago. I really appreciated her remembrances. So many people say just the good things. It’s like they’re making up a person that never existed, or one they wish had existed. My friend talked about some joys from her childhood and the heartbreak of her adolescence — not in detail, but in general description. She talked about taking the earliest opportunity to move away and the subsequent years of anger. She spoke of the realization that even as her father wasn’t the kind of father she wanted him to be, she probably wasn’t the daughter he wanted her to be, either. And then she talked about the healing and mending of the broken places within her. I so appreciate and value her courage to say her truth. Her honesty. Setting it all out there. Remembering him as he was to her. And I’m grateful she found healing towards the end.