I got a letter from a family member, talking about happy memories of my father, mother and sister, who are all dead. How much fun they were and my mother’s influence taking them to museums, art museums and the Smithsonian.

It’s a bit difficult to answer, since my memories are much more complicated and tangled.

I wrote a poem called Butterfly Girl Comes to Visit a long time ago. It is about my sister. My mother could charm a room full of people and enthrall them with stories. Sometimes the stories were about me and my sister and actually making fun of our feelings: fear or grief. However, my mother was so good with an audience that I didn’t break the stories down until after she died. She was 61. That involved exploring a lot of really dark feelings. My sister and I even asked my father what our mother was really like: his reply was “Morose”.

I inherited my mother’s journals. My sister told me not to read them because they were “too depressing”. I don’t agree. They explain some things. My parents often fought, screaming at each other at 2 am while I was in high school. The family story was that my father was an alcoholic. As an adult, I wondered why she would fight with someone who was drunk. Her journal says “I drank too much last night,” over and over. Well, that would explain it, right? It takes two to tango. Or fight.

My sister could also charm a room. That is the sparkle in the Butterfly Girl poem. There was a period where she would tell me that I couldn’t talk about certain things, that she was fragile, that I was hurting her. This is after I gained control my feelings and had actual boundaries: I could refuse to fight with her. Before that, she could set me off like dry tinder. Her first husband called me once, saying, “I can’t not fight with her when she wants to fight. What do I do?” I replied, “I can’t either. I don’t know. I am so sorry!” I think it took until I was in my early 30s to refuse to fight with her and took a lot of conscious work. A fiance that broke up with me right after college told me I was an ogre when I was angry. I took that seriously and worked on it. My parents were not good role models for dealing with anger or grief or fear.

I am not much in contact with my maternal family. One person said that we could be in contact if we only said nice things about my mother, father and sister. I suggested we never mention them at all. We did not reach an agreement. I realize that our society wants to speak well of the dead, but to really be someone’s true friend, I think we have to accept that people may be angry at the dead as well. I gave this handout, Mourner’s Rights, to a patient on Friday. He is in the midst of grief and we talked about it. He thanked me and said, “I am grateful to talk to someone who knows about grief.”

My parents moved to Washington State in 1996. My mother was diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer in 1997. I moved to be near them when her cancer recurred, arriving on Y2K. My mother died on May 15, 2000, four and a half months after we arrived.

My mother was only in that area of Washington for four years. She made such a charming impression that I had people tell me how wonderful and charming she was for a full decade. I was working though the complex feelings about her and tried very hard to thank people, even though I did not feel thankful.

I have not answered the letter yet. I want to return a gentle replay but I will not play the “only happy memories game”. I don’t mind my dark feelings. The family member would mind my dark feelings, I think. It is nice to be a physician and to be allowed to let patients talk about their dark feelings. Our culture wants to deny them, remove them, be positive. That is a disservice to love and to grief.

People are astoundingly complicated.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: astound.

The photograph is of my friend Maline, me, and two of her husband’s family members. Maline was one of my alternate mothers, a friend of my parents. She died within the last few years.