When my father died, there was a box of letters in the materials sent home from his office. I read the letters first, and discovered that my father had been having an affair for almost twenty years. He’d never left my mom and I had to figure out whether I should let my mother see them. I decided that if she found out, it might hurt her really badly. She was doing badly enough with his death. So I took the letters and burned them.
Sometimes I wished I hadn’t done that. It made it impossible for me to ever tell my mother. I mean, how could I admit that I had taken these letters and burned them? How could I tell her what was really in them and have her expect to believe me? And without telling her, how could I have asked her about it?
So we never did talk about it, and I’ll never know if she noticed the difference. She was very sad after my father died, and only lived a few more years, and never seemed to improve in her mood. Or maybe she was starting to recover, but her death was unexpected, to say the least, so we’ll never know what would have happened. Shoulda coulda woulda.