When people die, suddenly everyone likes them and is comfortable with them, no matter how uncomfortable they were to live with. My mother (according to everyone who came into contact with her) was a wonderful person, for instance, both brilliant and heroic, and her kindnesses were legendary. My husband, whom I adored, was (I hear) both honest and wise, and his friends and acquaintances universally remember him with both affection and reverence.

My mother forced herself to be outgoing and ambitious. She got married to difficult men who didn’t treat her well. In mid-life, she got religion and became an Episcopal priest. (Episcopalians just don’t do that kind of thing. It’s embarrassing.) She was a intellectual yet emotional person who wrestled with her demons and was there for everyone who needed her, including me, though I had to take care of her in her dreadful last years when Parkinson’s took away all of her strength and her clarity, despite her immense willpower.

People told me, when she died, that my mother was a wonderful person. Well, she was. I loved her very much.

But God, she was tough to take.

My husband was a skinny, hungry, angry, sweet man who was abused and neglected as a child and who sought out affection wherever he could find it. He never apologized for anything if he could help it. He was an unkind gossip, and talked about his enemies and his friends behind their back. He hated the fact that he inspired people, and often told me bitterly how tired he was of people thanking him with tears in their eyes.

People quote him to me, even today three years (Thursday) after his death. I appreciate the gesture. But the only person I can really talk to about him is our kid. We mock him in death as we did in life, and agree that he was a terrible man. I visit his grave every month and catch him up on everything, even though I know he’s dead. Sometimes I say out loud in my nice empty house, “I miss my boy,” and my eyes fill up with tears. I tell him out loud that he’s an asshole, too, because it would make him laugh. He knew he was an asshole.

My friend Mary and I were talking about our loud, difficult husbands. They were both angry and outspoken, and they are both dead. “It’s hard to believe he’s dead. He was so incredibly alive,” I said, and she said, “Exactly.”

I will speak ill of any old dead person, honestly. They should be remembered just as they are.

This is all to say that I have been getting fundraisers lately for a public person who recently died, describing a wretched excuse for a man as if he was a virtuous innocent who died for our sins. I would like to state for the record that, though he may have been sweet to his family, he was a horrid person who spread hate and violence, and who poisoned the public well. I will happily speak ill of the dead, especially in his case. They deserve that much from us.