Dear Queenie,
My mother died a few months ago and while we were clearing out her things my Dad found some letters she had saved from when she was a girl, before she ever met him. They were from a boy she dated in high school.
Now all Dad can talk about is how Mom was unfaithful to him in her heart by keeping the letters. He says if she had really loved him she wouldn’t have kept the letters to remember someone else.
Queenie, I don’t know what to say to him. Help!—Daughter in mourning
Dear Daughter in mourning,
Your father is also in mourning and is not thinking entirely rationally. He is probably also angry at your mother for “leaving” him, a normal stage of the grief process, and because he knows she didn’t leave him voluntarily, he is using the letters as an excuse for his anger.
Tell him it is normal for women to keep mementoes of happy times in their youth. It was probably not the boy she remembered, but her young days and the feeling of first love. Tell him also that she probably had forgotten she had the letters, and if she had forgotten them, she had also forgotten the boy who wrote them.
