To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

While someone is alive, what you say about them can wound them, so restraint is a kindness you owe. Once they are gone that reason falls away, and what remains owed is an accurate account. Sanding a person down into a saint is its own kind of forgetting, because the version you keep is no longer the one you knew.

If you are carrying a memory you have been quietly editing, try holding both halves of it at once. You are allowed to love someone and to be honest about them, and doing both is usually the truer form of remembering.