My husband and I divorced after 36 years. At his funeral, his father, drunk, said, “You don’t even know what he did for you, do you?”

I spent weeks trying to reconstruct the truth.

There were financial decisions I hadn’t understood. There were professional opportunities he had apparently declined. There were family problems he had handled without telling me.

Some of the things I discovered were genuinely moving.

Others made me angry.

I found myself wishing he were still alive so I could ask him one simple question:

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

That question haunted me.

If he had explained his choices when he was alive, perhaps I would have understood him differently.

Perhaps our marriage would have changed.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have.

I’ll never know.

And that is one of the hardest things about losing someone after a complicated relationship: death closes the door on conversations that may have needed another twenty years.

I also began thinking about the meaning of our divorce.

For a long time, I had viewed it as the final judgment on our marriage.

We had failed.

That was how I thought about it.

But the funeral forced me to see our relationship differently.

Our marriage had not been one simple story.

It had contained love and disappointment.

Kindness and resentment.

Sacrifice and misunderstanding.

There were beautiful moments and painful ones.