How much privacy are we owed in death?

I was 34 when my mother died the year the Soviet Union was unraveling. I was 63 when my father died as the world entered a pre-vaccine pandemic. My parents met in Yonkers, New York, in 1943, as teenagers, and married in 1952. My sister and I were born roughly four years later, she in January and me in December of the same year.

We weren’t a family that shared a great deal emotionally — not a lot of hugging. Any sense of “I love you” went unspoken. My memory of my parents was in my role as their son. I rarely if ever thought of them as the teenagers they once were, or as people who had lived lives of their own before I or my sister came along.

All that changed a few days ago after a box arrived from my brother-in-law full of files and papers that had been in my sister’s desk when she died three years ago, shortly after my father had died.

Most of the papers were inconsequential: old checkbooks, random receipts my father had kept for items that must have been important to him.

Some items were more meaningful: the crumbling wedding ketubah for my mother’s parents, my father’s transcript from a technical high school he had been sent to as a foster child.

But perhaps most meaningful was a shoe box of handwritten letters neatly folded in envelopes that my father had written to my mother after he went off to college. Another collection of letters composed after I was born, when my father worked abroad while we remained in the United States, were written on lightweight airmail stationery.

Those two periods — when my father went off to college and later when he went abroad to work — were the only time my parents were separated for extended periods. Each time, he wrote faithfully.

I had no knowledge of the letters until a few days ago. When I saw them and read through the first one, the pangs of separation and a few lines of poetry made clear what they were.

I was reminded of a recent article and then book based on found letters and documents of someone’s relative who had regularly given anonymous gifts of money to those in need in his community. That the man wanted his gifts to be anonymous was clear. It always sat uneasy with me that the man’s desire for anonymity was not honored. That the relative in receipt of the anonymous benefactor’s documents chose to tell his story and identify him was clearly the relative’s choice.

I have not yet read beyond the first of my father’s letters to my mother. If my father were still alive, I would ask him about some of the details. The inability to do so adds to the grief I still find myself with three years after his death.

But I have come around to believing that the relative who outed the generous relative’s largesse did the right thing. The documents had been left to him presumably with the judgment to trust him to do what he believed was best with them.

My father never destroyed his letters, and now it is up to me to decide, after I read more of them, how widely to share their contents. I am hopeful that I too will do the right thing.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

 

When readers share wisdom or kindness, I listen

In February, I received an email from M.F., a reader who lives in Mission Viejo, California. The subject line of the email was simply: “How are you?”

M.F. reminded me that he had written me 17 years ago after reading the column when it appeared in the Orange County Register. It seemed clear from his email that M.F. thought I worked for the Orange County Register at the time, which I never did. It was one of the newspapers that ran the column. Back then, I used the full names of readers who had written me, but a long time ago began using their initials or pseudonyms to help protect their identities since articles tend to have a long shelf life online.

“You were kind enough to mention my comments about your ethics column in a subsequent follow-up,” he wrote. Apparently, M.F. had been doing his regular search of his name on the internet “to make sure incorrect information doesn’t appear,” and our interaction came up in the results.

“I remember your kindness,” he wrote, and he then visited my website to see what I was up to. “I was happy to see that you are still writing.” M.F. closed by writing that he hoped his email finds me happy and healthy and that I “continue to do well.”

Many things have changed over the past 17 years. Back then, the column was syndicated by a different company. I was five years away from accepting an offer to teach at the university from which I’m about to retire. The character of Ted Lasso hadn’t been revealed to the world yet.

Doing some internet searching of my own, I discovered M.F. had written me about a column I wrote finding nothing wrong with people picking up recyclable cans from others’ town-issued recycling bins. He pointed out that such acts can divert funding from a municipality’s recycling efforts. M.F. made a valid point and I amended my advice to suggest that if a resident wanted to give their recyclable cans to someone other than the town, they should consider doing so directly rather than placing them in the receptacle issued by their town.

That original column on recycling to which M.F. responded remains the second most-viewed column on the website where I have posted columns after they have had their run since January 2006.

I mention M.F.’s February email not because of anything to do with recycling, however, but instead because he took the time to acknowledge my kindness for running his response. Such actions might appear small, but they can have an outsized impact. That readers like M.F. care enough to take the time to write even when they have no particular question or gripe sparks joy.

I ended the column where M.F.’s response was featured by acknowledging that I trusted I could count on M.F. and other readers “to do the right thing by continuing to share their wisdom with me.” Even 17 years later, that sentiment holds true.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

(c) 2023 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.