The latest This American Life, Birds and Bees, features a bit about the Sharing Place — a center in Salt Lake City where kids who have lost loved ones go to, well, process the trauma of that. How do you even talk to yourself about loss and grief, let alone a little kid who can barely dress themselves, who barely comprehend the fact that they Are? The center encourages honesty between parents and their kids. Instead of ‘Daddy went away,’ they get the truth, whatever that terrible truth is. Daddy shot himself in the head. Daddy no longer wanted to Be. This sounds like a horrific thing to tell a kid — but isn’t avoiding the full truth going to damage the kid even more? It made me think globally about truth and my own relationship to it.  I once wrote in a play somewhere, ‘the only thing more nauseating than lying is honesty.’ I am finally getting it. It took me nearly 33 years. It doesn’t matter how terrible the truth is, how bad it makes you look, how awful the words sound, how you can never unsay them. You must say them. After that terrible moment, there is release, and then there is progress.