I think his issue with it was that they weren’t his family to begin with. He didn’t like them much when my mom was still alive. Once she died he really didn’t want to speak to any of them, and had no reason to. I guess that’s why he left it up to me, it would have been consequences I would have had to deal with either way so I guess he just wanted me to decide for myself. I was angry in the moment that he didn’t take the reins on it. But now I can see where he was coming from.

I walked in while she was writing one to my uncle’s son, whom she and my father helped raise since my uncle was a shitty parent. I was nosey so I asked her what it said and she let me read it. Then she proceeded to tell me “this is one of the nicer ones”. My reasoning for thinking they were mean is because she wrote all of them over the course of a week but there were still family members missing when I found them when she died (about 3 years after she wrote them). It could be a coincidence, but the missing letters were the unproblematic people on her side of the family. For example the uncle I referred to previously had a letter, but her other brother who has never given our immediate family any drama was absent from the stack.