EXOD856 Said the school of Hillel to the school of Shammai: If someone makes a peculiar acquisition in the market, should one praise or deprecate it? Surely one should praise it. Based on this the sages taught: One should always try to be pleasant with people" (Ket. 17a). So too "If sexual relations with your wife make you late to the synagogue and people ask why you were delayed, ascribe it to something else" (Bava Batra 23b). The twentieth-century rav, Eliyahu Dessler, concurred: "Sometimes it may be wrong to 'tell the truth' about our neighbor... and sometimes it may be necessary to change details, when the plain truth would injure" (Mikhtav MeEliyahu). When Francie's late mother-in-law suspected that she had a life-threatening illness, she trusted her family to lie to her rather than scare her with the doctor's grim prognosis. Not telling her the medical "truth" about her condition was not totally honest, yet it supported a worry-free atmosphere that assuredly extended her life. There are other times when you must respect a loved one's final wishes and not betray a trust, though every fiber of your being wants you to do so. Francie's mother, the only person in her immediate family to survive the Holocaust, wanted to be cremated as they had been. She also asked that her ashes be scattered, so that no cemetery headstone would mark her earthly remains. She trusted her husband and daughters to carry out these difficult tasks, even though this would hurt them and was contrary to traditional Jewish law. Fulfilling that trust more than twenty years ago was perhaps the hardest task Francie ever faced.