After my dad died, we found the love letters

I obviously can't know what exactly you found, or how it might affect you or others, but with a few specific exceptions like knowledge of imminent harm to yourself or others, there isn't really something that's outside of the purview of what you can talk to a therapist about. You'd still need someone you feel you can trust with being open with your emotions with, and that's a difficult thing for a lot of people even without as giant secrets as you seem to be burdened with, but in a lot of ways when it comes to stuff like this, there isn't really therapy "for" specific things as much as just a general practice of how to deal with things that are tough emotionally in general. I'm not sure if your reference to previously believing in truth and facts being the best solution is intended to mean that therapy is something you would have considered in the past, or if it's conveying something closer to a "radial honesty" type approach, but if there's any chance you've ever considered talking a therapist before, I'd urge you to consider if it's really out of the question for what you're specifically going through. I'm of the firm opinion that pretty much everyone in the world likely would benefit from some amount of therapy, and a good therapist wouldn't just immediately insist on you revealing the intimate details of your pain to be able to start helping you through it (and it's possible that depending on specifically why you feel the way you do, it may not even be necessary for them to ever know them in order to help you learn to live with it in a way that's less painful).

The fault is here:

> my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small chinese port town. all four of my grandparents exerted enormous pressure to force them together.

You have an entire community that exerted enough social pressure to force two people together by fiat who clearly did not want to be together. Reading between the lines: a closeted gay male and a woman being excessively pressured to produce a child NOW before getting too old.

At that point, you've created such a highly aberrant social situation that you're guaranteed to get pathological behaviors.

After the community generated such a screwed up situation, it is difficult for me to assign much fault to the couple involved rather than see them both as unfortunate victims.

I may not approve, but I find it difficult to blame.

> So you use the societal pressure that forced you into your situation to keep her from leaving, stealing decades of her life that she could have potentially had with someone who would have made her happier: There is simply no excuse for this.

Why are you assuming that the social pressure that forced them together magically went away and assigning both agency and blame solely to the husband? Why is the community pressure somehow easier to deal with 10 years/15 years/20 years later? The fact that the wife could be browbeaten back into line shows that the community social pressure very much did not decrease or become easier to deal with over time.

It’s only in hindsight and it wasn’t just bigots. Safer sex as we know it today was directly from the AIDS scare.

AIDS was no less than a death sentence. It was incurable, untreatable, and the cancer after-effects were pretty nasty. Broad research and public transparency took a long time to take hold and that left regular people speculating for years.

Even medical doctors turned away suspected AIDs patients, because everyone was pretty scared.

For a bit, even as a kid I remember it being on par or scarier than nuclear war because so much was unknown.