If you really want to know the truth about the life of someone who has died, that falls within the realm of the journalist or historian, although of course, most people do not live the kind of lives which are important enough to merit the attention of a journalist or historian.  Otherwise, friends and family make their ritualistic memorial comments, which are traditionally favorable, no matter what character flaws the person in question may actually have had.

I observed an interesting example of this recently.  I had a cousin whom I will refer to as J, who was the most useless person living on the planet Earth, and who was particularly troublesome for her sister, whom I will call C.  I used to get almost daily phone calls from C complaining about the problems that J was causing her, for a period of several years.  Last year J finally died, to the vast relief of everyone who knew her, and who but her sister C should deliver the eulogy, which as it turns out was filled with warm and glowing praise for her departed sister, about whom she never had a good word to say while she was alive.  All of this I find rather strange - but then, as previously noted, I am from the planet Vulcan and many human customs strike me as strange and illogical.

Surprised nobody's mentioned this famous zing-filled and justifiably nasty obit.

Some choice quotes:

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."

"I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum."

"Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together."

"It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise."

"He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand."

Far more imaginative and bile-drenched than the family of Delores Aguilar; so many words expended, almost as if he cared...

As far back as Shakespeare's time (Marc Anthony's 'friends romans countrymen' speech) and perhaps even before, people have been using the death of others as a soapbox to 'speak truth'.

Orson Scott Card, that hate filled mormon and writer of sci-fi classic Ender's game, touched on this with other novels like Speaker for the Dead and Songmaster. It is indeed a good policy to not speak ill of the dead, but my view is its even more important to speak the truth as you know it. Whats the point of remembering someone who never existed? Delores Aguilar seemed to have been an awful person -- would saying otherwise have changed her life? If funerals are for the living rather than for the dead (as the dead care not), then whatever makes the living feel better is the way to go.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

this long, rambling, mean-spirited remembrance of the writer Thomas Disch

I don't know, that obit didn't really seem mean-spirited to me, just a lamentation of regrets. You know, an honest appraisal is better than sugar-coating, to my mind.

----- The earth may burn, but we will quiver

     Like all forms of writing, obituaries have formal considerations, both in the strict sense (ie stay on topic, mention what they did, and so on), and the cultural sense (remembrances are for those surviving, and the content should consider this.) Aguilar's obit doesn't break any linguistic rules, but it sure as hell breaks some cultural ones. Where are the lines? Are they worth crossing once in a while?
     To follow up on my title, restraint in obituaries comes from a recognition, a kind of Golden Rule, that we're all going to die one day, and that after we're gone it would be better if only the good part of our lives was discussed. ("An author is judged by his worst works when alive, his best works after death".) Breaking this trust is not quite so bad as stealing, but it's still a breach. There's also the question of outright falsehoods, or self-deception by the speaker ("that wasn't the way I remember childhood!"), which are curbed somewhat by asking only for praise-- a certain amount of error on this front is considered acceptable, at least. No, it's not ideal, but it's where American society, at least, has set the lines.
    Was what Aguilar did horribly offensive? Well, speaking strictly for myself-- no. An occasional breach of the rules is a good reminder that they're there, and a reason to ponder why the paradigm is what it is. There seems little danger that this will become a widespread change, and cause my family to speak ill of me should I get hit and killed by a car tomorrow. And it's also a good reminder that many of the folks you meet every day are shouldering burdens even worse than yours-- and that's a lesson I can get behind every time.

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras