I am careful about sanitising language simply because it has been overused elsewhere. A word is not automatically commercial because it is common. Sometimes it is chosen for its abrasion and impatience. It lodges to the rawness that a gentler synonym would have polished away.

Strong feeling does not always adorn polite church clothes.

I am not attached to profanity for effect. I am attached to accuracy. If the emotional register of the moment was jagged, then the language must risk being jagged too. Otherwise the piece is polite instead of honest.

That said, I respect your sensitivity to tone. These are aesthetic decisions and reasonable people can disagree on where intensity tips into excess but for that memory, softness would have lied.