Note: I wrote the original version of this essay for a “Women Rowing North” guided autobiography group in which I participate.

Bill was a short, freckled, auburn-haired, handsome-ish man blessed with the gift of gab. A charmer.

Despite having only an eighth-grade education and no interest in reading, his friends included doctors, shop owners, and even a NASA rocket engineer.

Bill was the youngest of five children. When he was ten, his father died after a gas explosion in the basement collapsed the house. His mother found a large house near the docks where she could take in boarders to support her family.

Three years later, Bill fell behind in school after his brother shot him in the left eye with a BB gun. He suffered complete blindness for nearly a year (“sympathetic blindness”). As his left eye healed, sight returned to his right. The left eye recovered only peripheral vision.

His return to school was a struggle and he soon dropped out.

At 16, he left home because he said that, “The house was too crowded.” He took odd jobs until he landed one as a long-distance truck driver.

He joined the army during the Korean war but while in basic training, the army discovered his imperfect eyesight. He peeled potatoes until his discharge processed through the system.

Then his mother arranged for him to marry a Canadian woman named Mary, a marriage that didn’t last.

At 30, a neighbor introduced him to June, a single mother working as a sales clerk, living with her 14-year-old son, Randy, and a soon-to-be-married 17-year-old daughter, Louise.

Months later, Bill and another of June’s beaus proposed. June asked Randy which fellow she should wed. He chose Bill.

That is how my younger sister Edie and I came to be.

Bill, the charmer. Bill, the father. Bill, the pedophile.

He sexually abused me between the ages of 8-10. He started abusing Edie when she was six. He never stopped. After the physical abuse ended, he continued his verbal assaults until the end of his days.

I’m sometimes asked if I’ve forgiven Bill. No. No, I have not and I never will.

If those words sound bitter and angry, you’ve hearing emotion that isn’t there. Those are just facts.

Scott Stabile, author of Big Love, writes, “Forgiveness is not about forgetting or excusing the behavior, it’s about releasing our own emotional pain.” This echoes a notion I first encountered watching Oprah back in the 80s.

I respect Oprah and Scott, but I disagree with this idea (except when we are talking about forgiving oneself rather than others).

Forgiveness is for the sinner, not the one sinned against.

In order to receive forgiveness, the sinner must acknowledge the sin, repent, and ask for forgiveness.

Bill never asked for forgiveness. He never acknowledged any wrongdoing. He never expressed any remorse.

If he had done so, I could have considered whether or not to forgive him. Were I convinced that his remorse was sincere, I may have forgiven him. Probably. I don’t know if my sister could have.

He ruined her life.

Author Iyanla Vanzant wrote, “...until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually it will ooze through and stain your life.”

Edie could not heal her wounds. She tried to bandage them with all of the above, eventually dying of heroin overdose. She passed down her pain to her daughter. I can see how that pain trickles down to the granddaughter she never knew.

A legacy of pain.

Vanzant goes on to say, “You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.”

I was lucky. I stuck my hands inside and, to the extent possible, made peace with the memories. When I say “to the extent possible,” I mean that the adult wise-woman in me has done that. Beyond reach of all the therapy and mindfulness and meditation exists a wounded child that I can care for but not heal.

She exists because I am a mammal with multiple brains, a mammal protected by nociception. We experience and remember emotional and physical pain so we don’t repeat what caused the pain (don’t touch that hot stove again!).

The problem with abuse is that this biological function gives us a warning we can’t respond to because someone else is in control (the abuser). Our helplessness leaves a deep scar.

From time to time, the wounded child can still take over my existence, sending me into post traumatic stress syndrome, as happened after the 2016 election in the U.S. It took a couple of months to soothe her.

Oprah said, “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.”

That sounds pithy, but it is not the definition of forgiveness.

I never hoped the past would be, could be different. I hope for the future, but changing the past is science fiction. I accept the past is what it is, that it can’t be changed.

Maybe that is what Oprah meant.

The claim that one can’t be happy or at peace until one has forgiven a wrongdoer is false. One doesn’t achieve peace without dealing with the pain, but that is different than forgiving.

Mental health therapists taught me skills to comfort the wounded child and reduce anxiety. Prayer and mindfulness take away anger. Metta meditation brought me peace:

Metta is first practiced toward oneself, since we often have difficulty loving others without first loving ourselves. Sitting quietly, mentally repeat, slowly and steadily, the following or similar phrases:

May I be happy. May I be well. May I be safe. May I be peaceful and at ease.

You work your way from yourself to those you care about, then to those who have harmed you, and, if you can, to those you hate or have hated.

I can meditate, “May he be happy. May he be well. May he be safe. May he be peaceful and at ease,” even though Bill died in 2002. It isn’t easy. I can’t do it every time I try.

When I am able to, it increases my peace. Perhaps it brings peace to the part of Bill that is in me.

My Aunt Marge brought me an envelope of childhood pictures of my dad to his funeral, the first I’d seen of him in his youth.

These help with Metta meditation. When I can’t say the words for Bill-the-abuser, I can look at the boy on the pony or the blind 13-year-old with his dog, a boy with itinerant sailors coming in and out of his home, men who perhaps abused him, and say, “May he be happy. May he be well. May he be safe. May he be peaceful and at ease.”

My main point here is that we lose an important tool in the social toolbox when we conflate healing with forgiveness. While the act of forgiving may increase our well-being, it isn’t necessary for letting go of anger and bitterness.

When we forgive where there is no remorse, we are disabling the wrongdoers. They need to experience remorse so they can change. Their act of repenting, apologizing, of asking for forgiveness, aids their journey to a better self.

Let’s not take that away from them.

Forgiveness

Review of 2023 and Goals for 2024