I’d like to say that I’ve done a fairly good job setting out doing what I want to do, which is beginning to forget about the person that gave birth to me, raised me, and spent as long of a period in my life as she did. But when people ask me about forgiving her for what she did to my child (which I have written about in here for anyone who might be curious, and do not intend on rehashing since it has already been mentioned), or whether or not I have forgiven her yet for what she did to my child… a lot of people don’t ever seem to put themselves in Bub’s shoes, which was a point that I tried to make in my last post when I stated that I didn’t know if I could forgive her even if she had apologized to me for whatever reason before she had passed away. At the end of the day, it wasn’t really about me, although I could have — and did have — my own opinions on the matter, and ultimately came to the realization that even if she had apologized for what she did, I personally could not forgive her because I would never know under what circumstances she had apologized and would never really know if I could trust that apology. But as I think I’ve made clear, Bub is free to feel about her whatever he pleases. If he’s forgiven her, that is just fine with me. And it’s just fine with me if he hasn’t yet, or if he never does. Because all of this took place to, or with, him. All of this involved him.

Imagine being close to someone your entire life, loving and trusting this person, and then having this person’s behavior out of the blue push you away. Even if it had a distinct pathology, that still does not make it right, because she had periods of lucidity where she knew better and should have taken some kind of responsibility for her actions, and no one else wanted to help her take responsibility for them — if anything, they wanted to make every single excuse under the sun as to why she was “doing what she was doing”.

I don’t think Bub has forgiven her as much as he has more or less forgotten about her, and in time I aspire to completely forget about her as well. But I’m not going to give her the luxury of retaining good memories about her until that point comes, and we are at that point now. I no longer retain any good memories about her at all, and I am fine with that. In the interim, I don’t mind people knowing how she was before she died, though. I can give her the luxury of taking “a good death” away from her in the same sense that she took away from me the ability to make good memories of and spend peaceful time with her in the six months that led up to her own death. While I’m forgetting her, she should be remembered exactly as she chose to go out.