Another thing: would I really have forgiven her?

The more that I think about it whenever she does get brought up, or something gets brought up that makes this relevant, the more I wonder: if my mother had apologized for anything that she did to Bub, would I have forgiven her for it? I mean, the entire point is moot because she never did. Given what she said and did to him, forgiving her for all of that after a simple apology would have been quite the tall order… and as I think about it from time to time, I’ve come to realize that forgiving her for that might not be “my job” to do. Furthermore, it would have been something that I would have wanted to stay out of if possible — I would have wanted her to apologize to Bub for what she did to him, because she did everything mentioned to him.

But with my own personal opinions on the matter though, I’m not sure that I could personally have forgiven her myself for the repeated transgressions that she made. This wasn’t just one thing that she did to my child. This was a series of things that she did to my child, and an initial refusal to apologize to him because he was not “worth it” in her eyes. So even if she had eventually “come around” for whatever reason, even if that reason was a fear of leaving things unsaid before death, I’m not sure that I could have gotten over that for anyone’s sake. And I didn’t feel like I owed her an apology because of her health, even because she was probably going to die soon. Talking to friends of mine that cared for individuals who were diagnosed with dementia at varying points, a lot of them said that her behavior was indicative of someone who had dementia, and that this might have meant that she had these opinions about Bub for a lot longer than we could ever have known about… and this made it all the worse to me. If she had been able to hide “her true feelings” about my child for years, until her health had degenerated to the point where she no longer could, that made it even worse. And you know what? My friends were probably right. It just made a lot of sense…

I would then have had to question her apology and whether or not it was sincere, or whether she was just apologizing to me thinking that she had to tell me what I wanted to hear, or whether or not she was apologizing to me “to tie up loose ends”. That was another thing. I would always have wondered about it.

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