Claire helped me work on keeping them in separate compartments, not because the connection wasn’t real but because conflating them made both harder to process. Grieving my father while also managing a family dispute required a kind of compartmentalization that didn’t come naturally.
I don’t think I did it perfectly. But I did it.
## The Question of Forgiveness
People ask about forgiveness, when stories like this get told. It’s the question that tends to come, after everything else, as though it’s the hinge on which the ending turns.
I’m not sure forgiveness is the frame I’m working in.
Forgiveness, in the way people usually mean it, seems to be about releasing something — releasing resentment, releasing the claim that something wrong was done, releasing the obligation to account. It’s framed as something you do for yourself, not for the other person, though in practice the line between those is blurry.
What I’m trying to do is something more like: carry this accurately. Carry what happened without making it heavier than it was or lighter than it was. Vanessa did something that was wrong. It was not the worst thing one sister has ever done to another. It was not a small thing. Those two facts coexist.
She has a history with my father that I also have, and that history involves things I wasn’t there for and things she wasn’t there for. She spent three years doing something real for him. She also did something wrong in October. Both are true of the same person.