When forgiveness fails

There's another answer.

“I’ve forgiven both our parents,” my sister argued, her tone implying I better do the same.

“But what have you forgiven them for?” I asked. There had never been any real acknowledgment of the serious crimes committed in our family, only vaguely admitted victim accounts, interspersed between avoidance and estrangement.

“You know, everything,” she said, still unable to name the crimes after four decades have passed since they were committed.

I’m using the word crimes literally and not metaphorically.

Let me name the ones our father committed: rape of a minor; sexual assault of a minor; aggravated sexual assault of a minor; molestation of a child; violent sexual assault; continuous sexual abuse of a child; and aggravated sexual assault of a child, multiple victims. Then there are our mother’s crimes of neglect, which the law specifies as “permitting sexual abuse of a child” and “failure to report sexual abuse of a child.”

Photo by Marianna Smiley on Unsplash

These are all statutory crimes—acts that we as a society have agreed are not to be tolerated because allowing them destroys the health and safety of our most vulnerable members, which undermines the health and safety of our society as a whole.

Are you still with me here, or have you already checked out? I didn’t paste a trigger warning at the top of this post because they don’t help anyone—except perpetrators of crime.

But I don’t blame you if you checked out. Maybe you’ve already left this post. There was a time when I would’ve done the same.

I have deep compassion for my sister. I understand why she can’t name the crimes. Why she’d hope with every fiber of her being that just forgiving our parents would make it all go away, like magic.

Neither parent has ever asked for forgiveness, in case you’re wondering about that.

Neither parent has ever even acknowledged these crimes, let alone answered for them.

It’s not that those two things are necessarily required in order to produce “forgiveness,” but absent them, what exactly does my sister’s forgiveness mean?

Here are two other women’s stories.

In What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, a book Oprah Winfrey co-authored with child psychologist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry, Oprah writes about the strained relationship she had with a mother who had not been there for her when she was growing up:

I was conflicted about our relationship up until the very end. The truth is, it wasn’t until I became successful that my mother started to show more interest in me […] I decided that one of the ways I could honor her would be to help care for her financially. I always made sure she had everything she needed in order to live a comfortable life, but there was never any real connection. I would say that the audience who watched me on television knew me better than my mother did.

When her mother was dying in a hospital, Oprah was finally able to “forgive” her. She offers her mother understanding for her failings, sympathizing due to the woman’s lack of education and opportunities at the time she was pregnant with Oprah. She thanks her mother for bringing her into the world instead of opting for abortion even though it meant a harder path. “You did the best you knew how to do—and that’s okay with me,” she tells her mother. “So you can leave now, knowing that it is well. It is well with my soul.”

It’s a great mercy, this understanding. Though unattributed, Oprah’s words “it is well with my soul” must have been borrowed from a well-known hymn with an amazing origin story, as referenced in the movie I Can Only Imagine 2.

This show of mercy didn’t require anything that would go against Oprah’s values and authenticity. The megastar had already told the story of her mother’s neglect, and she’d told it over and over again to millions of people on the world stage. It was part of Oprah’s core brand, in fact—to share her worst childhood moments in order to connect with an audience who might have their own, similar wounds.

By the time Oprah offered this mercy, her mother was on her death bed. So the hope that they could finally have a mother-daughter relationship that would give Oprah what she needed was dying there in the hospital bed. There was nothing left for Oprah to lose.

So was it really forgiveness she offered, or instead, acceptance?

I think it’s the latter: Acceptance that she could not go back in time and alter her mother’s choice. Acceptance that no matter how successful Oprah herself had become in life, she would never gain love and validation from her own mother.

The mercy Oprah offered came from a position of power. Oprah had already proved that she could gain love and validation from other sources—whether that was the love of a worldwide audience or the family and friends she chose as an adult or even her own ability to self-love. She had gained love and validation though her own mother failed to provide them when she was a child and continued to fail now that Oprah was, well, OPRAH.

Not even access to the best psychotherapists, self-help gurus, and spiritual leaders money and celebrity status can buy could save Oprah’s relationship with her own mother.

With her mother gone for good, there was no sticky consideration of how to put this newfound acceptance into practice as real intimacy. This is key: It made no demands on Oprah other than that death-bed speech.

Likely a real relationship could not have been forged even if Oprah had come to a place where she could make this speech before her mother was terminal. I bet on a subconscious level, Oprah knew that, and knew it to the very end.

So offering mercy to her dying mother actually served Oprah well, as the enduring belief that they could somehow share a real connection—as opposed to their faux, financial one—finally died with her mother. I hope acceptance gave Oprah a needed release and that she doesn’t feel guilty for not coming to it earlier.

But to call it forgiveness seems… at the least, inaccurate, since it required so little of the forgiver but to simply share words of understanding in order to ease a dying woman’s transition.

I don’t mean to split linguistic hairs here, but it’s important to understand what we’re really talking about when we talk about forgiveness.

Now let’s turn to Erika Kirk, widow of the influential commentator Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated September 10, 2025.

Admirably, Erika took to the stage a mere 11 days after losing her husband and expressed forgiveness toward his killer.

By then, the alleged shooter had already been apprehended, with a surprising, dizzying swiftness.

The murder had taken place on the worldwide stage, with literally millions watching.

No one could deny what happened.

Or the senselessness of it, the injustice, the tragedy. A man—a loving husband, father, friend, and tireless crusader—cut down in the prime of his life. By what could only be evil, for it must be evil that fuels such acts of senseless depravity.

Evil carried out by a man who chose to act on it. To commit a heinous crime, the one we punish more severely than any other because it stands in defiance to all life: Murder is annihilation, the ultimate destruction.

Erika Kirk’s speech is very moving.

It’s also brilliant, inspiring, and even if you disagreed with everything Charlie Kirk did and said, I challenge you not to tear up, watching it.

At the end of her speech, she expresses forgiveness, and it’s hard won.

It obviously requires great strength and even pain to feel through it, to conjure enough love to blot out what could grow as bitterness in her heart if she didn’t make this effort. What transpires is a spiritual moment. I bet those in the audience felt something more akin to what one might feel in church, watching it, being a part of it.

Earlier in the speech, she exhorted women to “Guard your heart; everything you do flows through it.” And then she demonstrates this very thing with her profession of forgiveness.

But what no one required of her—what no one requires of her still—is that she try to convince prosecutors to let Charlie’s killer go free.

Or even spare his life.

Yeah, that’s right. Have you forgotten about the alleged murderer already, Tyler Robinson? He most certainly will get the death penalty.

Whether you disagree with capital punishment or not, Robinson’s crimes warrant it under current statute: aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and commission of a violent offense in the presence of a child.

It’s not like Turning Point USA (Charlie Kirk’s organization that Erika now heads) is mobilizing its tremendous clout to try to prevent Robinson from receiving a conviction on all counts and a death-penalty sentence.

Nor should it:

This grieving widow’s forgiveness does not erase her need for justice.

That’s something therapists, self-help gurus, and Christians and other religious believers—all of us engaging in the talk of forgiveness—should keep in mind when we demand or push for it, or judge those who don’t feel it’s right or don’t see that it would help them to forgive—especially not in the midst of that dark vacuum, that airless place where heinous crimes go unpunished.

What if Charlie’s assassin had never been caught? Erika would have to move through her pain in the total absence of justice, a dark path to walk for any victim.

What if Charlie’s assassin had been caught, but due to some technicality or the limitations of the justice system, he walked free anyway? Imagine if prosecutors and Erika herself knew beyond a shadow of a doubt he was guilty, and confronted him with it, and he simply denied it. She would still crave justice and a just punishment, and maybe without those, she could still forgive, but it would again be a dark and difficult path for her to walk.

Forgiveness in the absence of acknowledgement of the crimes and atonement for the harm caused is too much to ask any victim. I don’t believe a loving God would ask more of the victim than is asked of the perpetrator.

We as a society shouldn’t ask it either.

My father has never acknowledged his crimes, let alone atoned for them.

He’s also free to continue victimizing children if he gets the urge and opportunity.

His were the perfect crimes, with the victims his own dependent biological offspring, the crimes denied, covered up, enabled, and even literally cleaned up. So perfect, in fact, that some of his victims continue to not just maintain their silence but try to enforce it on the rest of us even though he’s no longer in our lives, demanding this acquiescence.

The shame he put into his victims is that powerful.

When I talked to him on the phone to try to get some closure after a thirty-year estrangement, he spun the same narrative he always has, which is to deny his crimes.

So I don’t know what forgiving him in this context means. It had no place in that conversation. I should volunteer to forgive him for crimes he insists he never committed?

As for my mother, I have always tried to see her with grace and mercy—from the very moment she stood in the doorway of my bedroom, bearing witness as my father raped me. She saw that, her husband brutalizing her own tiny little girl. Instead of intervening in that moment, she turned around and went back to bed.

When my mother failed me in that moment, I was broken. My self obliterated into separate parts, and one of these in a sense followed my mother back to her room to tuck her in, to take the place of responsibility, to be her mother when she couldn’t be mine.

For the past 18 months, my mother has refused to respond to my phone calls, emails, text messages, and mailed cards and letters. Two of my birthdays have gone by without a word from her. One day I ran into her at the pharmacy; she looked at me and then quickly turned away, as if to pretend she didn’t recognize me. This is her response to my simply speaking the truth.

Before her rejection of me, I’d been like Oprah but with far fewer resources, buying her cases of sardines when she needed fish oil in her diet and teaching her to make sauerkraut.

Unlike Oprah, I didn’t stop at the tangible gifts. I earnestly tried to forge a relationship, visiting for walks in the park or to take her on day trips or just to chat. Unfortunately, these were always one-sided experiences. I was and always had been cast as her therapist, listening to her either brag or complain without so much as a question about me and my life, my own family.

My mother had also put conditions on our relationship: I should never bring up Dad’s crimes, or her role in them. I could speak of my father only to sympathize with his brutal treatment of her in the context of upholding the narrative that she was his greatest victim, that she suffered more than any of her children ever had.

I defied those conditions, as a way forward in my own health. I began to speak to my family with truth and conviction, to name all of the crimes, including her neglect of not just me and my siblings but a neighbor’s child—yes, I’m sorry to say my own siblings and I were not the only victims. For this, she punished me with banishment.

I’ve always forgiven my mother and continue to offer her this mercy, though I can no longer uphold the conditions she puts on her love for me.

I have compassion for the children my parents once were and the crimes probably committed against them. I suspect those crimes—also denied and buried—eventually turned them into severely compromised adults.

Those adults willingly made and continue to make the wrong choices. We as a community need to hold them accountable because heinous crimes against innocent children are serious transgressions we cannot allow.

My father should absolutely pay for his crimes—to the fullest extent of the law. Whether or not I offer him the mercy of my forgiveness is up to me to make, on my own timeline, if I choose to do so. Or maybe acceptance is enough for me.

If he approached me with an apology, asking for forgiveness, I would tell him to turn himself in to the police, as the next step in atoning for what he did. We are long, long past the possibility of a relationship, as he long ago forfeited his right to father. He is a stranger to me who was only in my life for the first 20 years of it out of 50+, was thankfully away on tours of duty for at least five of those 20, and brutalized his family when he was home, covering all of it up with psychopathic, manipulative charm and lies.

My mother has already paid dearly for her crimes, I believe, over a lifetime of repeating destructive patterns, like a record stuck in a groove. I ask nothing more of her, and I forgive her for even the worst of it. Yes, even for turning away at my bedroom door, as I know she did not have it in her to do the right thing.

I suspect she’s been punishing herself for that failure ever since.

Here’s the thing: It’s not forgiveness my sister holds over my head like a cudgel of judgment, but compliance.

She wants me to comply with the lie that holds my mother in shackles. But I can no longer do that. It’s a lie that falsely lulls, a lie that slowly kills.

Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer was apprehended immediately, and he will stand trial. If he’s guilty, and the evidence says he is, he will pay, possibly with his life. Because the community has righteously stepped in to punish this wrong, Erika can now focus on the healing work left to her, and for her, forgiveness is part of that process, so that her grieving heart can mend instead of harden with bitterness.

It doesn’t look like Oprah’s mother’s failings were crimes by legal definition, but even so, Oprah tried and convicted her mother every time she took to national TV to tell her own story. The only work left was to accept a past she could not change and the reality that she’d never, ever get to experience her mother’s love. That hope had to be let go at last.

I’ve been reporting my father’s crimes all my life, beginning when I was a little girl, continuing in young adulthood when I first broke free of his grasp, and again when I was finally able to process the full force and detailed bodily experience of those crimes as part of my own work to heal.

The justice system sets a high bar. It’s called a burden for a reason, the burden of proof. Despite the strength of my own credible victim’s testimony and some corroboration from my family, he’s never been prosecuted because the surviving evidence simply isn’t enough to warrant an arrest.

Even though my father left my mother more than thirty years ago, she has never reported his crimes against her and refuses to do so now. She was not only not supportive in my own quest for justice but actively tried to undermine it. I believe that if he hadn’t left her, they’d still be married.

Self-help gurus like Jack Kornfield or even Oprah herself, who included it at the end of her story about her mother, like to say, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.”

But that’s never made much sense to me. Logically, we all know we can’t change the past since no one from the future has ever come back to let us know it’s possible! 😂 My future isn’t dependent on a different past anyway and never has been. The wounded little girl inside me doesn’t need to be stuck in the 1970s—I can let her know I’ve aged and lived and loved and not let those crimes hold me down.

It’s hard to let go of the desire to save your mother so that you can finally gain her love and validation, or to put your father in jail so your family and community can finally feel safe.

But I have to accept that neither of those things is in my grasp. I’ve now done everything I can do, everything in my power, to bring about justice and safety. The rest is out of my hands—and out of my control.

When justice and safety are denied, and forgiveness is too much to ask, fortunately, we still have acceptance. There, I fixed it: Acceptance is giving up all hope of a better past.

There’s a reason so many adults know this one by heart:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr, Serenity Prayer

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