Can We Forgive the Ghosts?

I know a woman who cannot forgive her mom for something her mom did 25 years ago. I know the story, and I understand why it caused her pain, but there’s no point. In the end, she’s fighting with a ghost.

Her mother is still alive, but that mom, the woman who wronged her, is long gone. She looks much the same, but she is a different person from the one who wounded her child. If mom is sticking to her opinion, and her way of expressing it, my friend has a beef with the mom she knows today. If not, though, she’s volunteering to demean her current relationship in the interest of…what? Does she love the pain that much? Is she a big believer in parallel universes where the same person can exist in multiple forms? Is she stuck in a Schrodinger time warp herself, existing as both the person she is today and the person she was a quarter century ago?

I’ve written before that the worst days of your life can also turn out to be the best days, that a setback in one area can create an opportunity elsewhere. Recently, my daughter recalled the time I declined to increase her allowance in college, which led her to find a job, which led to her finding an internship, and a job, and a career… There’s no way to know how things would have turned out if I had acquiesced and increased her funding. Maybe better, maybe worse, but we’ll never know. All we can say now is that things turned out well, so far.

The same applies to my friend, whose attachment to the memory is likely an indication that the incident affected some of her follow-on decisions in life. She’s doing quite well now, so how can we be sure that the sting from her mom didn’t, somehow, improve her life? It’s possible that she made some changes in how she talked to her mom, how she treated other people, how she made decisions that led to more decisions that led to now. As with everything in life, you can’t get one without the other.

I’ve written before about the importance of moving past the missteps, acknowledging that people can grow as they learn more, encounter more, and empathize more with other human beings. During the quarantine period, I had the “opportunity” to review some of my earlier writings and some family videos that I would absolutely not share with anyone today. They aren’t incredibly terrible, but I cringe just a bit at my lack of awareness and the limits of my vision.

As uncomfortable as I am with those entries in my permanent record, though, I’m also gratified to see them. These reminders of my earlier worldview are a marker for my evolution since then. I’m still a work in progress, but I have absolutely grown wiser, more insightful, less judgmental. Or so it seems to me.

Just like my friend’s mom, I cannot go back into my own past and unsay anything. I cannot change the views I held or the way I expressed them. I cannot undo whatever harm I might have caused someone when I was a child and spoke as a child. All I can do, now, is to work on the person I am today and avoid the impulse to do battle with ghosts.

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