Forgiveness is one of the most challenging topics to address and its emotional complexity often intensifies in discussions around death and dying. This guide is not meant to tell anyone whether or not they should forgive someone, or what they should do about forgiveness. Instead, it intends to clarify what forgiveness is and is not. It offers a path for what it means for you to embark on a forgiveness journey to potentially discover greater peace or resolution at your own pace, even when death has entered the conversation and the stakes feel at their highest.
What is forgiveness?
Forgiveness rarely happens in one moment. More often, forgiveness is an effortful journey from pain to peace that sometimes feels like you are going in circles or losing ground altogether. Mettle’s Head of Care, Bridget Sumser, describes forgiveness as learning how to “quiet the inner noise” in order to have more capacity to find okayness within any given relationship. .
Forgiveness cannot be rushed, even if time is short.
What does forgiveness mean when we’re close to the company of death and in the swirl of grief? The need for closure can seem more imminent as you or someone who has caused you injury or harm is facing the end of their lives. Old pains and betrayal can re-surface, unearthing grief over how much peace of mind was lost or stolen.
As you’re processing what this means for you, it may be too late to have any big conversations to find closure. The feelings and rationales you may observe circulating can be many things including: You may not be in a place to forgive, and others close to the situation struggle to respect that truth. Or, you have received an apology from someone who is dying that you are not yet ready to forgive, and you feel conflicted. Or perhaps, the person died before there was ever an opportunity to forgive them in life.
Forgiveness can take time, and forcing it is harmful. When we are facing the permanence of death, we might feel a sense of urgency to close pain or ambiguity. The messages we often receive about forgiveness: it’s necessary, it’s kind, it’s functional, it’s the moral or righteous thing—can create pressure to act outside of our own needs and values in order to perform the illusion of a “good death.” Despite these internal and external pressures, unfinished and/or unforgiven business is a common part of the human experience, especially at the end of life. We can relinquish a sense of urgency or control in this process when we accept that time is also a form of healing, and everyone’s schedule of life and timeline for forgiveness will not be perfectly coordinated.
For example, an estranged parent or ex-spouse wants to reconcile with their children or former spouse before they die. Most of the family has accepted this offering and are applying pressure on another in the circle to do the same. But for this family member, it feels performative and inauthentic; “forgiveness” in this context would only benefit the dying person and not them. There are no exact words to recommend in a moment like this. You might not understand, but respecting that each person has their own schedule for processing everything from forgiveness to grieving is a gesture of care: “I am not ready to forgive, but I respect that you are. Please respect where I am.”
Forgiveness is not reconciliation.
Forgiveness is often confused with reconciliation. However, forgiveness is not about reconciling with the person who caused harm, or absolving them of what they did for their closure. Instead, forgiving a person—whether they have died or are someone who is unwilling, unable, or unsafe to reconcile with—means releasing the pain this person has caused. The release of this pain is not whole or complete, but is by degrees and increments.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, in her book, On Repentance and Repair, emphasizes the distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation. She argues that forgiveness must center on the experience of the victim or injured party, not the one who caused the harm. Forgiveness is not about restoring trust in the relationship with the person who caused harm, but rather it is how victims and survivors can find internal freedom and healing from the harm they experienced. If we are the person who has caused harm and wish to make amends, we can broker our wishes for forgiveness, but it is the person(s) harmed that makes the decision to forgive. The process of taking accountability and acknowledging harm is essential to making amends and self-forgiveness. But it is a separate and distinct process from finding forgiveness for the harm that was caused to you.
Forgiveness is a choice you make for your own healing, no one else’s.
Forgiveness is a deliberate decision to let go or soften the ongoing resentment or need for vengeance. Robert Enright, a forgiveness researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, developed a four-phase process, beginning with uncovering anger and pain. In this model, the choice to forgive is not even made until one allows themselves to “uncover” or acknowledge the depth of their anger and hurt. Once the pain is “uncovered,” then a person can make a real “decision.” From there, the “work” of forgiveness truly begins, followed by the process of “deepening” that healing over time. To dive into these cold, stormy waters can be overwhelming to our nervous systems. In navigating your anger and pain, having steady support will help stabilize your experience. Once you’ve acknowledged and assessed your wound, you can decide and define what forgiveness means to you and make your own choice about it.
“Everyone deserves safe passage.”
As a hospice chaplain, I once met a woman who brought her dying father into her own home to care for him. The man was, by all accounts, a mean soul who had caused deep harm to her and many others. And even at the end of his life, he was unrepentant and abusive. There was no deathbed reckoning or apology. And yet, his daughter still managed to carry a hard-earned peace derived from years of doing her own healing work. When the social worker and I asked how she was able to care for him, she said, simply: “Everyone deserves safe passage.” These words have stayed with me, affirming that forgiveness is first about reclaiming our own wholeness, dignity, and peace. That does not mean we must then put our own bodies on the line as she did to care for someone who is unsafe. But it might mean that as we protect our own dignity and worth, we can extend a measure of that dignity to them, even if that care comes from professionals, not us.
Sometimes the person you are forgiving no longer exists.
Once we understand that forgiveness is not bound to the person(s) who caused the harm—but instead describes an interior process of healing—we are not bound by time either. Unlike the example above, sometimes people do change as aging, illness, and the dying process bring new insights into how we have acted over the course of our lives. This sometimes brings vulnerability and accountability to what previously was a guarded space that had been locked away and avoided at all costs.
But other times, illness and dying radically change a person so they are no longer recognizable to themselves or others. A client of mine visited her mother in the skilled nursing facility almost every day. The woman she visited now was not the mother she had known growing up: a woman who was cold, rigid and withheld affection. Her mother’s dementia had softened her hard edges and opened a channel in which sweetness and love could now flow between them. Her adult daughter described what it meant to her to demonstrate her love for her mother now in ways that she had never been able to do when she was younger.
I don’t know whether she would say that what she found for her mother was forgiveness. Perhaps “understanding” or “healing” might have been the words she would have used instead. But the reality was that she was navigating a relationship now in the present with a person who was no longer the person who caused the pain. In examples like these, forgiveness may still require tending to the pain even when the relationship itself no longer exists as it once did. Ultimately, what I have learned as a practitioner is to be mindful that the person I am often meeting at the end of their life is not always the same person their family has known, and perhaps been injured by. Holding the complexity of a life story, including its edges, is essential to honoring the whole truth. And, sometimes the present gives openings the past could not have predicted—neither cancels out the other.
The choice to forgive extends beyond death itself. If you did not have the time or opportunity to forgive a person while they were alive, your relationship with them will be undeniably transformed by death, but not fully extinguished. What grief researchers have described as “continuing bonds” normalizes the value in finding ways to honor this ongoing connection. In the realm of forgiveness, it means you can continue this work evenThe choice to forgive extends beyond death itself. If you did not have the time or opportunity to forgive a person while they were alive, your relationship with them will be undeniably transformed by death, but not fully extinguished. What grief researchers have described as “continuing bonds” normalizes the value in finding ways to honor this ongoing connection. In the realm of forgiveness, it means you can continue this work as long as the relationship is alive in you.
Resources
“The Four Key Steps To Forgiveness,” Wisconsin Public Radio, May 21, 2017
Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, Beacon Press, 2023
