But I found that I could not.
Because the truth was more complicated than the crime, and the man I had known was not the boy who ran that light. The man I had known had spent three decades trying to unmake a single terrible night, one anonymous kindness at a time, expecting nothing, receiving nothing, asking for nothing except, at the very end, a few weeks of Scrabble and soup and the chance to be called someone’s husband before he died. He had loved me my whole life from the shadows, and the only selfish thing he had ever done was to step, for a few short weeks, into the light.
I have thought about it a great deal in the time since. I have decided that forgiveness is not a single act but a long practice, something you do a little at a time, the way he did his penance a little at a time, and I am still in the middle of it. Some days the anger comes back. Some days I stand at his grave and I am furious at him for what he did and furious at him for making it impossible to stay furious. But most days, now, I remember the man and not the boy. I remember the taped-up box and the terrible cheating and the way he pressed my hand to his cheek on our wedding day and looked happier than anyone I have ever seen.
