What I Really Know About Forgiveness

The AARP Bulletin's "What I Really Know" column comes from our readers. Each month we solicit short personal essays on a selected topic and post some of our favorites in print and online. Below, reader Kathleen Clary Miller of Huson, Mont., shares what she really knows about forgiveness.

Before I visit my father at the Alzheimer's facility, I stop at a fruit stand for the sweet strawberries he loves to eat. I bake his favorite chocolate chip cookies. I gather a few familiar pictures, like the old photograph that shows him striding toward the bow of his sailboat as it heels against the breeze. Perhaps strawberries, cookies and memories will bring him some small measure of peace that I cannot, though they won’t assuage my guilt or sorrow that I won’t be bringing him home.

I promised my father that I would never put him in "one of those places." A promise is a promise—when all is fine and well. I kept him close to me at home for 12 years. Nothing was too good for my father until the staggering loss of his ability to function. Suddenly nothing was good enough. "In the end," a physician friend told me, "it's the ones we love the very most for whom we can do the very least."

For those coping with a loved one's dementia, my heart goes out to you. I spent one very long afternoon sitting on the floor of the local bookstore turning page after page in search of someone to tell me not what to do but how to live through it. I longed for some flicker of hope.

If you need a forgiving friend, lean on my shoulder. Know that you are not alone. It's OK to send your parent away from home. It isn't your fault. It isn't about letting down, but rather letting go.