Life can be seen as a series of relinquishments, rehearsals for the final act of letting go of our earthly selves. Why, then, is it so hard for people to surrender the past? Our memories, good and bad, are what give us a sense of continuity and link the many people we have been to the one that temporarily inhabits our changing body.
     The collection of habits and conditioned responses that renders us unique serves as a kind of gyroscope, lending our responses to life a predictability that is of value both to us and to those who seek to know us. Our former selves can also serve as a sort of anchor, providing stability while sometimes inhibiting adaptation to new circumstances.
     Few of us had ideal childhoods. It is easy to get caught up in self-definitions that involve past traumas as explanations for why our lives are not what we wish. The problem with living in the past is that it inhibits change and is therefore inherently pessimistic.
    Certainly it is true that understanding who we are depends on paying attention to the history of our lives. This is why any useful psychotherapy includes telling this story. Somewhere between ignoring the past and wallowing in it there is a place where we can learn from what has happened to us, including the inevitable mistakes we have made, and integrate this knowledge into our plans for the future. Inevitably, this process requires some exercises in forgiveness--that is, giving up grievances to which we are entitled.
     Widely confused with forgetting or reconciliation, forgiveness is neither. It is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves. It exists, as does all true healing, at the intersection of love and justice.
     To acknowledge that we have been harmed by another but choose to let go of our resentment or wishes for retribution requires a high order of emotional and ethical maturity. It is a way of liberating ourselves from a sense of oppression and a hopeful statement of our capacity for change. If we can relinquish the preoccupations and pseudo-explanations that are rooted in the past, we are free to choose the attitudes with which we confront the present and future. This involves an exercise of consciousness and determination that is a certain antidote to the feelings of helplessness and anxiety that underlie most of our unhappiness.
     As we contemplate the inevitable losses that we have had to integrate into our lives, the way we grieve and the meaning that we assign to our experience determine how we face the future. The challenge is to remain hopeful.
     Many people choose a religious basis for their hope. The idea that we live under the guiding hand of a merciful God and are promised life everlasting is a great comfort that answers for many believers the universal question, and shortest poem, of human existence: "I, why?" Religion also provides a way of dealing with the uncertainty and apparent randomness of serious loss since it ascribes purpose to all human events and we are relieved of the burden of understanding by a simple acknowledgement that God's ways are both inscrutable and ultimately benign.
     Those like me, unable or unwilling to relinquish our skepticism about easy answers to large questions, are left with the difficult task of living with uncertainty. Not for us is the comfort of religious formulations. Instead we must struggle to establish some basis of meaning for our lives that does not depend on a belief in a system that requires continual worship of a deity that created us and gave us a set of instructions, which, if followed, will defeat the death that is our common fate.
     Some form of forgiveness is the end point of grieving. My six-year-old son died from complications of a bone marrow transplant performed in an effort to cure his leukemia. I was the donor. Coming to terms with his death-not accepting, not closure, and certainly not forgetting-has been an exercise in forgiveness: for the doctors who recommended the procedure and for myself whose marrow failed him.
     When I prayed for his life it was an act of desperation fueled by the hope that the religion of my youth might yet save what was most precious to me. When he died, a victim of random cell mutation within his otherwise perfect body, I was left with the conviction that no God who would allow such a thing to happen was worthy of a moment's more of my contemplation. I envy those who can retain their faith through such a loss and even imagine a purpose to it. I cannot. But still I hope for a reunion with the soul of my departed son, so what kind of unbeliever am I?