If I’m feeling very physical and thinking
about weight – maybe I’m eating too
much because I’m emotionally unsatisfied
– then the weight is a presenting issue
going back to the loss. Or maybe it’s a
spiritual pain where I think, “Why was I
given this cross?” or socially, “I’m still
locked up in this. I’m forever the parent
of a murdered child.”
Forgiveness is as complicated as life is,
and every day is so different than yester-
day. Now what we’re going through with
the retrial, it’s a very vivid example of how
these issues remain, and might for the rest
of our lives.
F T: Often the word closure is used, but it seems
like with pain and grief like this and the process
of forgiveness, it can take a lifetime. Can you
speak to that?
WD: I think we yearn for closure, and I
guess in some ways what I do is encourage
people to do artificial chapter endings. We
need to commemorate the moment. At
the end of the day, we need to close the day
down. But when it comes to big issues,
forgiveness is never closed. It’s never
finished. You never finish cleaning the
house. There are some things you can
close, but you can never close the big
things in life.
Love is never closed. You never stop
loving someone. I love Candace still.
I appreciate chapter endings. At the
end of every trial we have a kind of closing
ceremony. We have to be intentional
about moving through all of this. It’s intentional about the moving, with the idea
that it will never be finished.
FT: You use a term in your book “the dishonour
of minimization,” when you share about how
people help, or don’t help.
WD: To be a good friend means you need
to have the courage to go into the darkness. Not a lot of friends can do that. To
honour the darkness is to go into it. It is
to experience it with another person and
to hit the bottom together. It’s the companionship in sorrow.
So often we just want to minimize. We
also minimize happiness with friends. We
want to keep things even keel, but it’s in
the spikes of up and down where we will
encounter life. We can’t just clip things
THE FT INTERVIEW
