The ones that cannot be settled

Everyone who was going to ring today has rung.

Some of it you did. It was yours. And there is nobody left to say it to.

That is the hardest page in this book and it is not going to be solved on it.

First, in case this is not your chapter. If the person it belongs to is alive — findable, reachable, still answering a telephone — then this is not tonight's one. That is chapter 9, The ones that are not for the floor, and the short version is that saying it and it being received are two acts, only one of them is yours, and the first takes about four minutes. Go there instead.

People try things.

A letter written and not sent, or written and burned. Saying it out loud in an empty room. Saying it at a graveside. Being better to somebody else instead, for years, on purpose. Money to something they would have liked.

None of that is nothing. Some of it is a good deal better than nothing, and anybody who sneers at it has not needed it. But you will know the size of what it did, because you were there afterwards: about a day, sometimes two, and then the same at four in the morning.

They half work for a reason that is not mysterious. They are addressed to the wrong person.

And they cannot refuse.

That is the part nobody mentions. If they were alive they could tell you to get out of the house, and that would at least have been a real event, with them in it. What you have instead is both sides of it in your own head — so you can have them forgive you, which is worthless because you wrote it, or have them refuse, which then has nowhere to go. Either way you are the only one in the room, and you have been the only one in the room a long time.

So here is the plain version.

You are going to die with this.

It will not be settled. There is no act left that closes it and no amount of time does it, and nobody can take the wrong off you. You have probably known that for years and nobody has said it to you in those words, because people are trying to be kind.

But there is a distinction in it worth more than it sounds.

You have wanted one thing and it has been two things.

You wanted to be forgiven by them. And you wanted it to be known. Those are not the same want, and they have been welded together so long that losing the first looked like losing both.

The first is gone. It went with them and there is no way round it.

The second is not gone. It is available this week, it does not need them, and it does not need anybody's permission.

Be clear about what that is and is not.

It is not an apology by proxy. Telling somebody else is not saying it to them.

It is not absolution, and you must not choose somebody who will give you any. If the person you tell says oh, you mustn't think like that and changes the subject, that is kindness and it is not what you went for. What you went for is that one other living person knows the accurate thing and did not look away.

The wrong stays exactly as large as it was. What goes is that it has been in one head only, and the sealed quality of it has been doing damage of its own that has nothing to do with what you did.

And it costs something real. Somebody may think less of you, possibly for good. You may decide the price is too high, and nobody here is pushing.

Who, then.

Somebody outside it. A priest, a chaplain, a counsellor, a doctor, somebody on the end of a telephone at four in the morning.

They do not all hold it the same way, and before you say any of it, ask the person what they are required to do with what you tell them. A priest, a counsellor, a doctor and a volunteer on a telephone have four different answers to that, and the answer is yours to have before you speak rather than afterwards.

Not their children. Not their sister. Not anybody who would then be carrying it instead of you, which is not putting a thing down. It is moving it onto somebody who did not ask.

If anybody is still being hurt, that goes today, and no part of this chapter says otherwise.

It is not settled. It is not going to be.

The only thing on offer is that it stops being the only thing nobody knows.