And I never got to change the decisions we made when we were young.
But I learned something else.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean saying that what someone did was right.
It means deciding that their worst mistake doesn’t have to become the rest of your life.
Carol made her choice forty years ago.
At the end of my life, I realized I still had a choice of my own.
I could spend the years I had left living inside her secret.
Or I could finally live in the truth.
So I chose the truth.
And when I looked at the photograph of Anna and me as twenty-year-olds one last time, I didn’t feel regret anymore.
I smiled.
Because those two young people had no idea what life would bring them.
They didn’t know about the marriages.
The children.
The losses.
The mistakes.
The forgiveness.
They only knew that they loved each other.
And perhaps that was enough.
Not to rewrite the past.
But to finally understand it.
