Anyone can forgive anyone - it's a matter of deciding to, and has nothing to do with your feelings.
This is so true Steve.
My paternal grandmother was a very hard woman. But there were reasons. She went into service in a large house at the age of 10, and despite Downton Abbey trying to brainwash us into thinking it was all lovely for the folks below stairs; it really, really wasn't. Grandmother was up at 5 to make fires and regularly was still working at 9 & 10 in the evening with Sunday afternoons off.
She was tough on both my father and his sister, my aunt; who she frequently told that childbirth was the worst thing that could ever happen to a woman. Perhaps understandably my aunt never had children. She filled the void with alcohol. My father struggled all his life to express his emotions, I think, in part to do with his mothers attitudes and to do with his experiences in WW2.
However much I could blame my grandmother for this general lack of emotional stability she brought about, and I am sure she did, there comes a point where you have to say that was then, she had her reasons for the way she was, but this is now, and you have to get over it somehow. To hold the hatred towards her, that maybe she deserves, or maybe she doesn't is kind of irrelevant. The hatred can hurt only me now, not the dead and gone. As people we have to find a way to move on and forgive otherwise that hatred gets polished, and gains more power rather than diminishing as it should be encouraged to do.
