With so much family carnage behind us — betrayals, suicides, accidents, bad choices, cruelty, silence, and the long shadow of consequences — it is hard to fully imagine healing among us.

Small gestures occur. A kind word here. A softened tone there. A note. A phone call. A moment when someone does not say the worst thing they could say. But nothing that feels complete. Nothing that rises to the level of true reconciliation. Nothing that gathers up all the broken pieces and makes them whole again.

Maybe that is where the phrase “forgive but don’t forget” really hits home.

But I have come to wonder whether that phrase is even possible. If you cannot fully forget, can you ever fully forgive? Once the damage is done, it is done. Once something is broken, it is broken. Duct tape and Elmer’s glue can only do so much.

Still, even a small semblance of forgiveness among the tribe can feel like grace. Not full forgiveness. Not full healing. Not some grand reunion with tears and embraces and choirs of angels. Just a small lessening of the sting. A tiny lowering of the weapons. A moment when the old rage does not occupy the entire room.

We remain distant from one another — snakebit, estranged, wary, and bruised. We have all learned the hard way that families do not always function as sanctuaries. Sometimes they become minefields. Sometimes the people who were supposed to protect one another become the very people from whom protection is needed.

I feel this most deeply with my sister-in-law, who lost two of her sons to suicide.

Those two boys were my nephews. They were uprooted from a safe and secure community when they were very young — three and five years old — and taken into a world controlled by a diabolical leader and his willing lieutenants. A place that damaged people. A place that shaped lives in ways that would echo for decades.

For a long time, I have blamed my brother and my sister-in-law for that choice. I have blamed them for taking those children out of safety and placing them into the hands of people who had no business being trusted with vulnerable souls. I have blamed them for what followed. Maybe blame is too small a word for something that deep. It is more like a permanent verdict rendered in the court of my own heart.

But even that verdict does not erase the terrible truth that she has had to live with the consequences hour by hour, day by day. No mother loses two sons to suicide without being haunted. No parent can escape the private tribunal of memory. Whatever I may feel, whatever anger I may still carry, I cannot imagine the torment of living inside that grief.

That is where the hard part begins.

We will never be fully healed. We will likely remain estranged. Too much happened. Too much was ignored. Too much was excused. Too much damage was passed down through the generations like an inheritance no one asked for.

But small offerings of empathy and forgiveness can take some of the sting out of life’s slings and arrows. They do not erase the past. They do not absolve every choice. They do not bring back the dead. But they may keep the living from hardening completely.

The carnage left behind by that commune did not end when people walked away from it. It continued into marriages, divorces, addictions, breakdowns, estrangements, and suicides. It continued into children and grandchildren who may never fully understand the original wound but still feel its aftershocks. Hundreds of lives were shaped by that experience. And unless there is real healing — true accountability, not performance; true reckoning, not denial — the damage travels forward.

At one time, I advocated for a massive reunion of those who had passed through that world. I imagined hundreds of people coming together for one great reconciliation — with themselves, with one another, and maybe even with the past. I imagined people speaking honestly. Naming what happened. Owning what they did. Asking forgiveness where forgiveness was owed. Offering mercy where mercy was possible.

But the idea fell on deaf ears, broken hearts, and broken spirits.

The prevailing posture was simple: let sleeping dogs lie.

No one wanted to go back there. No one wanted to revisit it. No one wanted to open the locked rooms where the screams were stored.

And maybe I understand that. Some people survive by remembering. Others survive by refusing to remember. Some need confession. Others need distance. Some want the truth spoken aloud. Others fear that speaking the truth will finish what the original damage began.

So we live in the half-light.

Not reconciled. Not entirely hostile. Not healed. Not hopeless.

Just older now. Tired. Carrying what we carry.

And maybe that is what forgiveness sometimes looks like in families like ours. Not a cathedral. Not a miracle. Not a final embrace under stained glass.

Maybe it is only this:

A little less venom.

A little more mercy.

A small recognition that everyone who survived did not come out whole.

And maybe, in the ruins, that has to count for something.