A friend once asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks. Not externally. Internally. I am a highly verbal person inwardly, and while the conversation continued around me, another one had already begun in my head.
Earlier that day I had been cataloging the various grievances I believed had been inflicted upon me by another person I had once counted as a friend. After listening patiently for some time, my friend asked: “Why exactly do you need closure?”
At first, the answer seemed self-evident. Then I realized I did not actually know. What did closure mean? What shape was I expecting it to take? Did closure mean that the person who had caused the injury would one day experience an equivalent hurt themselves, some form of poetic symmetry in which the wound revisited its creator? Did it mean acknowledgment? An admission that harm had occurred? Did it mean an apology, or understanding? The more I thought about it, the more elusive the concept became.
As psychiatrists, we spend a great deal of time discussing grief, trauma, resentment, anger, betrayal, and loss. Yet closure remains curiously undefined. Everybody seems to know what it is until they are asked to explain it. Like happiness, it appears easier to recognize than to define. The more I reflected on the question, the more I began to suspect that closure may not exist at all, or at least not in the form we imagine.
Real physician voices, twice a week
Free, and one click to unsubscribe.
Many of us seem to believe that closure arrives from outside ourselves. It arrives as a confession, an apology, an explanation, a letter, a conversation, or a final meeting. In other words, closure is often imagined as something another person gives us. The difficulty, of course, is that other people rarely behave according to our narrative requirements. The colleague never apologizes. The estranged parent dies. The friendship fades without explanation. The relationship ends without the conversation we rehearsed a hundred times in our heads. Life is littered with unfinished stories.
Yet somehow people continue. Which made me wonder whether closure had been mistaken for something else entirely. Perhaps what we call closure is simply forgiveness viewed from a distance. Not forgiveness in the moral or religious sense. Not absolution, not forgetting, and certainly not excusing. Something quieter than that.
As a psychiatrist, I find myself increasingly interested in phenomena rather than ideals. The idealized version of forgiveness is easy enough to describe: One rises above injury, releases resentment, and proceeds serenely onward. Real forgiveness appears considerably less elegant. It often arrives while the hurt is still present. It arrives before understanding, and sometimes it arrives before an apology. Most inconveniently of all, it often arrives before the offending party has done anything to deserve it.
This seems profoundly unfair, yet it is also recognizably human. Patients forgive parents who never acknowledged the damage they caused. Parents forgive children who never appreciate their sacrifices. Friends forgive betrayals, and spouses forgive infidelities. They do so not because the past changes, but because carrying resentment indefinitely proves exhausting.
Recently I have found myself wondering whether resentment might have something resembling a half-life. Not a disappearance, but a decay, a gradual reduction in emotional potency. The memory remains intact and the story remains unchanged, yet something shifts in the relationship between the person and the memory. The event occupies less territory. The emotional charge diminishes. The injury no longer demands daily attention.
Perhaps forgiveness is not the disappearance of anger at all. It is simply the moment when anger ceases to be the organizing principle of a narrative.
The older I become, the less interested I am in forgiveness as virtue and the more interested I am in forgiveness as phenomenon. How does it happen? Why does it happen? Why do some injuries calcify into lifelong bitterness while others gradually loosen their grip?
I do not know the answers. I only know that my friend’s question continues to linger: Why exactly do you need closure?
Weeks later, I suspect the answer is that most of us do not. At least not in the form we imagine. What we seek is not necessarily explanation, apology, or justice. What we seek is release. And there is a quiet irony hidden in that truth: We spent years waiting for a key, only to realize the door was never locked. Forgiveness, imperfect and unspectacular as it may be, is simply one of the names we have given to the moment we finally decide to stop waiting.
It also lies in the moments we can accept that the other party will never know the extent of our suffering, or the pain lived through. Understanding will never be proffered, and yet we are somehow at peace with that. We are able to accept they never knew, and one day it ceases to matter to us. Therein lies forgiveness, I think. It is when we move on and stop ceding real estate in our minds and hearts to another person.
Loshi Rajen is a psychiatrist in the United Kingdom.
