When my grandmother died, I did not go to her funeral.

At the time, I was already dealing with my mother’s Alzheimer’s, and grief was sitting everywhere in my life. But my relationship with my grandmother was complicated in a different way.

She had stayed married to my step-grandfather, the man who went to prison for sexually abusing me and my cousin. She believed marriage was for life. She believed God did not allow for divorce. In her mind, staying with her husband until death parted them was part of her faith.

I understood what she believed. I also knew what he had done. I could never fully reconcile those two things while she was alive.

She was not willing to talk about it, and I was not willing to push her into a conversation she had made clear she did not want to have. So instead, a wall stayed between us. We loved each other, but we also stayed away from each other.

When she died, I knew I could not sit through a funeral where everyone stood up and talked about only the good parts of who she had been. Not because those good parts were not real. They were. But they were not the whole story.

So I did not go. Instead, I went to her grave.

I stood there and told her everything I had never been able to say. Mostly, I told her I did not understand. I did not understand why what happened to me and my cousin had not been enough for her to leave him. I did not understand why her belief about marriage had mattered more than what he had done. I told her how much that choice had hurt me and how it had kept a wall between us for years.

I yelled. I cried. I talked to her as though she were standing there listening. Then I left.

That visit did not change the past. It did not give me an answer. My grandmother did not apologize or explain herself in some new way that suddenly made everything make sense. But something in me changed anyway. I had finally said what I needed to say.

For a long time, I thought closure was something another person gave you. A conversation. An explanation. An apology. Some neat ending where everyone finally says what they should have said years ago and then walks away understanding each other.

Sometimes that happens. But sometimes the other person is unwilling to have the conversation. Sometimes they are incapable of giving you what you need. Sometimes they are gone. Sometimes they are dead. And sometimes the conversation you have been waiting for would not fix anything anyway.

My step-grandfather going to prison was justice, but it did not resolve what happened between my grandmother and me. Those were two separate wounds. The closure I needed from her had to come from somewhere else.

After I visited her grave, I started being able to remember her differently. Not falsely, just more completely.

I could remember that when I was small and a stuffed animal was falling apart, she would sew the pieces back on for me. I could remember sitting upstairs beside her sewing machine. I could remember making a quilt and having her help me put the backing on and bind the edges. I could remember calling her my grandmom because she felt like another mom to me.

Those memories did not erase what she did wrong. And what she did wrong did not have to erase those memories either.

My grandmother was someone I loved and someone who failed me.

Both things are true.

I think forgiveness became possible once I stopped trying to decide whether she was a good person or a bad person. She was a person. A human being who loved me and made a choice that hurt me deeply.

Forgiving her did not mean deciding that choice was okay. It meant deciding I did not want the worst thing she ever did to become the only thing I remembered about her.

Even now, there are days when I think about it and get angry. There are still moments when I think, that was such a wrong decision. Closure did not make the pain disappear forever. It changed where I lived in relation to it.

I can think about what happened. I can talk about it. I can write about it. I can even get pulled back into the grief or anger for a while. But I do not have to live there.

For me, closure was standing at my grandmother’s grave and finally telling the truth out loud.

It did not change what happened between us. It did not give me the years back. It did not make her choice right. But it gave me a way to stop standing in the middle of that hurt waiting for someone else to finish the story for me.

I could put it behind me without pretending it did not matter.

I could still love her.

I could still be angry sometimes.

And I could keep living.