Oh my, Arpad, such a lot of pain in these events. I’m so sorry for all the suffering your family has endured.

I would love to offer a perspective that I intend to be helpful; I hope it’ll come across that way.

You are a deeply kind and sensitive soul. I can’t imagine you’ve ever made choices to be deliberately hurtful. We always do the best we can with the tools we’ve got in the circumstances at the time. If you could have done better, you would have.

You had your own wounds and Life Stuff, and it’s easy to forget that years down the road and wonder why we didn’t behave then the way we would now. We didn’t because we couldn’t.

I’m quite sure you’ve never got up on any morning and said, “Today I’ll do less than my best!” But sometimes our wounds and other issues get in the way.

I suspect that if anyone else had written this piece, you’d have had plenty of compassion for the author. That’s just who you are, in my very limited experience of you. If I’m correct, perhaps you could consider cutting yourself the same slack and offering yourself forgiveness and understanding. And in the meantime, I’m offering a huge hug 💖