I thought about how such portrayals separated us from our human inclination to empathize and forgive. What had happened was horrific on every level, but news reports in cases like these often circumvent the root issues. Instead, they typically skim the surface to sell fear, to stoke animosity. It was tragic that Mr. Williams had attacked that woman. Sad that her heart had stopped when her lung collapsed around it. Sad that she was murdered by a stranger when all she had wanted to do was go to church. It was also sad that this tormented man was caught between this reality and the world of his mind. I couldn’t know what had brought him to that point. I did know that most psychotic people aren’t violent; in fact, it’s the sane ones who pose the greatest physical threat to others and commit the most violence. I knew that Mr. Williams had once been functional enough to be enlisted in the armed services. Then something had happened. Perhaps he had a genetic predisposition that timed a late-onset schizophrenic break. But this is rare. Usually, there is trauma that triggers a psychic separation. And usually this trauma is layered onto prior unresolved traumas to tip the balance to an altered state. As the spirit struggles for protection, it can become frozen, can splinter, shatter, quiver inside not knowing how to heal.

I could only imagine the trauma caused to the woman’s family as well as to the larger community by her murder. Her killing was as heartrending as it was unjust. It was also true that Mr. Williams’s suffering was so great that he had experienced a break. Of course, as is the case in adulthood, his trauma is his own responsibility. His actions are his to bear. But the trauma of every veteran and, more broadly, every person, is also ours. I couldn’t say for sure, but most likely Mr. Williams, as in the case of the many veterans whose mug shots we see on the news or who sleep invisibly under bridges, had been broken by the combat he waged in our name. So, his trauma was ours, too—our trauma, our pain, our responsibility. Just more evidence of the interconnectedness of all beings.

The arrival of the day team signaled the end of my shift. On my way to the parking lot, I searched my phone for the song “Rosebush Inside.” This would be a fitting soundtrack for my trip home. The guitar strummed as I pulled out of the hospital lot. The day before, I had listened to a podcast on NPR about Moreese Bickham. In 1958, two local police in Louisiana who were reportedly also Ku Klux Klansmen made good on their promise to exact revenge for an argument in a bar and came to Bickham’s home in the middle of the night armed with guns. In this attempted murder, one shot Mr. Bickham in the stomach. In self-defense, Mr. Bickham returned fire, striking and killing both men. An all-white Louisiana jury sentenced Mr. Bickham to death. In 1996, after he’d spent thirty-seven and a half years in prison, the governor commuted his sentence, and at the age of seventy-eight he was released. While incarcerated, Mr. Bickham had made it his mission to be of service. He became a minister and a mentor to other inmates. He also found refuge in a rose garden. Of his cherished roses, he said to an interviewer who visited him in prison before his release, “I want to introduce you to the beautiful rosebush . . . This one here is my favorite. I named it after my wife, Ernestine—a beautiful pink rose. And some way or another, I keep it trimmed and uniform looking, too. I call it my beauty. I know it sounds funny, but these are my company keepers. I enjoy these bushes. See, if it wasn’t for these bushes, I wouldn’t have nothing to do. So, these bushes have come to be close, close, very close to me.”

After his release, Mr. Bickham said he bore no anger toward anyone. Instead, he practiced gratitude for his many blessings. I imagine it was so that the society that had robbed him of his physical autonomy could not also steal his peace of mind. For the rest of his life he continued to hold the system accountable through his work advocating against the death penalty. To me, he was someone who learned to live without bitterness and who savored every ray of freedom. In this way, he harbored unconditional love that few ever choose to achieve.

I pulled into the parking lot and began the walk across the street to my condo. Like the lull of the night shift, the quiet time of being home was rife with things to contemplate. Forgiveness had freed Moreese Bickham when his body was enslaved. While suturing up Mr. Williams, I had allowed myself to be guided by a deep forgiveness for his erratic behavior, which might have escalated to danger, and this had likely saved my life. Then, of course, the fact he hadn’t harmed me may have saved his life, too.

It’s the same calculation we make when we physically take down an agitated patient in the ER. There are risks and benefits to both the action and the inaction, so the critical question before either is chosen is whether action is truly necessary. So, too, the calculation taken regarding when and how we expose our military men and women to danger: We have taken too many liberties with their health. They are put in too many situations that should have never occurred in the first place. When danger is unavoidable, they deserve to be well supported during and then after the trauma they experience. We failed Mr. Williams the way we failed Ms. Honor. In the same way Vicki found healing in forgiveness, we as a nation need to do so as well. We need to acknowledge our errors openly, earn the forgiveness for the failures, and, most important, do better from that place of loving-kindness.

Forgiveness condones nothing, but it does cast off the chains of anger, judgment, resentment, denial, and pain that choke growth. In this way, it allows for life, for freedom. So that’s what’s at stake when it comes to forgiveness: freedom. With this freedom we can feel better, be better, and choose better next time.

Now that everything I had known had fallen away, I knew I would have to sit in this space of transition. Despite the end of relationships with my ex-husband and then ex-partner, followed by the end of what I thought the practice of medicine was and would be, I had decided to stay in Philadelphia for the time being. I had put down roots here. I had achieved my goal of becoming a doctor. I had been married—and then divorced because I had grown up. I had purchased a condo in Center City, which I had filled with paintings from contemporary artists for inspiration and with incense, candles, chants, and totems of “oms” for balance. And I had feasted on pure love. I had never needed Colin. Real love never needs. Part of pure love is knowing when to stay, when to yield, when to hunker down, and, ultimately, whether it’s after an hour, a decade, or the duration of this brief life, when to go.

I was in a new phase, one in which I realized that simply continuing to accomplish more of those goals that the mainstream world deemed important—in my career, in my personal life—would only lead to the desire for more and more to feed an insatiable hunger. This, too, would require forgiveness.

As I entered my apartment, I recalled the letter from my father, still lying at the bottom of my bag. I was calm now. For the first time in my life, I was dedicated to self-care in an unrepentant way. I was dedicated to loving myself so fully that the natural response was also to love unconditionally any authenticity I found in others. In this, too, was the freedom of knowing that another person’s journey had little to do with my own. Forgiveness was a natural response, the only one that really mattered. It meant that I could be okay with the possibility, indeed, the likelihood, that my father had reached out to me selfishly, and that was the best he could or chose to do. I was okay, too, with deferring my response.

I pulled the letter out of the bag. It occurred to me, too, that there was a possibility that the correspondence could be some version of a sincere explanation. I took out a fresh envelope, then stamped and addressed it so I could mail him my updated contact information should he want to speak to me. Putting the envelope aside, I opened his letter.

Inside was a Christmas card containing a piece of white paper folded into quarters. I carefully unfolded it and proceeded to read a handwritten note from a man lamenting his life. He expressed that he had finally taken responsibility for everything he had done. He went on to share that since he had broken off all contact with me, he had tried to learn about my life through periodic online searches about what I was doing, where I was living, who I had become. He congratulated me on the awards I’d received for patient care and compassionate doctoring he’d come across.

The letter ended with his phone number in the event that one day I might be open to speaking with him. Before I realized what I was doing, my hands were rifling through my bag for my cell phone. Seconds later there was ringing. At the third ring it dawned upon me that I hadn’t planned what I would say.

Then I heard, “Hello?”

“Hello, it’s Michele Harper,” I said.

There was a pause followed quickly by, “Michele, I am so happy to hear from you. How are you?” I felt my father’s voice cracking on the other side of the line.

We spoke cordially in a cursory way. I caught him up on what I was doing—that I was an emergency room doctor at the VA hospital in Philadelphia—and plans for the future. He repeated much of the letter’s content, then updated me: He was still living in the suburbs of rural Pennsylvania, still practicing medicine, mostly in the prison system.

Then he surprised me. “Michele, I’ve always remembered what you told me in one of our last conversations. You said to me, ‘You don’t own anything.’ And you were right. I’ve remembered those words so many times through the years. It wasn’t until I owned all of my mistakes—and that was so painful—that I could begin to change. I’ve dedicated myself to getting better over the last twenty years.”

My jaw dropped and my heart melted to discover that he had heard anything I said all those years ago.