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I have said elsewhere that the one thing we often have the most difficulty forgiving is our own humanness.

Life can throw curveballs at us that exceeds our capacity for coping and in the aftermath, we're left to struggle with our sense of inadequacy and failure. Even if we were strong -- you pegged it Rhapsody -- we still feel that we were not strong enough.

I don't know if there's anything anyone else could say that would lift that burden from us; we can't accept forgiveness from another unless we have first forgiven ourselves. And even if we do get to that place where we can accept that we did the best we were capable of doing at the time, the original wound can still ache and throb. We circle back, again and again to those places of woundedness, seeking healing, a full resolution of which may never come.

Meanwhile, life goes on. We are the sum of our experiences -- the good and the bad; the wretched and the ecstatic; the sacred and profane. This is the cost of being human, and human is what we are.