What It Means to Forgive the Unforgivable
No virtue resists cultivation like forgiveness; it grows in the wild. For Sarah Gregory, a middle-aged mom working for a substance-abuse treatment center in Frederick, Maryland, it arose from a blaze of old pain. Gregory, having been through years of addiction and recovery, has learned all about the cathartic power of letting go. But early in the fall of 2020, she still so vehemently hated the man who had murdered her grandmother Dorothy Epps in Alabama nearly 20 years prior that she couldn’t so much as say his name, even in prayer. She had been furious at him for so long, she told me, “I was having trouble remembering the good things about my grandmother.” All of the memories were stained by anger.
There was no question of guilt in Epps’s case. By the time Gregory was nearing her breaking point in 2020, the killer had already given an account of his crime. James “Jimi” Barber, a contractor and erstwhile boyfriend of Gregory’s maternal aunt, had been working on Epps’s house in the spring of 2001. He was also, at
