How to Forgive our parents and grandparents who are gone

This article is written from within the Orthodox Christian tradition, recognizing that faithful believers may hold different views, and it is offered with respect for those differences. Forgiveness is difficult when the offender is alive. It becomes uniquely complex when the one who wounded us has died. There is no longer an opportunity for clarification, apology, confession, or reconciliation in the visible world. The relationship feels frozen in its final unresolved state. Yet the human heart still carries memory, emotion, grief, anger, and unfinished sentences. This is why forgiving the departed is often one of the most important—and one of the most healing—acts a person can ever perform.

Forgiving the dead is not about pretending the harm never happened. It is not denial. It is not spiritual bypassing. It is a conscious decision to release a moral and emotional debt that can no longer be settled through ordinary human interaction. And crucially, it is an act directed through God, not around Him.

The Spiritual Framework: What Is Permitted and What Is Not

Within an Orthodox Christian framework, the departed are understood to be alive in Christ, not erased by death. “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Death changes location, not relationship. The Church is understood to exist both on earth and in heaven as one Body in Christ. Because of this, it is permitted to speak to the departed in love, to entrust them to God, and to ask them to pray with us and for us, always submitting everything to the Father in the name of Jesus Christ.

What is permitted:

• Asking the departed to pray for us
• Speaking forgiveness to them
• Entrusting unresolved grief, pain, and love to God in their presence
• Acknowledging ongoing spiritual communion in Christ
• Submitting all prayers explicitly to the Father, through Jesus

What is not permitted:

• Treating the departed as sources of independent supernatural power
• Seeking secret knowledge from them
• Attempting to control spiritual forces through them
• Offering them worship
• Bypassing God’s authority

The line is clear: the departed are fellow members of Christ’s Body, not mediators independent from Christ, and never objects of worship. All prayer ultimately belongs to God alone.

Why Forgiveness of the Departed Is Often Harder Than Forgiving the Living

When someone is alive, there remains the possibility—however faint—of dialogue, apology, repair, or change. When someone is gone, the psyche often clings to unfinished business: words that were never spoken, questions never answered, wrongs never acknowledged. The mind continues the conversation in private, repeating imagined arguments that can never reach closure.

This leads to what psychologists call ambiguous loss and unresolved attachment injury—a state where the relationship has ended externally, but not internally. Forgiving the departed becomes difficult because there is no longer a living person to “receive” the forgiveness. And yet, the emotional burden remains very real.

Why Forgiveness Must Be Spoken Out Loud

Forgiveness that is only thought often remains abstract. The nervous system does not register it as a completed act. Speaking forgiveness out loud engages:

• The breath
• The vocal cords
• The auditory system
• The emotional memory centers of the brain

When forgiveness is spoken, it becomes embodied. It moves from theory into experience. The words no longer float in the mind—they pass through the whole person.

There is also something deeply human about addressing forgiveness directly, even when the other person is no longer physically present. The heart does not operate on legal categories of life and death. It operates on relationship. Speaking forgiveness out loud allows the relationship to be completed internally, even if it cannot be completed externally.

This is why people who forgive the departed often report:

• A sudden lightness in the chest
• A deeper sense of peace
• The end of recurring mental arguments
• A release of long-held resentment
• Unexpected grief finally moving and dissolving

Forgiveness spoken aloud closes a loop that the unconscious mind has kept open, sometimes for decades.

The Psychological Power of Forgiving the Dead

Unforgiven resentment does not remain passive. It quietly shapes perception, relationships, self-worth, and attachment patterns. Many people unknowingly spend their adult lives reacting to wounds caused by parents, grandparents, or early authority figures who are no longer alive to answer for those wounds.

When forgiveness is spoken—even to the departed—the psyche releases its need to:

• Hold the offender internally accountable
• Continually rehearse past injuries
• Seek retroactive moral balance
• Stay in a posture of defense

This does not excuse abuse. It does not deny injustice. It simply transfers the burden of judgment from the human heart to God, where it belongs. And when that transfer occurs, the one who forgives often experiences true interior freedom for the first time.

Forgiveness as Submission, Not Control

The most important spiritual distinction in forgiving the departed is this: forgiveness is an act of surrender, not power. When forgiveness is spoken and prayers are submitted to the Father in Jesus’ name, the person forgiving is renouncing the illusion of control over the past, the offender, and the unresolved story.

This is what makes the act spiritually clean:

• God remains the Judge
• Christ remains the Mediator
• The believer remains a child, not a ruler of outcomes

Forgiveness offered this way is not an attempt to manage the afterlife. It is an act of trust placed directly into God’s hands.

Why We Need to Forgive the Departed

We forgive the departed not for their benefit primarily—but for the healing of our own heart. We forgive because:

• The past cannot be altered
• The offender cannot return to amend the wound
• Carrying resentment harms the living, not the dead
• The soul needs resolution in order to rest
• Love must be allowed its final word

Forgiveness is not weakness. It is one of the strongest acts the human spirit is capable of.

Conclusion

To forgive the departed is to acknowledge that love, pain, memory, and relationship do not end at death. It is to speak peace into unfinished history. When forgiveness is spoken aloud and submitted to the Father through Christ, it becomes both spiritually ordered and psychologically freeing. The believer does not bypass God, does not grant divine authority to the dead, and does not seek forbidden knowledge—but simply releases the burden of judgment into the hands of the only One who can carry it.

Forgiving the departed is not about rewriting the past. It is about freeing the present and restoring the heart to peace.