Wife: "You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?"
Husband: "I choose to. I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.
Wife: "But it's not that easy."
Husband: "Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things. I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a very proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No, we always have a choice. All of us."
"Izz, I've learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future, you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past."
There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory. Isabel is part of him, wherever she is, just like the war and the light and the ocean. Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.
All the above from The Light Between Oceans, by M.L. Stedman
That last paragraph is the ultimate epitaph, relevant to every human life. An unvisited headstone, the final reality.
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