The ones you can still mend

Go back to the list you made after chapter 1. For each event, ask a question the replays have never asked. Is there anything here that can still be done?

Often there's nothing. The colleague left nine years ago, the moment was small, and tracking her down to apologise for one sentence would be more for your benefit than hers. With events like that, the only work left is the write-up in chapter 12.

But with some events there is something to do. You owe somebody money, or an apology that would mean something to them. There's a rift with your sister that began with something you said. A friend you dropped during a bad year of your own never knew why. You promised your father something and haven't done it.

Replaying and mending are rivals. It would be natural to assume that someone who replays a wrong four hundred times is the person most likely to put it right. My impression is the opposite. The replay produces a feeling of having dealt with the matter. You've thought about it a great deal and you've suffered over it. It seems as though that must count for something. So the phone call doesn't get made, because in some inner ledger the debt is being serviced. Meanwhile your sister, who can't see your ledger, has had seven years of silence.

If an event on your list has something mendable in it, then mending it is the most effective thing you can do about the replays, and also the right thing. Chapter 7 described how an open item keeps coming round until it's given a plan. For these events the plan is obvious. You've been avoiding it because it's harder than flinching.

I can't offer research on exactly how to apologise that I've checked to my own satisfaction, so what follows is my own view.

Keep it short. "I've thought for a long time about what I said at Dad's seventieth. It was unkind and it wasn't true, and I'm sorry." That's enough. A long apology starts to be about you.

Don't explain yourself much. Reasons shade into excuses easily. One sentence of context at most.

Ask for nothing. Don't ask to be forgiven or reassured, or even answered. "You don't need to reply to this" is a generous line to include. The other person may have made their peace with it long ago, or may still be angry, and either way they don't owe you relief.

Expect it to feel out of proportion. After years of replays the event is enormous to you. The other person may say, "Oh, I'd forgotten all about that." That can be oddly deflating, but it's the best result there is. Or they may say, "Thank you, that did hurt," in which case you've done something that mattered.

There are times not to do it. If contacting the person would disturb or frighten them, don't. An ex-partner who has asked for no contact is an example. So is someone for whom your reappearance would reopen something painful. Your need to apologise doesn't outrank their peace. Likewise if the apology would mainly unload your guilt on to someone who was better off not knowing. In those cases the mending has to go somewhere else. You can do the equivalent good for someone else. If you weren't there for a friend when it counted, be there for the next person who needs it. If you owe something that can't be repaid to the person, give it where it will help. This isn't a way of wiping the slate. It gives the guilt an action to point at.

And sometimes the person has died. People carry things they wish they'd said to a parent for decades. There's no apology to send. Some people find it helps to write the letter anyway and keep it, or to read it aloud somewhere that mattered to the two of you. I can't promise it will help you. I can say it's a different act from a replay. It gets done once and it has a last line.

If something on your list can be mended, put a date next to it now, before you read on. A date is a plan, and chapter 7 explained what a plan does.