Pain as a character

Okay, I'm thinking out loud here, kind of, so bear with me, and forgive me in advance if this doesn't make any sense.

I'm thinking about pain, and how people use it to obviate guilt.

Say you've done something terrible. You didn't mean to do it, but something horrible happened and it's your fault. Maybe because of you, your child is dead.

No matter what anyone else may say--even if your spouse, your parents and your in-laws, everyone is willing to forgive you, would you ever be willing to just forgive yourself? I wouldn't. I don't think I could ever suffer enough or go through enough pain to feel like I've attoned for something like that. No matter what everyone else says.

But also, look at it this way. Put the shoe on the other foot. If you are the spouse in this case, and you told your wife or husband that you forgive him or her and she thought about it and said, "Okay," and went on with his or her life like nothing had happened, would you still feel the same way about this person? If he or she can just shrug off something like that, like it was a minor fender bender in a parking lot or something? Even if watching this person suffer the agony of grief and guilt tears at your heart and you'd give anything, anything at all, to ease this person's suffering, even if you get frustrated as hell at this person for continuing to torment him-or-herself over this, even if in your heart you really and truly forgave this person, wouldn't you rather he or she felt that way than the opposite?

That's one aspect to this story I'm working on. Another is the role of pain in love and relationships. Yeah, I write about pain a lot. It's one of the few aspects of the human condition I think I understand.

So, this is where you say something.