She could hardly think of a less appropriate motto for a man whose forgiving nature everyone, from the neighbours to her mother and herself, took advantage of. Eventually she guessed he intended it for her, so that she might turn out tougher and less forgiving that he had been. But when the dementia began to take over and swallow up the man whose character directly rebutted his favourite phrase, many of the people whom she thought he should have forgiven less became kinder. Even the neighbour who had exploited her father’s good nature to rob, there was no other word for it, a plot of garden attached to the apartment that had once been theirs, even he turned out to have hidden reserves of generosity, going out of his way to call in favours to find the best doctors he could for them, giving her father lifts to the clinic and then the hospital, getting her father to join a bowling club and then making sure he went there and spoke to people and remembered who he was and why he had come – human contact being the only cure for the incurable.
