I’ve spent my entire life just trying to get by in the world. You can’t possibly imagine how hard that is until you’ve been through it. Every day is a struggle to find enough food, warm shelter, clothes. To keep from getting killed by rougher, more desperate people. People just like you who are trying to survive and are doing it in any way they can, sometimes no matter who gets hurt along the way. So self-preservation is a way of life. It isn’t as much important as it is essential, like breathing.

But forgiveness is a luxury. And it’s a choice. An important choice. It goes beyond how many cans of food you found in that abandoned house or the warm socks you bartered them for. You don’t need forgiveness to survive the physical world, but you need it -- and trust, love, hope, and all the other emotions that are what’s best in humanity ­ to rise above it. The Death may have taken away our dignity but it didn’t take away our humanity. Not all of it, anyway.