Hear victims’ parents talk about forgiveness in an ABCNEWS.com video slide show. RealVideo (download RealPlayer)

Tearing Down Crosses
In the year since the tragedy, many of the victims’ families have bonded, meeting regularly to talk and share and cope. But the one issue they rarely discuss, because they can’t begin to agree, is whether those boys who slaughtered their young and ruined their lives should ever be forgiven.
     The very notion of forgiving those two angers some families so much it makes them bristle. Brian Rohrbough and Rich Petrone, the father and step-father of murdered student Daniel Rohrbough, found the 14th and 15th crosses so disturbing that they yanked them out of the ground and chopped them to bits. Shortly after, when a local church planted 15 trees in memory of the lost, Rohrbough and Petrone grabbed a saw and cut two trees down.
     “Those two guys are cold-blooded evil murderers,” Petrone says. “And after what they did to our kids, there’s no way that I’d ever forgive them.”
     But what about all that stuff in the Bible about forgiveness? The crime even happened the week of Easter, a holiday that symbolizes God’s display of forgiveness to the world.
     “According to the Bible, you need to repent before you can be forgiven,” Petrone says, his voice rising with anger. “They were evil. They did not want forgiveness. They even said it, ‘We’re not victims of society, we evolved above humans.’ They called Jesus the a-word. They told God to f-off.”
     The way Petrone sees things, forgiving Harris and Klebold would be letting them off the hook. To do so, he says, would be to dishonor Dan. And it would send the wrong message to others.
     “If you can do what Eric and Dylan did and not be held accountable and God’s going to let them in Heaven, then why do we even have religion?” Petrone says. “To me, if you forgive the murderers, you agree with what they did. When you plant a garden, and group those murders in with those innocent victims, you’re telling the rest of the kids, ‘Hey kids, it’s OK. If you have a bad week and a bad year and you want to murder all your friends and teachers, it don’t matter. You’re going to be forgiven. God’s going to let you in Heaven and we’re still going to love you.’
     “Now what does that make a kid think? I mean, is there no shame in murder now?”

Just Let Go
Put that way, the idea of forgiving Harris and Klebold sounds ludicrous. But there’s another way to think of forgiveness. The Rev. Billy Epperhart of Trinity Christian Center in Littleton, Colo., preaches that it’s possible to forgive without pardoning the murderers or their actions.
     Epperhart, who officiated at four of the victims’ funerals and has counseled many of the families since, sees forgiveness as letting go of hate and anger.
     “When we talk about forgiveness, we’re not saying we’re sweeping what happened under the rug, or that we’re pardoning them as though they didn’t do it,” Epperhart says. “But we are saying that we must let go of the hurt that the tragedy caused in our lives, and accept what happened, and begin to find purpose and meaning in the tragedy and in the future.”
     That approach has done wonders for the healing of Darrell Scott and Beth Nimmo, the parents of 18-year-old victim Rachel Scott. After the shooting, he founded a ministry called The Columbine Redemption to encourage positive changes in young people, and ever since has been evangelizing across the country. In addition, the couple just finished a book, Rachel’s Tears (see excerpts), about their daughter’s beliefs and their own spiritual perspective on the tragedy, a book they hope will help prevent youth violence.
     “Forgiveness is for me, it’s not for the offender,” Scott says. “I knew that I couldn’t afford not to forgive. … Forgiving helped me to move on.”

Forgiving Is Good for You
Forgiving can do more than help one heal spiritually. A large body of research shows that forgiveness contributes to good physical health, says Virginia psychologist Everett Worthington, the director of the Templeton Foundation for Forgiveness Research. Worthington says people who are unforgiving tend to hold hostile feelings, and hostility contributes to cardiovascular risk, increasing the changes for arteriosclerosis, heart attacks and strokes.
     Being unforgiving is also stressful, he says, and that weakens the immune system, increasing the likelihood of autoimmune diseases such as cancer. And, he says, people who don’t forgive are more likely to develop mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety.
     But even with all those health benefits, Worthington cautions, that doesn’t mean everyone should forgive. In fact, he says, even the old adage that you must forgive in order to move on isn’t necessarily true for all people. Forgiveness means different things to different people depending on their religious and moral values.
     For some, like Rohrbough and Petrone, refusing to forgive may be the only way to make peace with oneself. And for others, like the Scott family, forgiveness may be the only way to move on.