The daughter of a Conservative MP the IRA killed when they missed Margaret Thatcher in the Brighton hotel bombing, Jo Berry, inspires some and makes others shudder by forging a mutual understanding with the IRA man who bombed the hotel, Patrick Magee.
An exhibition in Belfast this week at Queen's University uses their story, reinforced by similar accounts from South Africa, Israel, the US, Ukraine and elsewhere, in the declared hope of prompting a debate on forgiveness.
The exhibition is called "The F Word: Images of Forgiveness" - a trendy, surely unworthy title to put over accounts of horror, bereavement and, usually, forgiveness, which must make many gasp and look away.
Yet nobody can do that in good conscience. No matter how it sounds from a distance, disputed Orange marches and the supposedly overarching question of restoring political institutions in Stormont are not on everybody's lips.
The public face of the North is firmly averted from the Troubles and the anticlimactic negotiations to clear up the debris. You can skim through once-dour Belfast and see nothing but novelty, some substantial and some surface: a new school on one side of the Falls-Shankill peaceline, new houses on the other. Starbucks is rumoured to be coming to the Lisburn Road, Belfast's Dawson Street/Islington. But the grieving still grieve.
Whatever emerges in the next weeks or months from the IRA, whether the DUP agrees to share power, or not, after a statement of intent followed by decommissioning followed by a period without violence or criminality, the human cost of the Troubles remains.
Anybody with experience of "unnatural" bereavement or other major trauma knows how damage extends. The 3,700 Troubles deaths and many more thousands horribly injured means a sizeable part of the population is traumatised to some degree.
For everybody who has talked to an organisation like those who researched the forgiveness exhibition, thousands suffer in silence or at least entirely within their own families.
The concept of "forgiveness" has almost been devalued by the glibness, or at least the unquestioning nature, of some of the debate so far. Many want the truth about how particular murders happened, probably impossible to achieve in a large number of cases. But a special police unit has begun to reinvestigate almost 2,000 killings.
Some say they forgive to reclaim their own lives, to escape destruction by hate. Forgiveness after suffering unspeakable agony, that pardons the person or persons who caused the pain and brings redemption and the chance of a new life to the perpetrator - what evidence there is suggests this is impossible for many, perhaps the majority.
In the editing and presentation of too many accounts from those who do forgive, the subtext is that forgiveness is the only decent response.
There's a trace of that technique attached to the testimonies in the forgiveness exhibition. An introductory leaflet says the aim is to tell the stories of people who have found "that the only way to move on is to set aside hatred and blame". It does that.
It also tells a few stories of people who do not forgive; among them a woman blighted by sexual abuse that she suffered as a child from an alliance of an outsider and a sibling. There is also a family with deathly illnesses brought on by the Chernobyl disaster, who have been abandoned by the disintegrating communist state, their savings swallowed up by collapsing banks that made others very rich.
One account, from a loyalist ex-prisoner, touches on the way forgiveness has been exploited. Asking for it is more about the needs of the perpetrator than of the bereaved, he says, so he will not ask. Alastair Little, who shot a man dead when he was a 17-year-old UVF man, goes on to say: "And some people can't forgive. But that doesn't mean they're weak, or that they'll be consumed by bitterness or anger . . . Unfortunately reconciliation and forgiveness have been politicised, so for me they've lost their value."
Gordon Wilson's daughter, Marie, died in the rubble of the IRA explosion at Enniskillen's remembrance day memorial. His gentle retelling of her last words and the forgiveness of her killers he voiced right up until his death made many weep. But others bereaved in Enniskillen felt his superhuman charity absolved the bombers and reproached their own rightful anger.
Clearing up after the Troubles goes on while many go about their lives - very much as happened while bombings and shootings were daily occurrences. Politics stumbles forward. The bereaved do the best they can to live, and honour their dead. No single route meets the needs of all.
The McCartney family, the families of the Dublin/Monaghan bombing victims, the Finucane family and many others want justice, and truth. Some simply want a body to bury decently. Wholesale conflict in the North ended but was not resolved, and for many of the bereaved, as in politics, forgiveness is not in sight.