Should I forgive my dying father?

Long story short, my siblings and I had a falling out with my dad. After years of emotional abuse (and in one instance, physical abuse), we had enough and all told him he needed to change in order to stay in our lives.

Strange as it sounds, none of us has ever stood up to him, and it took a lot of out of us to muster up the courage to do so. We each wrote heartfelt letters detailing how we felt, and begged him to change for the sake of the family. We are all wounded and deal with anxiety/depression on a regular basis because he just won’t let us be adults (by the way, two of us are in our 30s and married with kids) His thirst for control has been a constant battle and he has essentially been a dictator for as long as I remember. Anyway, he basically told us not to let the door hit us on the way out. That’s the last I heard from him.

Ever since then he’s been pressuring my mom to fix everything and bring us back to the fold. From what we have gathered (since he still has not said a word to us) he is not sorry, does not feel like he’s been a dictator all these years, and in fact blames US and tells anyone who will listen how bratty and ungrateful we are and how he “didn’t raise us to be like that”. This is all basically our fault.

Now add that he just got diagnosed with cancer. We thought that faced with possible death, he would soften his heart....it did not. Though he wants us back and swears he won’t be a controlling dictator anymore, he is still not sorry. He wants us all to talk it out with my mom (when he is not around) then never mention it again and go back to chatting as if none of this ever happened.

I am feeling all sorts of emotions, particularly guilt because he may die, he may not (my parents have a history of lying or bending the truth to their benefit) but something tells me it’s not safe to go back knowing your abuser is not the least bit sorry. What prevents him from mistreating us in the future? Right now he’s banking on me needing help financially (he was helping with my student loans but pulled that help once I stood up for myself) I’m pregnant and wanted to move to a larger place (which he knows) and that money surely would help, but I can make payments myself and remain where I’m living now.

To teach me a lesson, if I come back, he still will not help with my loans for quite some time, so that I know not to do this again (this is a guess based on what my mom alluded to) using money as a manipulation tool has been very prevalent in our relationship for years so this is nothing new. When I was a college student and I didn’t do as they said, they both used to let my bills get close to delinquent until I agreed. Once, they almost let me get evicted just to prove a point!

My mom is a whole other story (she is also toxic) but today I’m only asking about my dad:

Should my dad get a pass on not apologizing on the 0.1% chance he has actually changed just because he has cancer? Or should I cut my losses and move on, even if that means he dies without us resolving our issues?

Edit: I’ve been played. After doing some research, I just found out they caught the cancer early enough that the survival rate is 98% something told me this was a ploy to appeal to my kind side, and turns out it was! He has the best doctors behind him...he’s not dying.