Forgiveness

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

                                                                                                      Matthew 6:12 

Sometimes you hear a thread of a family story that is so contrary to your version of the story that it makes you reexamine and ponder what you know and what you do not know to be true.

That is what happened to me last Friday. My thoughts and heart have been knotted ever since as I sort through the tangled, loose, or just plain snarled threads of a family story that has had far-reaching consequences even to this day.

A long time ago, decades ago when I was a small child, my grandfather committed a great wrong against me, not just once, but numerous times over several years.

When he died in the spring of my fourth grade year, I was relieved. No more hiding, no more dodging, no more trying to be invisible.

My grandfather's death had an immediately freeing effect on me, but what I did not know in my ten year old naivety was that the emotional consequences of what had happened would imprint me forever. In part, it made me who and what I am today. Some of that has been to my benefit: what happened infused me with determination and resilience to survive what otherwise would have destroyed me. Some of that was to my detriment and it took a long time with a wonderful  therapist to help reshape core coping mechanisms that had served the child well, but were disastrous for the adult.

But this post is not about what happened. This post is about the new line of the story that I heard for the first time last Friday and am weaving into the story I already know.

On Friday, I accompanied my aunt Ginger to the hospital while she underwent a medical procedure. While we waited in the prep area, she on the bed, I on the hard chair, we talked to pass the time and Ginger started sharing family stories.

I learned things about Grandma Skatzes (her mother) that I had not heard before: how she went to work in the kitchens of the women's dorm in this small town when my grandfather was ill and unable to work, how much she loved that job and how she hated to give it up when he was better and insisted she quit. I heard how during the Depression she was the one who went to the Relief Office to get food for the family, as my grandfather was too proud to ask for help despite the hunger at home.

And then Ginger told me a story I had not heard before, about my grandfather's final days. My grandfather had a heart attack and was hospitalized. Within a week or two, he would have a massive one that would kill him. That part of the story I knew. But what I didn't know is that for several days prior to his death, at my grandfather's request, a minister came daily to the hospital and met with him for lengthy talks.

Ginger, who knows my story, stopped in her narrative and said, "I wonder if he was feeling…guilty over…you know…and wanted to…well, maybe atone for what he did…well…you know…."

We changed the topic and the day went on. But I carried that new piece of information home with me and have turned it over innumerable times since then.

My grandfather met with a minister several times in the days leading up to his death.

I struggle with the notion of my grandfather seeking forgiveness in his dying days, if that is what he indeed did. I struggle with the image of my grandfather, facing death, finding solace with a minister.

I struggle big time with all this. Never mind that faith is meant to be a strength and comfort to people. Never mind that it is not my right to dictate how, when, or even whether a person repents of his wrongs. I struggle with the notion of my grandfather having that comfort at all. 

It is hard to forgive.

One of the many, many reasons I veered away from church as a young adult was my childhood church's interpretation of the duty and obligation of Christians to "forgive those who trespass against us." That message was hardened into a kind of co-dependency diatribe by our elderly minister and at least one Sunday School teacher whose class I attended for one or two miserable years. If we were incapable of forgiving someone who had wronged us, then we were at fault, we were to blame, and we were the ones in dire need of forgiveness. Never mind what the wrong was. The burden was all on me, the victim, to rise magnanimously above the wrong and forgive the wrongdoer. Anything less than that and I was probably heading to hell in a personalized hand basket.  

There was no discussion of the human and humane side of forgiveness: that forgiving lifts a burden from the victim's heart, that forgiveness allows the one who has been wronged to move on and put the wrong aside. If someone, anyone, had suggested that side to forgiveness, instead of threatening me with damnation if I could not grant absolute and total forgiveness, I might have listened.

But, as taught, this was a version of forgiveness that I could not swallow. It was not one I could find in the Bible. It was certainly not one I could live with as a tenet of faith. It left me outside in the cold, victimized in spirit, knowing in my heart there was no place for me inside that church. It is no coincidence that the religion that drew me in was Judaism, which places the emphasis on atonement by the person who has done the wrong, including, where possible, to the victim.

It is no wonder that I have been journeying spiritually for so long.

It was my wonderful therapist who finally explained forgiveness to me in a way I could understand and accept. He asked me how I felt about forgiveness, which caused me to nearly leap out of my seat. I explained the whole painful religious experience that left me feeling more victimized than before. He was quiet while I calmed down, and then he suggested equating forgiveness with forgiving a past due bill in a business. You stop sending the bill. You write it off. It doesn't undo what happened, it doesn't explain or excuse the act, but it allows you to put it away.

You just let it go.

I could accept that. I could mentally run the bill and stick it away in a folder marked "closed accounts." And that is what I did, until Ginger's story last Friday. 

Now the bill is in my hand again.

In writing this post, I read various translations of the Lord's Prayer, particularly the verse having to do with forgiving "those who trespass against us." I did not find any version of the prayer, including the King James version, that used the "trespass" language. I did find multiple versions that spoke of forgiving debts and forgiving debtors, in line with what my therapist discussed.

I can approach forgiveness on those terms. It's a debt. Not all debts are honored. Not all debts are paid.

Not all debts are collectible.

Did my grandfather seek forgiveness in his final days? I don't know. I'll never know. Am I better able to forgive his wrongs, knowing he might have been remorseful, that he might have repented? I don't know. I do know this: what happened is a long, overdue bill and there is no need for me to continue to send it. It will never be paid, but I can let it go.

The account is closed.

Letting in the Light

"Blessed are the cracks, for they shall let the light in."

I have carried that quote around in one of my notebooks for years. It is a good place to start today. This morning, despite the heavy, gray overcast, there were cracks in the cloud cover which were luminous with the early light. I stood for several long moments at the back deck door, just looking.

Last night was our monthly legal clinic. Clinic night is always a reminder that despite my tiredness, physical or otherwise, so many others out there are carrying far heavier burdens. They come to the clinic looking for advice, looking for hope, looking for a place in which to lay down those bundles of worry and dead ends, even if only for an hour. We give them coffee and comfort, cookies and counsel, before sending them back out into the world again.

Working at the clinic does not "cure" my depression, but it softens it by helping me gain a fresh perspective. It cracks open the soft gray in which I am wrapped and lets the light enter.

Thoreau ends Walden on a Transcendentalist note: The sun is but a morning star. As I type these words, it is early afternoon and the room has suddenly brightened. I look up from the screen. The sky is blue and clear; the morning star is shining bright.

Winter Night, Winter Memories

The first Friday of each month, our downtown stores stay open late and people come out to eat and shop. The Symphony office, located downtown next to the movie theatre, stays open for the event. So last night found both of us headed out for First Friday.

I had a book to return to the library, a block and a half down the hill from the Symphony office, so I walked there in the gathering evening before coming back to help Warren out.

It was snowing lightly when I walked down, and snowing a little harder when I headed back up towards downtown. As I walked up the small hill, I could see the lights of downtown burning bright against the evening sky.

I was hit with a strong, cold wave of memory as those lights came into view. Not strong enough to knock me off my feet, but it jarred me all the same.

When I first came back to Delaware 20 years ago, I worked as an associate in a very small law firm in the heart of downtown. For reasons sometimes too twisted to decipher even decades later, I rarely was allowed use of the family car. Fortunately, we only lived six blocks from the office, and I loved to walk.

I last worked at that office 11 years ago, but I still remember, strongly, emerging from the building on an early winter evening onto the very same street down which I was now gazing. Street and window lights would be on, often it was cold, sometimes there'd be snow falling. I would walk home quickly, bundled against the chill, eager to reach the shelter of the house.

My thoughts would often be on the day I'd just left behind - the clients, the paperwork. As I walked, my mind would transition to whatever awaited me at home. In all likelihood, I had talked with my then husband and already taken an initial reading of his mood over the phone. I was too often tense over what probably awaited me when I got home, but that often propelled me to walk faster, not slower, to get the homecoming over with and to be there for my sons.

I missed my boys. I wanted to be home with them more, but as the sole wage earner, that was not an option. Despite the troubled household, despite the tension and pain that laced so many of the days, I gathered strength from the looks of their faces when I walked through the door each evening. I knew that for the next few hours at least, I could focus on Ben and Sam, the stories of their days, the bedtime books, the blissful look on their sleeping faces.

Last night's walk in the early evening brought back the feelings - the anxiety, the sadness - I used to wear almost every day but most especially as I walked back home each night. But it also brought back the bright moments: the joys in my children's faces, the warmth of a small boy snuggling up against me to hear a story or to tell one himself.

The poet Rilke, commenting on his decision to leave therapy, said "if my devils are to leave me, I'm afraid my angels would take flight as well." That sentiment applies to the past as well. The past is what it is and I cannot dwell too long in its deeper depths. But I can reach into the gloom and pull out the brightest moments, and those would be the times with Ben and Sam.

When I got back to the office, awash in these memories, I looked over at the bookshelf inside the front door. On it are rhythm instruments and a collection of children's books with rhymes and music and art themes. Most of the books are loaners from my collection. They are books that were interwoven through Ben and Sam's childhoods: Color Dance, Mouse Paint, Traveling to Tondo, Brother Billy Bronto's Bygone Blues Band (a picture book that magically features both dinosaurs and a train wreck, which automatically made it a hit with Sam when we first read it).

Looking at the titles, I could once more feel the weight of my boys on my lap, once again hear their quiet, rapt breathing while we read. Surely it is a prerogative of every parent of grown children to hold close such memories, especially when their warmth and glow are inextinguishable against the dark winter night.

The Stars Overhead

 

 *Milky Way image courtesy of NOVA (PBS). 

Six years ago today, at about 2:45 in the afternoon, I learned I had myeloma, which is an incurable bone marrow cancer. My amazing friend and doctor, Pat Hubbell, had been honing in on what was "wrong" with me, and she called to say that, from everything she saw, the diagnosis had just changed from "might be" cancer to "it looks definitely like" myeloma.

I was sitting in my law office when we talked. I remember watching with a sort of shocked detachment my hands shake as I hung up the phone.

My life changed irrevocably in one phone call. It has never been the same.

I've blogged some about how cancer changed my life and what it's like to live with one that will never go away. Just look at the labels on the right: "cancer" pops up 20 times (and that's just all the times I remembered to tag it).

 

Ham and eggs, salt and pepper, April and myeloma.

I continue to be grateful and amazed for the support and care my friends and the community immediately, unhesitatingly, and freely gave me from that moment on, starting with Pat. Family, friends, and even strangers stepped forward, wrapped their arms around me, and never let go.

Six years ago today, I wasn't sure I would even make it to the first anniversary, let alone any more beyond that. It has been an amazing journey.

I just today started corresponding electronically with a young woman who just a few weeks ago received a diagnosis of Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage 2. We were connected through a mutual friend. In my reply to her initial email to me, I told her: You are at the start of a long journey, Loise. I'm here on the path too. We can travel it together.

Thank you to all of you who have kept me company on my own travels in Cancerland. Whether you dropped off a meal, sent me a note, gave me a hug, made me laugh, slipped me some money, commented in support on my blog, or even went so far as to marry me (thank you, dear Warren), you are the stars in the heavens overhead, lighting the path over which I still journey.

On Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, and I fear I have reached the last day of the month without paying any homage to something I so deeply love. Like Jesse Stuart, I want to call out:

Hold onto April: never let her pass!Another year before she comes again…

But April has passed. Or will after the day ends. And I have spent it immersed in grant writing and Chasing Light…, when I wasn't chasing bills and laundry and all of the various and sundry things that came across my path this month.

The closest I got to poetry this month was watching the middle school poetry jam that was a Chasing Light… community event. That and catching some shards that our visiting composer used in his talks.

I used to write poetry. A lot of poetry. Poetry fascinated me, poetry held me. It was the warp and the woof of my most inner self. As late as my early 40s, I had a folder, some six inches thick, that contained poems and fragments of poems and ideas for poems dating back more than two decades.

But those were very bleak times and after one too many post-midnight inquisitions by an unstable spouse as to "who are you writing about?" or "what does this line mean?" or "what are you hiding?," I took the folder to the office and spent three hours shredding every last piece of poetry I had ever written.

My words were too dangerous to own.

I was numb as I sat there feeding the sheets into the shredder. That was a good thing, because otherwise I would have dropped to the floor from a broken heart that day.

Sometimes lines from the shredded works come back to me, like little ghosts. They shimmer and rustle in the air, fading away if I try too hard to sound them out.

Sometimes I think about writing poetry again. This week, spending time with our visiting composer and hearing him talk about composing music, I have found my thoughts often drifting to poetry.

Could I write poetry again? Will I remember how it feels to kindle words into light? Will I still know how to do it?

I don't know. Not counting an occasional parody or some light verse, I've only written two poems since the Day of the Shredder. Neither has been read aloud, not even to Warren.

Time will tell. It's another year until April comes again.

Healing Houses

Walking to my final United Way site visit on Friday, I ran into my friend Don, who said, "You know, Nora really likes that little house."

I replied, "I'm so glad! I always liked that little house."

Don nodded. "I think it's a real good house for her to be in."

Nora is a recently divorced mother of young children. She is in the process of reassembling her life and moving forward.

"That little house" is a post-war bungalow, one floor, on a quiet little street, just a block away from the neighborhood elementary school. About 1100 square feet; three bedrooms, one bath.

It is the house into which Sam and I moved in 2005, as I was starting my cancer treatment, and in which we lived, eventually joined by Warren, until the fall of 2008.

It was a healing house.

When I left my marriage, my life in pieces, my children's lives in shambles, my older son Ben and I moved into a newly renovated, spacious 1920s era apartment on the top floor of an 1889 commercial Italianate building in the heart of downtown Delaware.

Ben, a sophomore in high school, fled the house for some of the same reasons I did - peace, quiet, safety, our inalienable right to own our own lives.

Sam, only in 6th grade, was torn and hurt and shattered. It would be a year before he would agree to stay overnight with me, and only then because he missed his big brother, who refused to stay overnight with his father, so much.

The separation and divorce marked a terrible time in our lives. We all needed healing, but the apartment, while great space, was not a healing house. It held us together, temporarily and loosely, while we each started to reassemble the pieces of our lives. The divorce became final. Ben went to college, which became his great healing experience. Sam floated between his parents' respective addresses.

And then I got sick. Really, really sick. And the apartment, which was a 3rd story walkup up two flights of really steep, 1880s style stairs, became not only unaffordable but also unlivable.

Enter that little house. I found it driving around town looking for small places to rent. It was only three blocks from the high school. It was only 1100 square feet. It had no stairs. It had a Dutch door on the front and sunlight flooding every room.

An army of friends and family moved us in on a cold, wet March day. At some point, I whispered, "thank you so much. Now please go away." Sam and I were left alone in our new space. I was very ill. Sam was scared and anxious. The house wrapped itself around us. We stood there, listening to the silence. Sam smiled a little crooked smile. "This house feels really good." I nodded.

We didn't know it yet, but it was a healing house.

That first summer there, I had tandem stem cell transplants, each time returning to that little house to recuperate and grow well. Some days my biggest activity was walking to the rear sun porch and sitting down for the afternoon. Ben came home for college and he and Sam ran the household with and without me.

It was a healing house.

Sam's dad, who'd pledged never to abandon him and who had vilified me as the one who abandoned the family, moved abruptly out of state. Ben headed back to college. That left Sam and me together, creating a whole new family again.

It was a healing house.

It was while living in that little house that Sam rocketed through anger and depression before finally deciding he needed professional help, asking for it without any prompting.

It was a healing house.

My healing was physical and emotional. Badly battered by cancer, somewhat banged up and bruised by an ill-timed and worse-fated brief relationship, I needed that little house to retreat to, to reflect in, to grow strong again.

It was a healing house.

Later, when Warren was fleeing his own marriage, he moved in - severely underweight, unable to sleep more than a few hours at a time, scared for his emotional and physical safety. Slowly, he started to gain weight, sleep again, and take steps to assemble a new life.

It was a healing house.

After we married, after Warren regained possession of his own home, we made plans to move. Sam found an apartment. We gave up that little house.

I cried when that day came. It had been a healing house. It had become a healing home.

So I am not surprised one bit that Nora is finding it to be a good house. My hope and wish is that it is a healing house for her and her children too.

A friend, about to be divorced, is moving this weekend out of the house that she and her husband bought 18 years ago and in which most of their now adult children were raised. Like me, her long term marriage were marred by serious mental health issues that, ultimately, destroyed the fabric of the marriage and the family.

I wrote her: May we forever dwell in places that make us strong, ready to be surprised by joy.

That is a line from Around the House and In the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing and Home Improvement by Dominique Browning, written in the aftermath of her divorce. I have always loved the hope in that sentence.

May my friend's new apartment be a healing house.