Forgiveness - Who have you forgiven this year and what was the journey like that brought you to forgive them?

My father was a hard man, hands of stone and an icy glare that could chill me to the core. I was afraid of those hands, afraid of what they might do next, afraid of the hurt they brought with them when they reached toward me. Make no mistake; if they were coming for me there was no good reason, I was in trouble.

I remember his smile, the way it changed his face and made him look almost happy. He was always the life of every party and could make you laugh with his razor sharp wit. He walked with large steps that ate up the ground like a hungry animal, forcing me to almost run beside him when we were going somewhere. He never held my hand, not to cross the street or to help me keep up; not to be close to me or make me feel safe.

My childhood was devoid of hugs or soft words, he never said, “I love you,” or even, “I love you too.” He wasn’t one for saying, “good job”, or “I am proud of you”. The stale stench of old beer warped the words aimed at me when I was little; I grew to hate that smell. He called me stupid and worthless; he told me I was lazy and weak. I never stopped trying, but I never made him proud.

I never saw him cry, and learned early not to let him see me doing so. He never talked about his father—a man I never met—or his stepfather, a man I never knew existed until years later. I knew little of his past other than the war; he had killed people in Viet-Nam and despite his best attempts to hide it, it haunted him. There were nights when the beers tasted too good, or the world was being too demanding, and he would find himself there again, scared and alone, fighting to live. He would flip the table and duck behind it; hiding from some imagined attacker trying to kill him. He would return fire from an invisible rifle, and scream to get down.

The police would always come, and he’d go away for a while, leaving my brother and me to live with family, or in foster care. I always missed him while he was gone, he was hard and mean, but I loved him like no other and couldn’t imagine life without him. The last time he went away they came for us in school, told us we couldn’t go home that night. When asked when we would be able to go home, they would smile and fidget as they said they really didn’t know.

I remember a supervised visit; it was in a small park down the road from the house we grew up in. He told us he was getting better and we would come home when the state said it was okay. He said he loved us and things would be better then.  When we did move back home we had a new step-mother and lived with her, her son, and our new step-grandmother. There were six of us in a three bedroom house, I slept in a closet.

A year later he sent me to live at a reformatory because I was too much trouble and he couldn’t handle me anymore. I eventually convinced him to let me come back home, but not for long, I was still trouble: smoking pot and staying out all night; skipping school and shoplifting. When I was fourteen he invited me to leave and never come back. I only saw him once after that day—a week later, on my birthday—he told me he was done with me for good. I choked back the tears that burned in my eyes that day; refusing to let him see them, ashamed to even need them. He hated me, and I hated him back.

Years later, when I was caged like the animal I was, I learned he was dying. He was given a year and was closing in on it. I wrote him a letter and told him I knew I wasn’t easy as a boy; I told him I still loved him and wish I could have seen him one last time. I can’t say I truly believed the words as I wrote them but I needed to let it go. I needed to say them in order to make them real.

He wrote me back and his words made me cry. I sat in prison, tears streaming down my face, and read them over and over. He lived another year after that and I was able to speak to him on the phone once or twice before he went. We were civil and I tried to act like I knew the man on the other end of the line but I couldn’t help but feel like I was talking to a stranger. I asked him if he was ready to go, and he said he was. He was gone from my life only a month later.

At the end of last year I was in contact with a cousin of mine that I hadn’t seen since before I was thrown out. She was older than I and had moved a couple hours away; we made plans to meet when I was going to be in her town doing some work. She was cool and smart, we had a great time; we went to a bar and had a few drinks, made each other laugh, and found out we had the same twisted sense of humor.

After a few drinks, she asked me about my father. I recounted the story of the letters and told her that I had given him my forgiveness, still not really believing it. That was when she turned to me and said that she missed him now that he was gone; she said that he was always her favorite. She told me a story about him sending her a picture he had kept of her in his pocket while away in Viet-Nam.

“He was your favorite?” I asked, my breath burning in my lungs as I fought to breathe.

What she said next changed my life. She told me about my father’s childhood, about things that I never knew—never could have guessed. I learned of a monster in my father’s young life. I learned that he had protected his younger siblings as best he could, faced his demon head on, sacrificed himself in a way I never could. She told me about a child that had been abused by a creature I can’t imagine, a child with my father’s face.

As I stood there hearing these words, I felt guilt oozing over me like syrup. My father had lived a nightmare, but no matter how bad things were for me, he never visited that kind of pain on me. These revelations don’t excuse the man he was, they don’t make it okay, but they do explain it. I knew then, without question, that even though he never said the words, he did love me. He had shielded me from his past, from the horrors that visited him in his sleep. Between his childhood and the war, my father had seen his share of pain.

I still struggle to let his memory rest in my mind. I make an effort everyday to forgive him for the things that I can’t forget. I want him to rest in peace, to find a calm I never saw in him. I need to give his memory the freedom it deserves so I can start forgiving myself for the mistakes I’ve made, and the disaster my life has become.