Like most things that are less cerebral and more emotionally based, there is no way to properly describe forgiveness until you experience it. Even then, words are bound to fall short because human language is not equipped to elucidate matters that are divine, and yet, here I go...
I have always had a complicated relationship with my father. Love mixed with hate. Real hatred, born of real wounds, and real love that a child always has for her parents. It is not the time to recount the specifics, but suffice it to say: the gripes were legitimate, and the pain was excruciating. Over the years I had broached the subject of my upbringing with my father in an attempt to get some closure, hoping for an apology, longing for the perfect circle of forgiveness and reconciliation. I never got that apology. Not even remotely. I never felt that forgiveness. But I knew I must. So I forgave, with my words. I let go with my hands and mind, as often as i could, of the bitterness they clung to. I prayed for a softened heart toward him. In a practical sense, I forgave him seventy times seven as prescribed. The problem is that forgiveness is not practical. I was practicing forgiveness like a piano song where the same passage gives you fits over and over again no matter how many times you rehearse it and your fingers still reach out for the discordant notes. The sadness, madness, bitterness and feelings of abandonment always returned, in their sneaky way, at times and places where I wasn't prepared for them.
This weekend I returned to the "redrum" home of my last three years of high school. I returned to what I view as the dark endroit to blame for being the scenery behind the painful memories so gloomily painted in my mind: 44 Tower Rd. As I have chronicled in my pictures of the place, a picture can tell a very different story. The place is like a cottage from a fairy tale now that it is finished (as it was under construction the years I lived there and several after that). Deer bound and mice and squirrels abound and if you are lucky every once in awhile a skunk rears its tail and the smell lingers for a few sweet hours.
It was the last day of summer and sun shone and danced off the breeze driven branches of the oak, maple, elm and birch trees that still proudly wore their chlorophyll induced summer green glory. The cottony wisps of clouds sailed by, propelled by the brisk breeze that hailed fall in its wake. We sat in the cobblestone courtyard, which much to my dismay (and this is really my only aesthetic disappointment with the grand home in its current finely appointed state) was decorated by the same pink adirondack chairs that every idiot alpha male I know buys instead of spending a few more dollars to get gorgeous wooden ones that would so much more befit the setting. Four cedar adirondacks would have completed the visual so much more eloquently, but I've chased that rabbit too far already.
Back to the subject at hand. While we were sitting there in the courtyard hydrating ourselves, as I am the undisputed queen of hydration, I was overwhelmed by the shock and awe of the ease of forgiveness. Forgiveness wasn't what I had been practicing. It was poured out all over me and flowed through me, unbidden and unrecognized. I have no idea when it came, or how, it just was. I loved that man who sat across from me, scheming a way to catch all the frogs that were running amok in his gardens, sipping his "good stuff" that I had just "topped off" for him. I loved him like you love your child, unconditionally, the way you can only love an adult when they have become benjamin button and now express what they know in their vastly clever brain through the jumbled up free word association of a child who is unfettered by the rules of grammar and unhindered by the vernacular use of words.
The ridiculous things he said made me laugh, because as his child, I understood where they came from even though they would make sense to no one else. We all laughed together because we knew that in that laugh there was only mirth and no derision. We remembered Wendy as his amazingly fun, funny, clever, vivacious wife and our most amazing mother. We shared stories, even though they were wildly fabricated and mostly had nothing to do with us, as if they were our own.
I did his bidding, looking for the mice (leaves that his cataract ridden eyes saw as furry brown mice as they skittered across the cobblestone) that were so trickily escaping under the outdoor furniture in an attempt to avoid his skillful detection. I went on a fool's errand to find the frogs and the water that we would need in order to flood them out of their hiding place. I cleaned his wounds when John vs. the barn door and kitty's decorations did not leave John the victor this time. I patched him up and gave him his meds.
We spoke with a "bossy" hospice nurse with an Irish name (aren't they all bossy and Irish?) and gave her a little what for right back. We hunkered down in his man cave for half stories about the days of old, until he realized he'd quite mistold an important part of the story, whistled at himself "heehoo" and declared it was not his day. We realized that we were all professional gardeners and could, thanks to his instinct for detail, mow a lawn in straight lines. Pro and mow, pro and mo. He made clever number associations that at first just seemed like gibberish and then turned out to be some sort of scene straight out of a beautiful mind. We respected his pride and sense of privacy while helping him like Miriam and Aaron, one each at his sides. A man who had in the past been eager to see his daughters go, asked, "What's this talk I hear about you leaving? You don't have anything you need to do? Who said you have to go? Stay Here." You can't know how nice it is to have your presence desired by your father at long last. Inside, everyone is just a broken little kid looking for the validation of their daddy.
There aren't words to express the slow teeming surprise with which forgiveness welled up from the center of that courtyard. I laid there in an unmitigated blanket of warmth toward my father and felt free.
