I mean, not very often.
I learned from all my teachers that when I feel like shoveling in food, a man, or expensive purchases, the emptiness can be filled only with love—a nap with the dogs, singing off-key with my church. Or maybe, perhaps, a fig.
I learned that opening myself to my own love and to life’s tough loveliness not only was the most delicious, amazing thing on earth but also was quantum. It would radiate out to a cold, hungry world. Beautiful moments heal, as do real cocoa, Pete Seeger, a walk on old fire roads. All I ever wanted since I arrived here on earth were the same things I needed as a baby, to go from cold to warm, lonely to held, the vessel to the giver, empty to full. You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you’re dirty and rattled. Who knew?
Dad
No one can prove that God does or doesn’t exist, but tough acts of forgiveness are pretty convincing for me. It is so not my strong suit, and I naturally prefer the company of people who hold grudges, as long as they are not held against me. Forgiveness is the hardest work we do. When, against all odds, over time, your heart softens toward truly heinous behavior on the part of parents, children, siblings, and everyone’s exes, you almost have to believe that something not of this earth snuck into your stone-cold heart.
Left to my own devices, I’m a forgiveness denier—I’ll start to think that there are hurts so deep that nothing can heal them. Time alone won’t necessarily do the trick. Our best thinking isn’t enough, or we would all be fine, instead of in our current condition. A lack of forgiveness is like leprosy of the insides, and left untreated, it can take out tissue, equilibrium, soul, sense of self. I have sometimes considered writing a book called All the People I Still Hate: A Christian Perspective, but readers would recoil. Also, getting older means that without meaning to, you accidentally forgive almost everyone—almost—so the book would not be long.
You forgive your mother, for having had such terrible self-esteem, dependent on being of value to all men, everywhere, in every way. You forgive her for not having risen up, for not teaching you how to be an autonomous, beautiful woman, for not teaching you how to use eyeliner and blotting papers, and for not having been able to lose the extra fifty pounds that led to childhood embarrassment and your own lifetime obsessions. You forgive your father, for—well, you know—everything. The masculine shut-downedness, for which only the Germans have a word, the faithlessness, the drinking, and the general contempt for women, with their icky, messy, mysterious bodies and minds. You forgive all but the very worst boyfriend, with whom even Jesus struggles. You forgive awful bosses, gravely incompetent doctors. You forgive your child’s peers who bullied him or first got him smoking cigarettes or weed. You forgive your professional rival, especially if you surpass him in stature, and his books sell poorly, and his hair falls out, and people can finally see what a generally loathsome pervert and fraud he is, ideally in the book review section of The New York Times. You mostly forgive life for being so unfair, for having stolen away from and saddled us with so much, for being so excruciating to most of the world. You even semi-sort-of-mostly forgive yourself, for being so ridiculous, such a con, a nervous case, a loser.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a giant wound is created, revealed, reopened. Your child has grown to hate and blame you, bear false witness against you; or your sister’s ex charges someone in the family with a ghastly crime to wreak revenge. Or someone steals your retirement savings. Or your ex marries an adorable, mature teenager.
I have been known to hold the random grudge, usually against a really rotten egg. Yet for two years recently I was quite mad at my dad—the person I loved best.
The problem with this is that he has been dead for thirty-four years. Also, he died tragically, way too young. So you’d think I might cut him some slack.
Nah.
I was, seriously, a perfect daughter. I got great grades for him, kept the family together, rubbed his feet, and read way beyond my years, starting at five, like a cross between a geisha and Susan Sontag. Later I could dazzle his friends with my charm. He loved this. I overlooked the weaknesses in his character, and the destruction these weaknesses wrought on our family. I made him drinks, I drank with him. I became who I am—a writer, intellectual, conversationalist—to please him.
I was twenty-three when he got sick with brain cancer in his early fifties, after which I devoted myself to his care. I hung out with him every day, because his girlfriend, D, and my older brother had jobs and my younger brother was in high school. I took him to most of his doctor appointments, chemo, radiation, for two years. I kept hope alive when his mind was still working, and then I became his hospice care and mother when it failed.
I never quite got over his death, not really, and I missed him beyond words. So much of his life and passions—literature, hiking, birds, writing—became mine. Except for these weaknesses of character—wine, women, the way he’d treated my mom—he’d been a great father, handsome and witty to boot, like a Kennedy.
However, a few years ago I came upon a journal he kept for the first year of his brain cancer. Actually, D sent it from the East Coast, where she lived with her husband of thirty years, with a note saying she thought I would want to have it. She and I had not spoken since Dad died. He had been diagnosed only one month after they fell in love, and while we knew she’d gotten a bum deal, there had been distance between her and my brothers and me both while Dad was alive and after he died.
I dove into the journal, the lake of my father being alive again, so glad to hear his voice, looking forward to the good memories—mostly, of course, of him and me.
But instead, he wrote about how comforting D’s company and devotion were, along with some harsh things about me, such as how unpleasant it was that I was sometimes so emotional. For example, I cried openly because the person I loved most was dying so young. He wrote some things about how I tried too hard to be brave and hopeful. He wrote: “Annie came to the hospital, full of the usual false good cheer and bad jokes.”
After reading this, I felt as though everything in the known world was now open to dispute. I was stung, shaken to my boots. I didn’t even know where to start processing this. So I cut him off.
My heart was hard by the next day, when the tears stopped. I put him out, literally; I took his journal to the garage. I summoned what self-esteem I could, and anger. The hell with him. What a dead guy. Talk about losers. Seriously—dead as a doornail. I had spent my life trying to get him to honor me. I needed to get on with my own life.
Yeah, right.
Despite talking about the betrayal with my best friends, my therapist, and my younger brother, who had been barely mentioned in the journal, I could not let go of the resentment. The bruise went so deep. Besides, it was intoxicating. Resentments make even the best of us feel superior. I’ve always found a kind of comfort in them, as if they were wire monkey moms, a place to hold on that is better than nothing.
I passed through all the stations of the cross—the hurt, numbness, disgust, the thoughts of revenge, the reversion to Tony Soprano’s childish response to his mother—“You’re dead to me.” This was not a recipe for self-respect, to be almost sixty, acting ten. You are so dead to me—double dead, infinity dead.
Addicts and alcoholics will tell you that their recovery began when they woke up in pitiful and degraded enough shape to take Step Zero, which is: “This shit has got to stop.” Fortunately, with twenty-six years of church, twenty-five years of recovery from alcoholism, twenty years of brilliant if intermittent therapy, and the loving friends in my inner sanctum, I got to Step Zero in only a year. Well, maybe a year and a half.
Growing up is not going nearly as efficiently as I had hoped.
Finally, though, I climbed out of my hole onto Step Zero. I’d had my fill of being in the hole of self-righteousness. I was no longer willing to let this neon in
sult overload me and wipe out whatever other visions I might have of life, and of myself.
Somehow I had a fleeting sense of doubt that something had been done to me, as opposed to my father’s having acted out of his own fears and compulsions, his need to convey his truth, as I had acted out of mine, and D had acted out of hers, in sending me the journal without warning me of its contents. And I mean fleeting, but still a crack.
The beginning of forgiveness is often exhaustion. You’re pooped; thank God.
You don’t get there by willpower. The readiness comes from the movement of wisdom and good will, or what maybe in a crazy moment of abandon I’d call grace. To take far loftier examples than our own, people told Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, “If you stop now, all those lives will have been in vain.” But he said, “Enough. It’s over.” After 1945, instead of people saying, “Let’s pound the Germans into the ground,” the Marshall Plan came to be. Let’s rebuild. Let’s help our enemies rebuild, and see what happens.
Something deeply mysterious jiggles loose in us that finally says, I’m going to let it go, instead of breathing the hot little flame into a conflagration.
I was done not forgiving my father or D, though I wanted to forgive them, which was a start, but I felt like a shivering blue child being told to jump into the cold pool.
Horribly, when all you want is relief from the pain, you instead need to tune in to it, right in to the lonely clench. You need to know how much the toxin has invaded you.
So I began to breathe into the fist, like loosening a knot. I raised my eyes to my father, who actually wert in heaven, and this put him in perspective: he didn’t get to be alive anymore. He had paid. What a flawed and complex person, so erudite and brilliant. Who looked at the track marks on my fifteen-year-old brother’s arms and pretended not to see. And who stood vigil at San Quentin when they gassed someone. Who orchestrated a warm, active relationship between his children and his mistress, all while still married to our mother. Who took us all clamming at minus tides, dug around with trowels in the sopping sand at dawn, then made us clam chowder for dinner. Who wrote like a dream and made a living as a writer, and yet died in debt. Who betrayed his longtime mistress, with whom he’d betrayed our mother. Who lived as much as he could the Emerson line “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.” Who faced his death with a lot of dignity. Who was who he was who he was.
I will never know where that willingness to see him came from, although talking with friends is where most of my insight comes from. As my heart softened slightly, my gut, the seat of the pain, rose in wonder, like a brass band, and said, “Hey, wait—I support this. I support you.”
Seeing him as a human provided me with the courage to stand up to the resentment and say, I’m not going to let you rob me anymore of my sense of modest generosity.
People like to say, “Forgiveness begins with forgiving yourself.” Well, that’s nice. Thank you for sharing. It does and it doesn’t. To think you know is proof that you don’t. But forgiveness sure doesn’t begin with reason. The rational insists that it is right, that we are right. It is about attacking and defending, which means there can be no peace. It loves the bedtime story of how we’ve been injured. The rational is claustrophobic, too. The choice is whether you want to stay stuck in being right but not being free or admit you’re pretty lost and possibly available for a long, deep breath, which is as big as the universe, stirs the air around, maybe opens a window.
I called on spirit, whom I usually picture as either a breeze or Isaac Stern, but this time I saw a psychiatrist with a clipboard. She listened, said, “Hmm,” nodding as I spewed it all out—the wrong, the blame, the exhaustion. Hmm. If someone listens, deeply, you’ve been heard, which helps you absorb it, and you can lay it at the feet of the right god. You can forgo the arithmetic of adding up the damage again, lay your Bartleby ledger in your lap, and look up. Looking up is the way out. And Hmm is very close to Omm, which is the sound of the universe. Hmm, she said: good work.
I felt as if I had gotten a leg and most of one shoulder out from the bell jar. There was fresh air on my skin. Rumi wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” In that field, you’re under a wide swath of sky, so the story becomes almost illimitable, instead of two small nutty people with grievances and popguns. You have to leave your crate, though; this will not happen inside your comfort zone. But if you can make a break for that field, you might forget all the whys, the nuance, details, and colors about the story that you’re sure you’ve gotten right, that doom you.
So you sacrifice the need to be right, because you have been wronged, and you put down the abacus that has always helped you keep track of things. This jiggles you free from clutch and quiver. You can unfurl your fingers, hold out your palm, openhanded.
At some point in the process, I remembered something my vet said years ago when my old dog Sadie was dying. He said, “Most of her is fine, and still loves being here. Very little of her is diseased.” So I looked around for any healthy tissue. I’d published a novel that was a love letter to my family and D. I had honored them, captured my family’s finest, funniest moments, and with this novel, my career began. I was swamped with memories unspooling backward from my father’s death, through all the years, to the first time I remember him, when I was two or three, buttoning my sweater. Spooling forward through the years, walking with him as often as we could after he got sick, and how long he refused to acknowledge that his brain was damaged, even after he wrote notes to himself directly on his girlfriend’s kitchen table, bypassing the need for paper or index cards, while looking as professorial as ever. Even as he combed the cats with barbecue tongs, which I am probably weeks away from doing myself, and which the cats loved. At one of his last outpatient appointments, when D and I had to support him from the car, as if he were blotto, the oncologist asked if he was having any trouble walking. My father thought this over, and said no, not that he’d noticed. Then he turned to his girlfriend and me, puzzled by this odd question, and asked: Had we? We both shrugged, innocent as Little Rascals, not wanting to hurt his feelings. No, no, we hadn’t noticed anything.
I also had a soupçon of knowledge: You know by a certain age that, contrary to appearances, all of us are weird, with our squinchiness, jabs, denial, judgment, tone deafness, and we can also be so lovely that it breaks your heart.
Months after the journal arrived, I wrote a note to D, apologizing for how long it had taken me to thank her for sending the journal. I sent love, and meant it, which was a miracle.
Forgiving people doesn’t necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
I wish there’d been a shortcut, but the wound had to be revealed to heal. Lack of forgiveness seemed like a friend, the engine that drove my life, with a hot little motor that was weirdly invigorating. It had helped me survive.
Some time later, D sent me photographs of her daughters and grandchildren. I was humbled, and glad for her. She had cared for my father at her home for almost two years, and in our family’s tiny cabin above a Pacific reef the last months. I began to feel a kind of head-tilted-to-the-side fondness for her.
I sent her photos of my brothers, my son, his son. We were out of the old equation, no longer engaging in the Rube Goldberg machine of clutch, scratch, poke, and point. I remembered her piecrusts. I remembered going on walks with her and my dad, when we’d be in the woods so early that the rabbits would still be playing poker.
Effervescent bubbles of absurdity floated in. I was no longer giving myself away to something that no longer existed, that I may have made up. Who knows how much of our stories are true? In any case, when I stopped giving myself away, my father came back. I hadn’t realized how desperately I’d missed him. I mean, he was my d
ad.
Forgiveness is release from me; somehow, finally, I am returned to my better, dopier self, so much lighter when I don’t have to drag the toxic chatter, wrangle, and pinch around with me anymore. Not that I don’t get it out every so often, for old time’s sake. But the trapped cloud is no longer nearly so dark or dense. It was blown into wisps, of smoke, of snow, of ocean spray.
Ashes
Ash Wednesday came early this year. It was supposed to be about preparation, about consecration, about moving toward Easter, toward resurrection and renewal. It offers us a chance to break through the distractions that keep us from living the basic Easter message of love, of living in wonder rather than doubt. For some people, it is about fasting, to symbolize both solidarity with the hungry and the hunger for God. (I, on the other hand, am not heavily into fasting: the thought of missing even a single meal sends me running in search of Ben & Jerry’s Mint Oreo.)
There are many ways to honor the day, but as far as I know, there is nothing in Scripture or tradition setting it aside as the day on which to attack one’s child and then to flagellate oneself while the child climbs a tree and shouts down that he can’t decide whether to hang himself or jump, even after it is pointed out nicely that he is only five feet from the ground.
But I guess every family celebrates in its own way.
Let me start over. You see, I tried at breakfast to get Sam interested in Ash Wednesday. I made him cocoa and gave a rousing talk on what it all means. We daub our foreheads with ashes, I explained, because they remind us of how much we miss and celebrate those who have already died. The ashes remind us of the finality of death. As the theologian said, death is God’s no to all human presumption. We are sometimes like the characters in Waiting for Godot, where the only visible redemption is the eventual appearance in Act Two of four or five new leaves on the pitiful tree. On such a stage, how can we cooperate with grace? How can we open ourselves up to it? How can we make room for anything new? How can we till the field? And so people also mark themselves with ashes to show that they trust in the alchemy God can work with those ashes—jogging us awake, moving us toward greater attention and openness and love.