Pesky Forgiveness

While sitting on my therapist’s sofa, I listed what was happening in my life. Donna had nearly died of a pancreatic attack while not being able to eat the diet that prevents them. While in the hospital our basement rained sewage and the septic tank needed repair. She was fighting Lichen Sclerosis and everything that creates, plus a failed knee replacement. I had my own physical problems. All three of my biological children are dead. My business flooded. Then burnt down. Then failed.

Don’t judge. It was a rough couple of weeks and I was just talking.

He asked what normal meant. That is a whole other conversation. Eventually he landed on a word I was not expecting, the F word.

Not that F word. I said that one way too often in my early grief. No, the other one. The one that every complicated grief sufferer chokes on.

Forgiveness.

I have been a Christian for 48 years. I could teach a class on forgiveness. I have heard a thousand sermons. I could tell you the Greek root and the theological weight and the Sunday school answer. But sitting on that sofa with the list I had just rattled off, the word sounded like it belonged to someone else’s language. I knew what it meant the way I know what skydiving means. I can describe it. I have never jumped.

I did what I do with things I am not ready for. I moved on. We talked about something else. I drove home.

That was a year ago.

In that year, I was unemployed and trying to find work with the stress of keeping everything from collapsing at once. I did not write. I barely read my old posts. I was not avoiding grief on purpose. That is what I told myself. Of course I was still grieving. But avoidance is the thing grievers do when we are too exhausted to grieve and too honest to pretend we are fine. We just stop looking at it and hope it stops looking at us.

It does not stop looking.

I came back to my writing recently and realized something I had not seen before. I have written about yelling at God. About guilt as a parent. About friends who disappeared. About the silence of prayer. Dozens of posts. Thousands of words. And I have never once written the word forgiveness. Not once, across seven years.

I circled it. I described every wound it touches. I named the anger and the guilt and the abandonment and the silence. I documented all of it and never named the thing underneath.

So I am going to try.

God did not intervene. Friends and family quietly disappeared. People near Caleb in his last hours did not pick up a phone. Me, the protecting father, who did not see it coming.

And Caleb left.

I do not know where this goes. Forgiveness might be the wrong word entirely. Something that precise, that clean, might not fit what happened to us. It might be blasphemous to aim it at a God who has done no wrong. It might not even be possible for a human being carrying this much weight.

I heard the word a year ago on that sofa and I was not ready. I am not sure I am ready now. But I have run out of hallway and the word is still sitting in the room, waiting for me to stop pretending it is not there.