The Open Window | Unexpected Forgiveness
This week in honor of Mother’s Day, I’m writing about forgiveness as I have experienced it. I know that it’s a controversial subject for many, as evidenced in the recent comments on my Huffington Post blog article Forgiveness–A Mother’s Day Gift.
As memoirists, of course we have to take a chance and tell our truths, which means being brave about sharing what we think and feel, despite whatever winds may blow. I’m joining my colleague Darcey Rojas in writing about forgiveness, though both of us decided this without the other knowing it–but we both had complicated mothers who had to contend with mental illness. Please go over and read her thoughtful and inspiring blog too.
This piece is about my grandmother who raised me, a complex person whom I often feared, but whom I loved as a mother. She raised me, she saved me, she was with me as I grew up. I guess that’s what a mother is.
The old woman looked at me with an uncharacteristic glow, her deep brown eyes peaceful for the first time in years. For the last few years, I’d tried to escape my grandmother, her ballistic rants and thunderstorm moods, her hatred and grudges. But it’s not so easy when Gram was the only “parent” who cared enough to raise me. Still, the last sixteen years of her 8 hour a day rants—when she was in the mood–have worn me down.
Today I came to visit her in a convalescent home, after having just seen my father, who was dying of cancer of the liver. A dark cloud hung around me, the shreds of history woven by Gram and my father, a long war they’d waged for years. When I walked in the room, I decided that one word against him, and I’d walk out. I’d had enough of their hate and anger.
The history of these battles tied knots around my heart. When I was ten, Gram forced me to write hate letters to my father, and he answered in kind, letters addressed to me, letters filled with rage: damn bastard, greedy, no-good—accusations and counter accusations. I could feel a history I knew little about—he married my mother after a quick courtship, I was born 10 months later, and he was gone the first year of my life. Mother left me with her mother when I was four. Dishes were thrown when mother came to visit, vile words flung about during visits by both parents. My psyche was littered with the debris of war, sharpened knives of wounding words, saddlebags of grudges.
Today she looked so small lying there on the white sheets, her eyes soft, her voice like the Gram who used to brush my hair from my face and murmur, “You’re my Sugar Pie.” She was mother and father, best friend, advocate for reading, history, literature, foreign languages, the piano and cello, passionate about college and learning—everything she might have wanted for herself in another era.
Her slim fingers reached for my hand. “I have something important to tell you.”
The air in the room was not so dark and heavy as it used to be at home, and she appeared to be light, as in weightless, unburdened, so unlike her. What had happened to her since my last visit nearly two years ago when I ran from the house to escape her rage and hateful words?
She began telling me about her week in the Catholic hospital, St. Mary’s, how a priest would visit her, finding her weeping every day. In the last few years, she was either enraged or crying.
“He told me that he could see my troubles, and he said he could help. He prayed with me, and then he offered me the last rites of the church.”
I tried not to react, but a jolt of fear ran through me—that ritual was conducted when someone was dying. Was she dying? I knew of her deep conflicts with religion—angry when I became a Baptist, and angry later when I decided to become an Episcopalian. She would thumb through a Catholic prayer book, but she never went to church during the years she raised me. “A bunch of damn hypocrites, that’s all they are,” she’d say. I looked at her face now, serene, nearly unwrinkled as she went on with her story. She couldn’t be dying.
“My sins have been forgiven. I feel lighter.” She smiled, again the kind of smile she’d give me years ago, when we first began. She reached for my hand again., “Honey, will you please forgive me for hating your father all those years? I know he’s ill, and I’m so sorry.”
My mind stopped for a moment, shocked to hear her speak about him without rancor, even with compassion. Forgive her? I couldn’t lie to her, but her request was so unexpected, I wasn’t prepared for it. I was 25 years old, with a lifetime of unresolved stuff, a mountain of unfinished business that I imagined had been swept under a rug that reached to the ceiling. My heart was closed for self-protection. How could I trust and open to someone who had been so focused on her hate? I’d nearly given up on her, but here she was reaching out to me. I searched for a place in my heart, a corner, a small room with a window where forgiveness might be possible.
I don’t know how much time went by. It seemed that my whole history flashed in a kaleidoscope of images—the nights in high school when I cried every midnight, the welts from her yardstick, the sweetness of her hugs when I was little, her passion about WWII, England, Queen Elizabeth, Beethoven, piano music, and mostly travel, how her eyes would light up in the Nash Rambler on the road to Iowa every summer, how she loved the train, and the silver tea service, linen napkins and continental style of living. Silk dresses. Red lipstick. How she had seeded all this in me.
I found that open window—a gentle wind blew a lace curtain and the sun blessed us. Something in me melted and softened. “Gram, it’s okay. I forgive you.”
I knelt beside her, and she smiled. “Who knows, maybe I’ll even live for awhile.”
I’d not heard her be glad about living for 10 years—more than once she’d threatened to die and haunt me. But she meant it now, I could see it in her eyes, how she was lifted from her darkness. I would learn later that there’s a name for her ailment: depression-but then it was just the way things were.
Two weeks later she died on my birthday, leaving me with the blessing of being able to forgive her. Even though it was incomplete—it would take a few more decades to deal with the mountain buried under the rug—but in that moment on that day, the light in her eyes, her apology, and my acceptance was a blessing, the most profound moment of my life.