The Luck Stops Here.

I wonder if it is easier to forgive a parent or a child.

In most cases, I'd say it would be easier to forgive a child because by definition, they should never be as old or learned as a parent.  Then again, I can see where forgiving a parent could be easier at certain times due to the more flexible thought processing of the youth.  Maybe it depends on the infraction.

Call me naive, but I can't see much use in holding a grudge these days.  Maybe it's because I have found that withholding forgiveness affects me much more negatively than it seems to affect the person I may grace with such an act.  Maybe it's because nothing that bad has ever happened to me.

I recently forgave my father, whom I had not had any contact with in almost 10 years, for failing to be the father I was supposed to have had.  If that's not the silliest sentence I've ever written.  Anyway, it wasn't easy.  Took me nearly ten years to come around to the idea.  We missed a lot of each other in that time - some of it needed to be missed, but probably not that amount.  Because of my lack of willingness to forgive, my father and his wife missed the birth and almost all of the first two years of their (only) grandson's life.  Hardly seems like a fair trade for not living up to my lofty expectations.  I am sorry it took me so long to learn to forgive, but oddly enough, I had to have a child teach me about it.  You see, once I had a child and became a father was the first time I could see how painful life might become if we couldn't find a way to forgiveness.

At first I thought, "Well, my father had a bad father, and I had a bad father, but my son has a great father.  My son and I are gonna break this chain." There's only one flaw in that thinking.  It assumes that I will either be a perfect father for the rest of my days, or that my son will need to learn how to forgive me at some point.  Well, how was I gonna teach him to do that?  Bingo.

I'm not the only one in my family with these issues.  My father-in-law, Mike, recently made peace with his mother after several years of estrangement.  What their issues were I don't really know,  I'm not entirely sure if I ever knew.  Actually, it doesn't matter.  What matters is that they found a way back to one another and to a place where they didn't have to hold on so tightly and expend so much energy on proving a point.  The point being, that somebody had let somebody down.

The downside of my father-in-law's story is that he and his mother were joined in this reconciliation by serious illness.  Mike's mother became terminally ill and recently passed away.  I am very proud of him for letting go of the anger and resentment he was carrying around before she was physically absolved of the material world.

I am not certain any of us did enough to say we were sorry to Mike when his mother died.  We sent messages and such, and I know that he knows we care, but I for one, am terrible at grieving the dead.  Always have been.  I cried more when my cat had to be put down than I did when my grandfather passed away.  I'll cry at a movie, a moving poem from The Writer's Almanac, even a particularly poignant episode of Parenthood, but death of a human, meh.  I don't know what it is, I'm just not good at it.

But, fortunately for Mike, his grandchildren are fantastic at cutting through the ephemera and useless emotions that tend to accompany such an event.  A few days after Mike lost his mother, he got letters from Sadie Bea (8 years) and Simon (6 years) - they call their grandfather, "Poppy":

Dear Poppy,


I am sorry to hear about your mom (drawing of sad face at the end of this sentence).  I know that you are sad, but it was time.  


Love you a lot,


Sadie Bea (with a little cartoon heart dotting the i)

Simon's offering of condolence was less nuanced, but quite frankly receives high marks for not dancing around the subject matter as much as his sister had.

(This written in the absurdly large and wobbly script of a person who is just now learning to write.)

Dear Poppy,


I am sorry that your mom died, but luckily she was ready to die.


Love,


Simon

Reportedly, Mike and his wife Rita were in tears at the reading of these letters.  Mike could not stop laughing at the wording the kids used.  "How lucky was that?" he would say to his wife.  "She was ready to die," and then they would burst out laughing.

When I was in high school a woman called our house one afternoon and my stepmother answered the phone.  After several minutes, she hung up and told me that the person who had called was related to my grandfather and they were calling to let my father know that his father was in a hospital (in Illinois, maybe) and he was going to die soon.  They wanted to let my dad know so that he could go see him, so that he could make peace with him.  My father declined.  In fact, when my stepmother told him about the call, my dad used some choice words to describe his old man and the variety of reasons for which he would not be booking an airline ticket any time soon.  Even at his funeral, my father was angry about the proceedings, the cost, etc...

I have visited my grandfather's grave several times - it is near my other grandparents' graves, so I kinda figure, you know, while I'm in the neighborhood.  I don't know why my dad and his brother couldn't bring themselves to forgive their father, we've never talked about it that much.  I do know that I have never heard anyone in our family tell one good story about my grandfather.  His epitaph reads something along the lines of, "Loving Husband, Devoted Father".  It would be as accurate to say, "Cured Polio, Walked on Moon".  

I am sure it stung to have to pay for that headstone as my father and his brother surely did.  I'm fairly certain that it must be rough to be told you've got a shot at burying the hatchet with your old man, only to leave him to die without you.  And I hope I never know what it's like to be on my deathbed and place the call only to have no one respond.

Of course by then, luckily I'll be ready to die.