SEC17 WK:#1: Forgiveness unites family [Carrying the Torch]

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Carrying the Torch

Just a heads-up: If you’re feeling vulnerable, this might be a difficult read, so don’t feel bad about skipping it. I get it.

The far distant past. Single-celled organisms start spreading across the primordial soup. Eventually, photosynthesis develops. Eukaryotes, multicellular life. Fast forward through the Cambrian Explosion, multiple ice ages, and human evolution. A ceramic plate gets flung through the air and splashes apart beside someone’s head. An exchange of unintelligible screams, the sound of doors being slammed shut. Then someone can be heard cowering in a corner, reluctantly sobbing about something that can’t be helped. This is life.

I remember standing in my grandma’s basement, gently leaning into an improvised noose. I couldn’t do it, and now I was fighting the urge to cry. I don’t even know what I was potentially crying about. Maybe it was self-pity, or the expression of some kind of vague hurt. Could've been the realization of personal defeat and the feeling of powerlessness going along with it. Honestly, I didn’t know what was going on, just that… I was giving up. Whatever "this" was, it wasn’t for me, but I couldn’t even do "that" right.

For the vast majority of people, life seems to be suffering. Not necessarily in the agony sense, but in terms of an underlying feeling of constant dissatisfaction. Like a buzzing mosquito in the silence of the night, or some form of emotional tinnitus you can’t seem to get rid of. It’s there and it doesn’t go away, but what does this have to do with forgiveness? In my opinion, everything. I’ll try to explain.

Our suffering as a principle might be universal to the human condition, but it’s still highly contextual. What do I mean? Even if you’re unable to get rid of suffering entirely, you still don’t have to be a slave to it, so don’t make it more powerful than it needs to be. Whatever we’re suffering from individually, whatever we deem important enough to hold a grudge over, maybe it’s not that important after all. Especially when compared to other people’s suffering, or in the context of the larger picture.

You might think, easier said than done. True. I’m also painfully aware of my musings slowly devolving into fortune cookie territory, but just stick with me. I’m not trying to negate the legitimacy of your suffering, or whatever seems to be torturing you. I guess I’m trying to highlight the possibility of moving on, as a personal decision. To contradict myself: What I consider a horrible injustice, you might consider an amusing anecdote and vice versa. Ultimately, the power of individual experiences seems proportional to the importance we’ll attribute to them, often related to our own feeling of self-importance.

When thinking about my mother, I mostly remember the smell of cigarettes and her chewing her own nails, when she wasn’t fighting with my dad. After their divorce, she got herself an apartment and for a while she seemed happy. Sooner or later, she always would relapse into habitual anxiety and then fall sick. Despite her coming close to dying, I still don’t remember much about it. I stopped caring. I only remember being by myself and waiting in front of her hospital room.

For the longest time, I had a grudge against my mom. Part of me considered her weak and thought that weakness was rubbing off. She was like a drama magnet, seemingly determined to ruin everybody’s life by proxy. One time I was acting up and she would hogtie me with duct-tape, like I was Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle. Another time we would watch television and she had some sort of seizure, but I would just go stoic and only pay peripheral attention to the circus that would unfold around her.

Long story short. Whatever was going on in her life, she didn’t care or realize what I was going through in mine. Maybe it wasn’t important compared to her own suffering. Or it could’ve been something else entirely, just something that was beyond her ability to fix. Who knows. It wasn’t like she could explain her bottled-up problems to me either, even if she wanted to. Then my own selfishness contributed to that grudge I was holding towards her.

When I was older, my father told me about my mom’s childhood. Her own mother was always difficult. A thickheaded German woman, pretty religious at that, and old enough to remember the war. Roman Catholic, old school. My great-grandpa was living with them at the time and my mom loved him. Still a little girl, he would end up shooting a neighbor and injuring my grandma with a rifle. Depending on who you ask, he also killed a cop, but who knows. Either way, apparently, he raised the rifle against his granddaughter as well, but then he killed himself instead.

I’m not sure what’s true or not, but I figure it’s one of those things my mom never was able to move on from. A permanent thorn in her side she was told she mustn’t talk about. In the same vein, I figure my great-grandad was dealing with his own suffering. This isn’t a justification, but we’re all part of this relay race of pain, handing it down one generation to the next. Call it original sin, call it karma, whatever. You don’t have to carry that torch. You don’t have to accept it. I really do believe it’s your personal choice. Just drop it.

In a sense, the world is really out to get you and will crush you if you let it. But then despite all those injustices, the senseless cruelty, and the hatred, generally speaking, not holding on to pain is in your rational self-interest. It doesn’t mean whatever you’re feeling isn’t justified, but has it made a difference for the better? Somehow you must find a way of fighting back without succumbing yourself. Forgiveness might be one way.