I’ve always thought others urging you to forgive and forget was contrived and insincere because I don’t believe that you can do it at will. It is just not easy and and many of us (if not all) will go to our graves with a grudge, a hurt, a wound, or a gaping hole in our hearts.
For far too many years, I hated these people in my life. They’ve wounded me deeply when I was younger and the very mention of their names used to bring waves of revulsion. On the best days, I could forget they existed. On the worst, I couldn’t function. My mind and others told me to forgive. I made a resolution every time, just like New Year’s eve resolutions to find help for my insomnia. But it just didn’t and couldn’t happen. What I felt was far beneath the ministrations of the outside world or even my mind. I just couldn’t get to it.
Until now.
The blessed month brought the usual family phone calls and banter. The names eventually came up in conversation the way they always did. I couldn’t believe it the first time so I actually brought their names up myself a few times afterward. I felt nothing. No pain, no sickness in the pit of my stomach, no anger, no imaginary talk where I scream at their face and say everything I’ve ever wanted to say. Nothing. I wonder if this is forgiveness. I wish them no harm. I don’t even remember them in hate.
I think I’ve reached that spot I thought I couldn’t reach.
Funny how forgiveness works. If this is what forgiveness is.
I’m swearing off health news, health advice, Dr. Oz, my second cousin in nursing school who calls me in the middle of the night to tell me about glioblastomas, and my friend T. who finished his intern year and thinks sick people should just be killed, even if they only have a hangnail.
I don’t know but I’m scared shitless. I’m the special kind of hypochondriac. The one who never sees doctors but wonders when her good fortune of great health would run out. I was watching the news (my first big mistake of the day) and caught the tail end of the tragic death of a young girl (only 24) from uterine cancer. I didn’t even know people her age would get it, much less die from it.
And then I answered a long distance phone call (my second big mistake of this xaar day). A dude I knew from high school’s brother dies after a six month battle with leukemia, the second fucking person younger than me dying of that soul-sucking illness.
I know, I know, it sounds like I’m dealing with mortality issues now that I’m getting on in the years, getting long in the tooth, and all the other mean-ass cliches about being older than 16. But I really am not. I’m just developing this horror-fear-nausea-disgust-numbness response to news about sickness and sick people.
Finally, I check my e-mail (third and final mistake of a marathon stupidity day) and it has a scanned article from some magazine from my younger brother . Yes, the same donkey who was supposed to find a nice girl this past summer, make my parents some grandchildren and get them off my paranoid back. Noooo, he doesn’t go out and find this nice girl, instead, he clips an article about a woman who gets the human version of mad cow disease 20 years after she became a dedicated vegetarian.
I don’t eat red meat now but I did when I was a kid because that’s what we bloody ate at home. Mad cow, mad goat, mad squirrel. There is nothing I can do about that now, is there? Thanks brother, I hope you are stalked by a mad neighbour in spandex.
