New Year’s Eve is a Time of Reflection.
I have been thinking a lot about what has happened over the past twelve months.
Many of us do this at the end of December, right? I think it’s a rule, although I’m not sure it’s written down anywhere.
Truth be told, it’s been an usually stressful year for me.
My husband accepted a new job which led to a cross-country move away from family and friends. Oleg is a computer programmer, so we moved to – where else? – the East Bay of San Francisco, near Silicon Valley. Real techno-geek country. I love my techno-geek husband, and I love that he is flourishing here.
And I love it here, too. California has a wild beauty about it that is unmatched by the more staid Midwest (where I come from). But I hope all California-lovers will understand that it is still so new that it doesn’t quite feel like home yet.
My sister’s husband is — thankfully — now recovering from the heart attack he had earlier this year. A funny, smart, and kind man, my brother-in-law is still in the prime of his life. This made his attack all the more shocking and traumatic for my sister and the rest of the family.
It didn’t help matters that it happened while he and my sister were in St. Louis for my father’s memorial service.
Which is the other thing that happened in 2018.
My dad died.
Of all the stressful life moments I am reflecting on over the past year, this one was undoubtedly the worst.
Maybe because there was no recovery and no reprieve.
Just an ending.
Here’s the Story.
It’s not that we didn’t see it coming – Dad had already lived longer than might have been expected.
He had already survived cancer and a few open heart surgeries. But he had also been a smoker most of his life, which by his seventies had almost completely destroyed his lungs. In the last years of his life, he was under constant medical care. Despite this, his body was slowly but surely shutting down.
One week before we were scheduled to move to California, my mom called to tell me that my dad was not doing well. My parents have been divorced for over thirty years, so she actually had learned this through Dad’s stepdaughter, Magen.
Both my parents are re-married, and our blended family is like most others, I suppose – big and messy and confusing. But everyone has tried over the years to keep everyone else informed of important life events.
So Magen had called Mom earlier that day to say that Dad was declining fast. He had been hospitalized with pneumonia a few months before, but had never really recovered. A few days before Magen called us, he had become dizzy and disoriented, then had lost consciousness. Magen told Mom, “I don’t think he will survive the weekend.”
So I stopped packing boxes and dropped all our moving preparations. Early the next morning, I flew down with one of my two sisters to my dad’s and stepmom’s home in Alabama. We brought the two oldest grandchildren with us, my older daughter and my sister’s daughter, hoping that Dad would recognize them enough to say goodbye.
My stepsister Magen is a nurse and had taken expert care of Dad since he had left the hospital. She warned us not to expect too much. “He’s looking really bad now,” she said. “He can’t talk anymore, but he may still be able to hear you. You can talk to him, but that’s about all you should expect.”
When we entered Dad’s bedroom, it took me a minute to recognize him. He had always been a strong and hardy man; now he seemed incredibly weak. He seemed to be using all of his remaining strength to push each breath in and out. My sister and I sat down on either side of his bed, holding his hands. Like my husband Oleg, my dad had also been a computer programmer. But in his spare time, he had always loved to build things. So I was used to his hands feeling strong and rough. Now they felt soft and frail.
But it wasn’t his appearance that hit me the hardest. It was the absence of him, his powerful personality that had so easily dominated every room he stepped into.
He relished being the center of attention and had always been a jokester. Several years earlier, Dad had collapsed on the kitchen floor and my stepmother, Donna, had called 911. The paramedics found him kneeling on his hands and knees near their cat’s food bowl. “Can you come with us, Paul?” they had asked politely, stepping through the scattered cat food and trying to lift him to his feet.
Sick as he was, Dad couldn’t resist a joke in that moment. He stayed put on the floor and said, “Can’t you see I’m trying to eat?”
But when I saw him that last time, he didn’t joke or laugh. He didn’t open his eyes or acknowledge us in any way.
I couldn’t help but wonder where they had hidden away my loud, rowdy father. The man on the bed only looked like an old, worn out version of him.
We all took turns having a few minutes alone with him. I don’t know what my daughter or niece or sister said.
I just kind of…rambled.
I told him about the latest events in my family’s life: that Oleg had just gotten a new job; that both our daughters had just celebrated graduations (the older one from college and the younger from junior high); that our older daughter had started physical therapy school and our younger daughter was looking forward to starting high school in California.
Dad was a great conversationalist and had always been the one to keep a conversation flowing. I have to admit that I struggled awkwardly in his silence.
My words just sank like stones, small and inconsequential, into the great void of my father’s dying.
But Magen’s words kept running through my mind, “He can still hear you.”
So I did the best I could.
When I ran out of things to say, I told him I would let him to rest a little. I kissed him on the forehead, then left his room to rejoin the rest of the family outside.
It was the last time I spoke to him.
Magen called us at the hotel later that evening to tell us that he was gone. She had not been there because she had gone out on a short errand. Donna had been in the kitchen, but suddenly felt a strong urge to go to Dad’s room. She sat down by his bed and took his hand. He died a few minutes later.
We went back the next morning, but my dad had already been moved to the local hospital where Magen worked. All of the medical equipment was gone, too — Donna said she didn’t want to see it anymore. She and Magen made arrangements for his cremation and interment at a military cemetery in St. Louis where he had spent much of his career.
We flew home the next day. A few days later, Oleg and I loaded the moving truck for CA. Our older daughter stayed behind to continue physical therapy school; our younger daughter moved with us. Oleg continued with his job and, in between unpacking and furnishing our new house, I finished writing the first draft of a book on depression.
I tried to keep in touch with friends and family, but often felt a heavy weight of sorrow pushing me into a dark, isolated corner. I kind of gave up on posting to Facebook for a while, hoping that people would understand and accept the distance that death had dug around my heart. Death does that, sometimes, to the living.
It has been a strange – and difficult – year.
This is my first experience with the death of a parent, so I don’t really know how to explain it or compare it to anyone else’s experience. I suppose I have grieved as most of us do.
But in my case, my grief has also been complicated by… family history. More specifically, by my father’s anger and hostility and the many times his sharp wit came at my family’s expense.
I remember with great fondness the father of my early childhood, the one that used to laugh and play with me and my sisters. That father tucked me into bed every night with songs and stories and scruffy kisses.
This is the father I grieve the most.
I didn’t know until I was much older that that young man had already experienced great loss in his life.
I only have one picture of him as a little boy, sitting with his mother, father, and older brother (two more sisters and another brother would come later). He was no more than four or five when the portrait was taken.
In this picture, his face is slightly blurry because he is laughing at something the photographer said. He looks happy and carefree. He is leaning back against my paternal grandmother, a woman I never met. She died of leukemia when Dad was about twelve.
With her illness and death, Dad’s carefree days were ended. My grandfather was incapable of dealing with five grieving children, so he farmed them out to distant relatives and friends. They stayed there until they were all grown.
So my dad lost his mother, father, siblings, and home in quick succession. I suspect that these early cataclysmic events were like a ground zero for him, where his whole world imploded.
And I believe this caused the emotional fury that came later – because the father of my late childhood was a very angry man.
It was not normal anger. It was more like frenzied rage, laced with curses and threats.
He often hit my mother; he regularly threatened to do far worse. His physical and emotional abuse filled our home with fear.
My mother finally left my father when I was eleven. My father fought for custody and lost, primarily because my twin sister and I testified against him in court. Unlike other children, I did not try to get my parents to stay together; I did not personalize their divorce in any way. The only thing I felt when their marriage was finally over was relief.
The father after my parents’ divorce was even more filled with rage. Looking back now, I can see that this was his second ground zero, where he lost another family. Part of me sympathizes with him for this loss. The other part knows that his own actions largely caused it.
During the years that my mother was dating other men, then met and married my step-father, my father often threatened all of us. I took his threats very seriously. But I suspect, in a perverse way, my father’s threats were also a way to convey his pain and perhaps ask for pity. And of course they had the exact opposite effect to what he intended: they drove an emotional wedge between him and us that lasted the rest of his life.
That wedge loosened a little after both of my parents had re-married other people. Frankly I think my step-parents are both much better matches for my parents. That’s an odd thing to say, but…still. It’s what I think. My dad helped raise my stepmother’s two youngest children, including my step-sister Magen, who cared for him at the end. In my opinion, Magen is just as much his daughter as I am.
These are the memories I have of my father. It grieves me that so few of them are happy ones.
But I have three reasons for sharing them with you here.
The first is, these memories have been much on my mind this year. I think Dad’s death made them feel more fresh and raw than they have in many years.
Second, I know that I am not alone in experiencing severe stress. Many of us have experienced some kind of physical and emotional trauma in life.
Third, in my own life story – and going further back, in my father’s life story – you can see a pattern beginning to emerge.
The pattern is this: the stress and trauma we experience in life create emotional aftershocks. Some of these are easier to survive than others. But some strike so deep that they can shatter our mental and emotional well-being.
Over my life, I have not talked about my family very much, either in public or in private. Most of my friends, even close friends, have not known anything about what happened.
Part of this was because I wanted to protect my father. But truth be told, I also just couldn’t talk about it.
When something like that happens to you as a child, it never really leaves you.
The pain was severe enough to stay with me for life. So I and my two sisters, who suffered similar abuse, have been circling that pain ever since.
My father never apologized for what he did. In later years, it became clear that he didn’t even remember what had happened.
And let’s be honest – there is, on one hand, a real injustice in this. Of course my sisters and I would have rather known that he was sorry for what he did.
And yet the experience taught me an important lesson: that forgiveness can occur independently of injustice. That we can all give the gift of forgiveness freely to anyone we like, whether they have asked for it or not.
Five Steps of Forgiveness
Clinical psychologists Raymond Chip Tafrate and Howard Kassinove describe five steps of forgiveness in their book Anger Management for Everyone.
Step 1 is developing awareness of how exactly the injury has affected you.
I find this starting point very comforting — forgiveness starts with full recognition that a true injustice has been done. And it’s okay to feel angry about that.
But Step 2 is deciding to forgive anyway.
We often must work through this step despite continued indifference or even hostility by the offender, which can make this the most difficult step of the entire process.
So, how do we decide to forgive?
One way is by doing a type of cost-benefit analysis, where we ask ourselves:
- What benefits do I gain from holding on to these thoughts of anger and revenge? How does this help me personally?
- What is the cost of my anger in terms of time, energy, and emotional distress?
- What benefits will I gain if I decide to forgive? If you’re having trouble thinking of any, don’t worry – you’re not alone. This is where a trained therapist (or an objective friend) can help out. From their years of clinical experience, Drs. Tafrate and Kassinove cite the following benefits:
- less physical agitation
- less anger
- better decision-making
- increased enjoyment of the present
- ability to move on
- more peace and happiness
This cost-benefit analysis helps us realize that dwelling on our injuries may only lead to greater anger and personal distress.
In Step 3, we define what forgiveness means.
This is an important step, because we can also rule out what forgiveness does NOT mean:
- It does not mean forgetting what the person did. To do so may mean turning a blind eye to further injury they could do in the future.
- It does not mean accepting it, as if it were no big deal, as if it didn’t really violate a universal rule about treating others with dignity and respect. We don’t ever have to come to that conclusion in order to forgive someone.
- It does not mean excusing or justifying it, scrambling around for some logical or fair reason for the person’s behavior. Most likely there was no such reason. So we will just be wasting our time if we try to look for one.
- It does not always mean getting even. As Gandhi said, “If we practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be blind and toothless.” We shouldn’t buy into the idea that forgiveness can only occur if we are fairly compensated for the injury. Fair compensation and true justice are often impossible. Winning a court case involving a murder does not bring the dead loved one back.
- Finally, forgiveness does not mean we have the right to condemn the offender. We who are flawed have no business condemning others for being flawed as well. Christians believe that judgement and justice has always been, and always will be, God’s province. And we can trust him to carry it out, because we only see part of the story and He sees the whole.
Now that we have established what forgiveness does NOT mean, let’s talk about what it DOES mean.
Drs. Tafrate and Kassinove provide a psychological definition, which has two components:
- Choosing to let go of anger and other negative emotions
- Choosing to view the perpetrator with understanding, compassion, and good will
There is also a biblical definition: Giving up the right to condemn someone who has done you a true wrong.
Such unmerited forgiveness sometimes goes by another name: grace.
The apostle John spoke of this at the beginning of his gospel:
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth…From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.”
John 1:14,16 (RSV)
Christian apologist C. S. Lewis described it this way:
You must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart—every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out. The difference between this situation and the one in such you are asking God’s forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people’s we do not accept them easily enough.
But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine percent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one percent guilt which is left over. To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian character; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
This is hard…how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night ‘forgive our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’ We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says.”
–The Weight of Glory, pp.181-183
In Step 4, we work to understand why the other person behaved the way they did.
This is not excusing or justifying their actions.
It is explaining them.
It is viewing their actions through a wider lens, understanding the role that hardship, drugs, alcohol, early life trauma, and/or mental illness all played in their destructive behavior.
It is to begin to see them with empathy and compassion.
In my case, this grace had to both start and end in my own heart. I think it began when I thought about the hardships my father had in his own life, the poverties in his own home and family that left him deprived of compassion toward others.
When I saw that he too had been a victim of injustice, my own compassion could expand large enough to include him in it.
And that’s when it happened for me: the crossing over from unforgiveness to forgiveness.
Does any of this excuse what he did to me and my two sisters? No, of course not.
I have not forgotten what happened, but I have tried to understand it better.
In my mind, I have put it into a box with a label that reads, “This is what happens when a hurt person hurts someone else.”
Once in a while in my life, I still pull that box out and review its contents. Inevitably, some of the old pain returns when I do this. But I try to use that pain to scrawl another message across the box: “I CHOOSE NOT to continue this pattern; I CHOOSE NEVER to hurt others like this.”
And then I put the box away again.
We have now reached Step 5: giving a gift to the offender.
The nature of the gift will vary between individuals and situations. It does not have to be a physical gift at all – it could be a reconciled relationship or simply good will.
The final gift I gave my father was our last conversation. Granted, it was a one-sided one, with me holding his hand and rambling somewhat inarticulately as he lay silent and gasping in his hospital bed.
It did not even cross my mind to rehearse old wrongs. Rather I told him of my present happiness.
I described the joy and pride Oleg and I had in our beautiful girls and how well they were both doing.
I told him I was writing a book and how exciting and frightening that was for me.
No, it was not the time to condemn the past. It was a time to rejoice because, after a lifetime of anger and hostility, I had found my way back to understanding and hope.
I had found my way back to grace.
Dr. Pamela Coburn-Litvak has published research articles on exercise and stress in Neuroscience and Neurobiology of Learning and Behavior. Her latest book, Leaving the Shadowland of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression, was published in 2020.
After receiving a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she served as both Assistant Professor of Physiology & Pharmacology and Special Assistant to the Vice President for Research Affairs at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. She then joined the Biology department at Andrews University and developed courses in human physiology as well as the neurobiology of mental illness. She also founded Rock @ Science LLC, a company that specializes in health and science education and web development. She co-developed the brain and body physiology segment of the Stress: Beyond Coping seminar with its creator, Dr. William “Skip” MacCarty, DMin.
Dr. Coburn-Litvak currently lives in California with her husband. Their two daughters are mostly grown and attending school elsewhere.
When she’s not studying or teaching about stress, she enjoys stress-relieving activities like puttering around the garden, taking nature walks with her family, knitting, cooking, and reading.
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