Waiting by a window for Dad – Forgiveness, 2005

It’s taken me over 50 years to start forgiving Lee, my late father. But I have begun, and I’m feeling pretty hopeful about it. The need to forgive him crystallized while I sat near a cut glass window inside the local temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) that I attend. The sunshine diffusing through the glass cast soft hues into the Celestial Room, the place in the temple where we Latter-day Saints meditate and contemplate the profound things that we’re thankful for or that vex us. It’s where we seek guidance from Heavenly Father on how we should conduct ourselves and how we might navigate our way through the minefield of mortality.

I’ve learned a lot since that day a half-century ago when Lee walked out on our family. I’d like to think that my journey has made me wiser. Having more empathy and trying not to judge others are among the lessons I’ve absorbed; hard-won values that I’ve painfully learned after making more than enough of my own mistakes.

It has occurred to me that maybe Lee’s alcoholism was just the outward manifestation of some deeper affliction, possibly a mood disorder like bipolar. There was very little known about things like bipolar disorder in the 1950s. Often, people whose brain chemistry is imbalanced turn to alcohol and drugs to self-medicate; to seek temporary respite from the depression that haunts them. Or, his alcoholism might have been the result of having a blood line that is more susceptible to addiction than others. Another possible factor is that we’re all vulnerable to the example our parents and grandparents imprint on us and how it often leads us to carry on that behavior, good or bad.

Lee’s father and grandfather were also alcoholics. It makes me wonder how far back on my family tree the scourge of the “demon rum” goes. Thankfully, I quit drinking alcohol when I converted to the Mormon Church at the age of 25. It helped me break the chain. Otherwise, I shudder to imagine what path I may have taken. In any case, it has helped me have greater empathy for my father and why he might have engaged in such destructive behavior. It also brings to mind the humbling adage, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

I’m not the only one who agonized over the family breakup. Lee suffered, too, because he didn’t have his children in his life. When I helped clean out his apartment after his death, I found pictures of my sister and me and other items related to us. It was clear that he had watched us from afar, almost certainly with deep regrets. I’m a man of faith and I believe in Heaven, a place where we reside as spirit beings and learn to be more like God. I believe that my father is there and I pray that he’s learning to forgive himself as I am learning to forgive him.

It’s like in the movie Field of Dreams where Ray, the character played by Kevin Costner, hears a whispering, deity-like voice in the cornfield that tells him to “ease his pain.” Ray doesn’t understand whose pain he’s supposed to ease. But at the end of the movie it is revealed that the voice was whispering to Ray about his father, from whom Ray had been estranged at the time of his father’s death. It’s a deeply emotional movie for me. It plumbs the depths of the eternal and redemptive power that each of us has within ourselves to heal and forgive, no matter how much time it takes.

This is the last of three stories in the series entitled “Waiting by a Window for Dad.”