Tonight was the last session at the writing retreat I’ve been attending. Tomorrow I will have a Healing Touch session at 9:00 and then head back to the mountains. The past two days have pushed me to write in ways that aren’t particularly comfortable for me, but they’ve been wonderful learning experiences.
The last piece, which we wrote just an hour ago, was a letter of forgiveness to ourselves. That letter is way too personal for me to share here. But, the task we were given in the late afternoon - to pick a significant memory and write about it as if we were there- seems a fitting one to share on this blog. It’s about forgiveness of a different kind. So, here it is.
“Reconciliation
It’s mid-afternoon when I am finally able to leave the office and make my way up I-55 from Jackson to Madison. My parents’ house isn’t far off the exit, nestled in a zero-lot-line neighborhood peopled mostly by retirees. They moved to Mississippi from Tennessee two years ago for me to take care of them.
It hasn’t been easy. There’s a lot of history, mostly of the bad kind, between me and my dad, and both he and mama had been pretty loud in expressing their displeasure with me just about from the get-go because I didn’t come over to see them every freaking single day. But, things changed three months ago, and not the way either Mama or Daddy anticipated.
My father is dying, and today, a windy spring day in late March, 2007, I have left my law office to spend yet another afternoon with a sick, dying, unbending, self-righteous man who claimed me as his daughter, grudgingly, because I wasn’t born with a penis.
I knock on the front door, tentatively, and without waiting for an invitation, enter. My mother, prisoner of her wheelchair since her last stroke, sits in the living room with the sitter I have hired for 24/7 care. I waive, but I’m not here to see my mother. This afternoon is for my dad. And me.
Daddy can’t do much anymore, but he refuses to have a hospital bed. He barely eats anymore, just drinks black coffee at all hours and smokes his pipe. Instead, he lies down on the floor of his home office for afternoon naps, and that is where I find him now.
The office was supposed to be a third bedroom, but my father took it over immediately upon moving into the house. A grey metal desk takes up most of one wall. The last time I was here Daddy was shredding documents he had removed from its various drawers. Today, however, he’s stretched out on the floor sound asleep.
In the corner on a small table rests his old Army blanket. Dark green, made of the scratchiest wool I’ve ever had the displeasure of actually touching, Daddy’s Army blanket has been a fixture in our home for as long as I can remember. Trying not to awaken him, I lay the blanket across Daddy’s cancer-thin body, and as quietly as I can, lower myself next to him.
His breathing is shallow, slowed by the heavy pain medication he takes for the cancer that is eating him alive. I touch his cool hand, skin mottled by age and disease. I inhale the smell of pipe tobacco that lingers on his body, and moving close to his ear, whisper “I love you.” I won’t have him much longer, and I don’t want to be angry when he’s gone.
He never says he loves ME, but he reaches a hand to grab my own. Reconciliation comes in many forms.”
PS - The accompanying picture is of my father in his younger years before life and disappointment changed him.