Permission to Forgive and to Heal

Permissionary – Permission to Forgive and to Heal

This week marks the 20^th anniversary of my mother’s passing.  She survived my father by some 38 years. She passed quietly at home, the 9^th of January 1999. We suspect that it may have been by design because the one of suspected contributing causes was carbon monoxide poisoning, the result of a faulty furnace that was scheduled to be replaced.

I was ten years of age when my dad passed away. In my then child’s mind I viewed him as the hero and my mother the villain of a life that was, in retrospect, difficult for everyone involved. It was some very childlike black-and-white thinking.

After my father passed away in 1961, there was a period of chaos lasting a couple of years, during which we moved from New York City to Maysville, Kentucky and then shortly thereafter to 

Cleveland, Ohio, where we lived for a time with my mother’s parents.

While I was young, I still maintained the childhood ideal that parents are somehow superhuman and unfortunately, I took my mom to task for failing to live up to that ideal, little realizing then, the depth of her grief and her sense of guilt.

When I had grown and moved out of the house, I resolved to try to have an adult relationship with her. And while it was never easy, she and I maintained an unsteady truce for the remainder of her life.

Two things happened later in life that caused me to rethink my entire relationship with my mother, and how I viewed my parents’ marriage.

The first was when I received from a cousin a couple of letters that my father had written to his sister the month immediately prior to his death. In those letters it was revealed that my mom was dealing with mental illness. I had never known this, and it explained a great deal.

The second thing was the loss of my beloved wife, Susan, and the depth and breadth of my grief at her loss.  I was forced to imagine how my father’s death must have affected my mom: at the age of 36, saddled with 3 small children, stale job skills, and no real support system. It may well have been completely overwhelming.  

And over time, my mom slowly rejoined the land of the living, as many grief-stricken people do, and dedicated her life to teaching, mostly helping inner-city kids learn to read and overcome learning disabilities.

She did not fold up, she did not give up, and she became a true hero. And it has taken me this long to arrive at this understanding. I just wish that I had been able to understand this much earlier.

My father loved my mother deeply and treated her always with respect, love and kindness, regardless of her sometimes-difficult behavior. And he had his own demons, as do we all, brought about in no small part from his heroic role in the Second World War.

The take away from all of this is relatively simple. I had two extraordinary parents, and regardless of the difficulties of my childhood, I emerged a whole human being, equipped with what I needed to lead a successful life. I am very grateful for not only what I got from my parents, but what I came to learn over time about just what heroes they were. I have thus given myself permission to love and admire them for who they were.

MPC

01-11-2019