2003

Facedown on the motel carpet, desperate, great heaving sobs poured out of me as some dam burst, the waters of which had been backing up for years.  Marlana had met me there.  I had essentially run away from home because I did not know what else to do.  I told Bill I did not love him anymore, crushing him with a revelation he had already suspected.  I left with a little suitcase and called my friend, Marlana, when I had finished driving aimlessly around and decided to check into a motel.  For the two hours it took my friend to come to my rescue, I sat stunned on the edge of the bed. How had my life come to this?  I had soul-cancer. Some treacherous malignancy had been slowly devouring my life.

It seemed to me as I sat there on that particular Sunday afternoon in the spring of 2003 that I would either choose to live or die.  This cancer had a root, undefined by me in specifics; generally, I knew it took hold of my soul in 1985 in what Marlana aptly called my "train wreck."  It had been my choice not to adequately deal with my mother's willing death and my father's first arrest at the time it all happened.  I had no idea how to even think about it, and I was the mother of three children who needed me to be strong.  How could I spend months in therapy when I had to much to do?  So, I put it away - the dealing with it.

That was a mistake. I kept telling myself that someday I would have time for myself and then I could try to make sense of the chaos - ease the constant subliminal ache.  So, in this dreadful moment I found myself emptied and pitiful; a sheep caught in the brambles - a predicament of my own making.  I had not wandered off aimlessly, but deliberately.  Thought I could manage on my own.  Did not know extricating myself from the thorns would be almost impossible.  Almost.

With the knock on the motel room door came the beginning of my clarity and sanity.  Marlana had been praying with me and for me for several months.  Ironically, she was a Christian because I had shared my faith with her years before when I was her high school teacher.  Marlana was now the mother of four grown children, and she had only recently moved to Southern California for a year with her husband, who was in the military.

My friend strode through the open door with her Bible in hand and a resolute look on her face.  This was the moment for which she had been waiting - when the prodigal realizes she is in the slop with the pigs and she needs to go home.  She loved me and had a much better understanding of my predicament than I did.  Marlana brought hope into the room with her and set about making certain that she poured it all over me.

"You need to forgive everyone who has hurt you, Kay, speaking to each of them as if they are here in the room with you," she began.

Initially that sounded both silly and embarrassing - this talking to people who were not there, with Marlana listening in on the pretended conversation.

"There is great freedom in forgiveness," she went on.  "It sets you free when you forgive."

"Marlana, at this point, there are so many people who need to forgive me," I replied.  "I don't know if I can do this."

"If you don't, you will die spiritually, Kay; so, let's get started." No argument.

My friend instructed me to lie facedown, prone on the floor.  She sat down beside me as I cradled my head in my crossed arms in front of me.

"Pretend your father is before you right now and tell him how he has hurt you," was her command.

"I can't start with Daddy," I said as an uncanny fear clutched at me.  I thought I might drown or break.  That there would be some emotional cascading from which I might not emerge whole.

"Then let's start with God!"

What? Start with God? The thought was so preposterous I could not even argue.  What would I have to forgive God for?  I could only raise my head in wonder at Marlana.

"You're mad at Him."  No doubt registering in her voice or on her face.

I put my had back down on my arms and thought about that very carefully.  Who could be so brazen as to shake a fist in the face of God?  The audacity of the thought was abashing to me.  Sure, my friends had died young, leaving behind husbands and children.  I had tried to understand that.  I had tried to give God the benefit of the doubt. And Mother. All the years of suppressing hurt and storing offenses had finally manifested itself in a life she felt was no longer worth living.  Then there was Daddy - arrested a second time.  Maybe I could at least ask: "Where were you, God?"  I started with that.

"Where were you, God?"

A great sob took my breath away and made my body heave.  I almost vomited the words they so ached to be said.  "Where were you when my friends died?  Do you kill your children?"

This was loud!  I heard myself, yet could not control it.  I was profoundly angry with my God and had not known the extent of it.  The eruption was scary - too visceral -but once flowing, was not possible to stop.  It was not accusation, but a plea to understand. To know the unknowable.  I brought before God each moment I had tried to give my friends some comfort because I felt I had failed them, too.  It took literally hours for me to purge the ugly stream of offense that I harbored toward God.   Why had He taken Mother and left us to deal with Daddy? I saw her hopeless, jaundiced face and wizened little body sitting at the dinner table announcing her decision to die and railed at the necessity!  The lovely faces of my friends as they had been in life - vibrant and expressive - paraded into the crucible that this experience had become. "And Becky, Lord! And Cathette!" I cried out.  "How could you be good and still take them so young?"

Emptying.  Years of garbage had sullied my interior landscape.  When I thought I could not shed more tears, it was time to talk to a vicarious Daddy.  The real Daddy would not listen.   This one had to.  Still, I was reticent, fearing my body would relent again and sicken me before I could express to a phantom father the fathomless, bottomless pain he had caused.  I had to imagine him for a while before I could address him.  He needed a certain expression that my heart waited to see.

"I hate you!"  I was not expecting that!  It blew out of my mouth! "I hate that I came from your body!" Shame.  I had taken on shame! I did not know that.  "I am ashamed that you are my father!"

Too flooded with emotion, too choked by tears, it was several minutes before I could compose myself enough to speak again.  Beginning with the incomprehensible neglect of Mother's heart when we picked him up from jail, listening to Daddy wail, his voice keening out of control, professing to love the boy he had molested, I let this father have it!  Like the breaking open of a puss-filled infection, my feelings spewed with the stench created by years of festering, untreated, unaired grievances and unforgiveness. Finally I could say it!  To him!  It seemed only minutes had passed, but when I looked up, red-faced and spent, at Marlana, it was midnight.

"You need to forgive him, now," she said gently.

He seemed pitiful to me by the time I had finished.  Conjuring his face once more, I said, "I forgive you, Daddy."

I blew my nose and wiped my eyes.  "And you will no longer be able to affect my life.  I release you."  And it was gone, like a kite my hands had let go of or a balloon floating free, all the angst and deadly sense of responsibility I had carried for twenty years!  I felt unplugged from the source of the energy that had fueled my rebellion, void of the need to run away.  My hands had been manacled and my mouth covered, and I had been desperately trying to escape.  The placebo I had run to had only created further captivity and pain.  Untangling would be slow and excruciating, I knew; but, there was light, finally.

"You know, you have a Father," Marlana was saying.

I was sitting now, taking deep breaths and trying to synthesize my experience.  "Yes,"  I said. "I know."

Then it was my turn to beg forgiveness like a beggar begs for bread.  I had hurt and disappointed my God, my family and many others who loved me.  I cried out from my sin-parched spirit for newness.  I understood in that moment why God does not forgive us if we do not forgive others.  How could I ask His mercy for my deplorable actions yet hold others accountable for theirs?  Given the right circumstances, it seems we are all capable of anything.  I trusted in those long moments of confession that my God forgave me. It would be  many arduous months, though, before I could gain the spiritual strength lost in my wilderness.  I had gone a long way out; it was a long way back.