Forgiveness.

My super power? I am a great forgiver! When we talk about forgiveness, immediately I can think of all the things and people, I need to forgive. Leaving the toilet seat up is a big one…so is cutting me off in traffic! It’s human nature, right? To catalogue the wrongs done to us and systematically address them and offer MY forgiveness…like a pious super power that must relinquish my right to be pissed off at them, and forgive them, for my own well-being. After all, they do not know as much as me…they are not as emotionally intelligent as me, or spiritual, or smart. So, forgiveness becomes like an armor, protecting myself and my ego from damage. But what if –I actually am NOT perfect? (I know; hard to fathom.) What if I actually do mess up and I need to ask forgiveness for MY wrongs; for how I hurt someone?

Pastor Craig Groeschel wrote the book, “Soul Detox”. In it he talks about a Sunday service in which he asked his congregation “How many of you battle with self-deception?” A couple of hands went up. Then he asked, “How many of you know someone who is very self-deceived?” Everyone’s hands went up. We all know someone that thinks more highly of themselves than they should, or are tone deaf yet sing super loud not realizing how awful they sound. How is it that everyone knows somebody, but none of you are it? It’s a real struggle to objectively assess one’s self. Our brains are not self-cleaning ovens. We cannot flip a switch and automatically see all the ways we fall short, especially in the relationships we are closest.

For those of you that don’t know me, my husband Jeff died in 2011 from injuries sustained in a one-car accident. We were 48, married 26 years, with a 22-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter. Back then, I did grief support through LifeTime, a hospice organization.

But it wasn’t until May of 2022, when we trained to be facilitators for Faith & Grief, that I was smacked across my face with MY need to ask for forgiveness. One of our spiritual practices was to make a 4-quadrant mandala using Ira Byock’s “Four Things That Matter Most; A Book About Living”. As a palliative and hospice doctor, Byock found a pattern amongst those who face the end of their lives. There were 4 statements that proved most meaningful: “I forgive you”, “Please forgive me”, “Thank you”, and “I love you”. We had to quarter off our Mandala and draw or write something reflecting each concept. I forgive you was easy. Jeff had done a million things I had forgiven him for in 26 years of marriage—he was a recovered alcoholic, sloppy with our finances, and as you might of, guessed, a terrible driver! He had totaled 3 other cars in the last 7 years of our marriage, miraculously never injuring anyone else—just himself in the last one.

During those 7 years, as a self-trained IT professional (they all were in the 1990’s), he endured 3 lay-offs, we went through a bankruptcy, and our daughter had a life-threatening illness from age 6-9. As I stared at the Mandala and began…” please forgive me” …I realized I never just witnessed his pain.

I forgot to tell you, my equally powerful super power, next to “forgiveness” it’s “optimism”. I’m the glass-half-full girl. Hope is my middle name (not really, but it is tattooed in Hebrew on my neck). And my spirituality? Top notch! My mantra? “God is a god of restoration; God will restore us beyond our ability to imagine!” Though that doesn’t exist as a scripture, (I checked), it was my way of throwing spirituality in the face of pain, along with bright-siding and silver-lining every awful thing Jeff endured. At the time I saw myself as the little ray of sunshine trying to pull him up from the slimy pits he repeatedly slid into. When I look back at pictures of Jeff during those years, I now see his weariness, and his pain. Now faced with the blank quarter mandala—please forgive me—I wrote “for not just sitting with you in your pain, but bright-siding you, throwing spirituality at you, and toxic positivity (think of all the things we can be grateful for!)”

In David Kessler’s book, “Finding Meaning, the 6^th Stage of Grief”, David says, “I believe if you say you are sincerely sorry from your heart, your loved one will still feel it in theirs.” But the other option, and the one I have chosen, is to make a “living amends”. “This is where you take the action you wish would have occurred, and do it with others for the rest of your life.”  

To be clear, apologies are a necessary part of life; so is forgiveness—of and for others, and of and for ourselves. An apology is words acknowledging a mistake…making amends goes beyond words, actively choosing correction for past mistakes.

And so, I am here today, as this Faith & Grief site’s leader. I do this work because of Jeff (don’t get me wrong, I would much rather have Jeff than all of you people here!)

My living amends to Jeff is: I will sit with you, in your pain, witness your pain, and not try to fix it, (you’re not broken, you’re in grief). I won’t bright-side it or spiritualize it. That will be my amends, my living, breathing apology.