The Fear of Forgiving my Father (and Myself)
By: Patrick Schiefen
I opened my eyes on that cold mid-February morning hoping that I had woken up as somebody else. Or that I had woken up from the most unreal bad dream. Or that I had accidentally slept through the entire day.
But I was still me and the funeral services were still a reality and, to my disappointment, I hadn’t slept through them.
I refused to look my best. Looking put together or handsome felt like a betrayal. The wrinkles in my dress shirt seemed so inconsequential. My hair would have to reflect my mood.
I had emotionally tethered myself to my siblings since flying in from Shanghai and desperately clung onto them, afraid that my head would spiral out of control and I’d flood my thoughts with the tears I had been refusing. I had spent thirty years perfecting the art of suppressing and compartmentalizing but this was unlike any pressure I had known and I was doing everything I could not to erupt. Not now. Not me. I thought I had learned to be resilient.
My life blurred at the edges and the universe had almost violently contracted to the size of Elmira, New York.
One winter, when my parents still owned their house on the hill, I was driving downhill in the lavender 2002 Corolla my father had bought on my behalf with my savings bonds. I had lost control of the car on the ice and suddenly imagined myself sliding off the road into the trees ahead. For a split second, I was scared. But I gained control of the car before anything could happen and continued on my way to work.
But this fear was different.
I stood in the funeral home, second in line to my brother whom I hoped would extract the names of people before they got to me, whom I hoped would buffer the awkwardness of talking to strangers about my alcoholic father. This was fear. I wanted to leave. To run. To pretend like this all wasn’t happening. I didn’t want to talk to people. I didn’t want to lose my composure in front of my dad’s second cousin, twice removed.
My father’s picture was sitting at the altar, next to his ashes, staring at me. I didn’t dare look back. I hadn’t been looking back for years.
My father wasn’t a bad man. Actually, he was a very good man. Gentle, friendly, intelligent, and sensitive. I grew up being embarrassed of his booming laugh – a laugh that would rise to the top of even the noisiest rooms – but I had grown to miss it. Even before he died. His most endearing quality, however, was his immense capacity to love. He loved people. He loved me even when I purposely withheld love from him out of anger (or, more likely, out of sadness). I sometimes think that his habit of putting others before himself was his undoing.
The priest asked my family if any of us would like to say a few words at the end of the service and I privately volunteered to do so, telling the priest that I’d bail if it got too hard for me. There was fear again. It was getting more intense. I volunteered to speak but, in actuality, I didn’t want to. I wanted to leave. To run. To pretend like this all wasn’t happening.
When I had heard the news of my dad dying on one of the first cold mornings of the Spring Festival in Shanghai, I buckled at the knees. Would that happen again at the podium?
Speaking about my deceased father in front of a room full of people was scary. Maybe the scariest thing I have done so far.
I wasn’t in any physical danger but, at least emotionally, I was being threatened. I was open and gaping and vulnerable – in ways I had never felt before – and my dad was sitting on the altar, smiling at me. I had flipped the frame over when it was on my mother’s kitchen counter waiting to be transported to the funeral home and I had wanted to do the same throughout the entire service. It was too real.
My speech was one of those out-of-body experiences. I have little recollection of what I actually said. I know that I touched upon anger and forgiveness and the power of family but how eloquently? I did manage to keep my knees locked and my tears beneath the surface. That was, perhaps, all I could ask of myself.
I watched people kneel in front of my father’s ashes all day to say their piece. I even witnessed my brother kneel in silence with his eyes closed once everyone had moved out of the room.
I had decided earlier that I wasn’t going to do that in front of his ashes and his smiling photograph but, after my speech, I realized that I had more personal things to say to him. This may be my last chance.
I waited for the last of my family to leave the room before I approached the altar. I already knew what I was going to say to him, what I was going to put out into the universe. There was almost too much to release.
And release I did. I knelt down, made eye contact with his picture, and whispered “I’m sorry.” That was all that I could get out. Every part of my body – my mind, my muscles, my flesh – instantly flooded with emotion. I cried. I lost control of the muscles in my face. I lost control of the locks that had, up to that point, only allowed a fraction of emotion through. The dams had crumbled.
I had been scared to face this all day. I had been scared to face this all year. I had been scared to face this since calling 9-1-1 on him when he had crashed into his dresser and nearly bled out on the bedroom carpet five years before. And, I guess, in a way I had been scared to face this since I understood the reality of alcoholism, of addiction, of death.
Every emotion came out and I, for once, couldn’t hold it back. I cried. I cried knowing that people were watching me from the other room.
The dams crumbled and I... I began to float.
The day I got the news of my father dying I messaged my brother: “Do you think dad knew that I loved him?”
My brother had admitted to being mad at me for being mad at our father so I was nervous as I waited for the reply. I couldn’t really argue with him, anyway. I had been mad at him. And sometimes irrationally so.
Was it out of convenience? I had argued that it was out of self-preservation. My mom said it was my way of coping and coming to terms with everything. My brother had been mad, too. I was never mad at him for it and I wasn’t mad at him for being mad at me.
I had just graduated from university when my father’s alcoholism burned holes through our lives and my brother and I were trying to figure out our futures while living at home with our unemployed father. The typical trials of early adulthood were compounded by our experiences with addiction and we both felt alone and powerless, unsure of how to help ourselves and how to help anyone else.
I wanted my brother to forgive me. I needed him to forgive me.
“Patrick,” the reply started, “he knew you loved him.”
Asking for forgiveness is scary. I know firsthand that it can be withheld, that forgiveness isn’t easy to give out even when you want to.
It’s unfortunate that it took my father’s death to release half of the earth’s weight off of my shoulders but some lessons are learned the hard way. Some lessons are learned the hardest of ways.The people I care about most have always been quick to forgive me and I will always find a way to forgive them, if needed. I forgive my father and not because he’s dead but because he deserves it. But I think I had already forgiven him, long before his death.
I was just too afraid to admit it.
I didn’t wake up as somebody else but maybe I went to bed that night as somebody else. The next version of me. A better version of me. A healing version of me.
…
Patrick Schiefen is a writer from Upstate New York whose most significant body of work (so far) was created in the nine years he’s lived in Shanghai. If considering the work done on his actual body, he has the quotes “mad to live” (from Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”) and “radical vulnerability” (a phrase used to describe his poetry) tattooed on his skin as words to live by. He released his first collection of poetry, If You Know, You Know, in 2019.
Cover Illustration by Bernard Wun @enjoymydrawings
Story Edited by Sarah Boorboor