Forgiveness in Fiction and Real Life

Weather wise, we’re having the weirdest January in years, and the forecast for the foreseeable future is a rollercoaster of rain by day and ice by night. Boohoo, nothing keeps me at home more than weather. I thought I’d get out of the house today for my book club but it got canceled due to ice and here I was looking forward to a lively discussion of The Sandpiper by Susan Lovell. She actually lives nearby and set her book in places along Lake Michigan where I’ve been. That was fun. She even leads a book club through the local OLLIE program but, geez, each meeting costs $17.00. I can’t imagine paying that when free book clubs are all over the city. But then again there are people who’ll do anything to rub shoulders with published authors. Been there, done myself a few decades ago.

The themes in The Sandpiper---alcohol addiction, infertility, a dysfunctional sister’s relationship and forgiveness---were well written but not all that interesting to me. The plot of this story hinged on a misunderstanding and withheld information where one little conversation could have prevented ten years’ worth of pain. Do people really do that---not speak up for themselves when one sister wrongfully assumes the other sister was having an affair with an older man when she was actually raped by the guy? I suppose they do. Don’t you feel sorry for authors? We pick apart their plots, settings and characters and every detail in between. On the other hand, authors have the power to make us think. In the case of this book, think about anyone we’ve forgiven or need to forgive.

In my own life, finding forgiveness for someone who’d done me wrong took five years. He was a former friend and employee of my husband’s parking lot maintenance business who, after Don’s massive stroke, wanted to buy the business. I had the equipment appraised, we made an agreement and he promised to pay in 45 days when he could withdraw some investment money without penalty. Without a nickel down gave him all of Don’s bidding and contracts information, helped him write bids and assured the mall owners the guy would have the needed equipment. (You can’t bid big places like that without a verifiable list of equipment.) With my help, he got contracts with all the places where Don had done work for years. But when it came time to pay for the equipment, he strung me out for another two months, making up one story after another on why the money was held up. Two days before the storage yard needed our frontend loaders, etc., moved off their property, he finally admitted he’d been buying equipment piecemeal and he was reneging on our deal. 

I’d never felt so used in my life and mad at myself for helping him procedure thousands of dollar's worth of contracts. Had the guy been up front and honest about what he was doing, at the very least I could have sold the equipment months earlier saving me a summer’s worth of liability insurance and storage, not to mention having to pay big bucks to have the equipment moved to a heavy equipment auction site because I no longer had the option of selling it where it sat. It hurt to have a so-called friend do that to us, especially at a time when Don was still in a rehab facility fighting to get some quality of his life back and I was having major cash flow problems.

The forgiveness finally came when I was planning Don’s ‘Thank God, I’m Alive’ party on the 5^th anniversary out from the stroke. Don was not aware of the fiasco outlined above---he’d lost several years of comprehension---and he wanted to invite the so-called friend to the party. I invited 50 people, 67 showed up including this guy who I had hoped would have the decency not to accept the invitation. As I watched how happy it made Don to see the guy, I decided it wasn’t worth holding a grudge against a guy who was too stupid to be ashamed of what he did.

The last chapter with this guy came a few years later when he stopped by because a faith healer was coming to his church and he tried to talk Don into going. Don had a working vocabulary of twenty-five words, a forth of them swear words and he used them all that day. Nearly a year of therapies---physical, occupational and aquatic---plus 6-7 years of speech therapy couldn’t take away the repercussions of the stroke, but a faith healer praying over an agnostic was going to make him walk and talk again? Every time Don swore the guy “joked” about fining him for a “swear jar” which only served to make Don even madder. It would have been a funny scene in a movie but I was seriously worried that Don would have another stroke. The guy had recently found religion and had a come-to-Jesus spiel that rivaled any street corner preacher yet he never did understand the concept of doing onto others as you would have them do onto you. Hint: You don’t torment a stroke survivor with words when he doesn’t have the vocabulary to fight back.

Forgiveness. Sometimes it comes easy and other times you just have to shake your head and keep chanting, “Stupid is what stupid does.”  ©