This is going to be long in order to provide context.
I was sexually abused as a child by my uncle, who lived with my family for about a year. I have very recently learned a new piece of information that I am processing, but it doesn’t negate the healing that has taken place up to now.
I never told anyone about the abuse until I was an adult. And discovered that he had abused my siblings and cousins as well. He was an awful person—angry and rude to just about everyone. He had one daughter who he somehow got custody of in 1966 after his wife could no longer stand to be married to him. But as a firefighter he worked 24 hour shifts so my cousin/sister (L) grew up in a series of unofficial foster homes where he’d dump her. My mom wanted her to live with us and he refused. When L was 9 he sent her to a local orphanage where she stayed until she was 13. At least 3 weekends out of 4 he would tell her he was taking her for the weekend. She’d have her little bag packed and be waiting every Friday until the house parent would call my mom and we go pick her up. So she spent most weekends with us and when she was 13 she finally came to live with us. She calls/called my parents Mama and Daddy and her bio dad by his first name. Did I mention he was a really awful human being??
When I got sober in 2008 I’d been trying to fill the hole that was left in my soul with drugs and alcohol since I was 19 years old and had my first drink. I’d endured further abuse and betrayals through the years, but none that destroyed me so completely as my uncle’s abuse and my mom’s tacit complicity. I remember sitting in my counselor’s office at the rehab center (my 3rd rehab attempt).
TL;DR. I suffered horrible abuse at the hands of a horrible man who was allowed access to me by my mother, and went on to spend 20+ years in addiction trying to make the pain go away.
I asked my counselor how I was supposed to live as any sort of functional and/or healthy person with all this in my past. She said, "HF, you don’t have a past. Every single thing that has ever happened to you is still right here because you carry it all around with you all the time. It’s like this suitcase you cart around so you can pop it open and revisit all of those things like some kind of souvenir. The purpose of the 12 Steps is to give you a past. To allow you to put all those memories away in their proper place. That will allow you to use them for growth and to help a fellow suffering person."
I was nonplussed. I had literally never imagined such a thing. I pushed on. "How am I ever supposed to forgive this man?" She told me not to worry about that. She said my job was to get sober and stay sober. And that if I kept doing the next right thing I would be one day be surprised to find out I was healing.
Y’all, I can’t adequately express how much I hated this man. My mom and his daughter continued to feel duty-bound to help him as he aged. He was kicked out of several local nursing homes because of his hateful behavior. Ended up 90 miles away in a VA home. My mom called me one day, whinging about how bad the place was. And I snapped. I said "Good! I hope he's in the worst nursing home in the entire country. I hope they leave him to sit in his filth and when they do change his diaper I hope they laugh at his junk." And I told everyone in the family that when he died, nobody better ask me to sing for his funeral because if they did, I would get up and sing "Na na na na! Hey hey hey, Goodbye!"
I stayed in rehab for 30 days. Came home to discover JM was at the very least in an EA. Previously this would have been my reason to start drinking or using again. But something had changed in me and I just knew I had to stay sober. I went to meetings and poured all this stuff out. I was in IC and worked so hard to keep moving forward no matter what. I didn’t think about uncle. I worked on healing me. Several times my mom or my sister/cousin would tell me that uncle had found God at the nursing home. "Good for him," was all I had the energy or mental space to think.
Then one day L called to say he’d had a massive stroke the night before. She said, "I know you don’t care." And the words came out of my mouth, "You know what? I think I do. And I hope he is comfortable."
Wait. What???? Where in all heaven and earth had that come from?? I had no idea. But somehow, all the hate was gone and I felt only pity. And a tiny glimmer of hope that what I’d heard was true. He died the next day and L asked if I’d consider singing. I did. In fact, my sister played the piano for the service. I sang a hymn, "My Faith Looks Up to Thee". My brother and some male cousins were pall bearers. The service was performed by the chaplain who had gotten to know him at the nursing home. And I came to believe that he had made things right with God. Standing around his grave beside all of my siblings and cousins who had been abused by him I realized we’d all found our paths to healing.
So what’s the point of all this?
I believe that the willingness to forgive is all that is needed to allow God as we understand him to work in our hearts. As I stated in an earlier post, there’s no requirement to verbally announce forgiveness to the person who wronged us. And forgiveness is in no way saying that what that person did is okay. Forgiveness from me does not absolve that person from accountability for their actions nor does it relieve them from consequences. Forgiveness allows me to have a past, and to live freely in my present.
I know there are a lot of people who don’t believe the same things I do, and that’s okay. But this has been my experience, and I hope it can be of benefit to at least one person.