Forgiveness

Four years ago, on a night in the middle of December, my boyfriend left his brother’s birthday party to pick up more ice and was struck by a drunk driver less than a mile into his trip. His family and I rushed to the hospital, where he succumbed to the swelling in his brain and was declared braindead. That night became the fulcrum of before and after, a scorched black slash through the timeline of my life. The man who killed Andrew has been out of prison for a couple of years now after serving an 18-month sentence. He reached out to me via his lawyer once while he was incarcerated and a couple of times after he was released, and I eventually responded to his request to meet me out of morbid curiosity and a blatant and intentional disregard for my own well-being. I wasn’t particularly kind. I wasn’t cruel, but I was viciously neutral towards him. I did not offer him forgiveness or salvation. I told him of what he had taken from the world and that I expected him to work doubly hard to give that kindness back to the universe. He nodded solemnly, as though making a vow, accepting his fate. He asked if he could email me with updates on how he was giving back. I wrote down my email address on a scrap of paper and slid it to him across the coffee shop table. I told him that I would not respond, but that I would read his emails. He moved as though to reach out and touch my hand and I flinched and left without another word. I was there for less than five minutes.

He emails me every month. He details every act of kindness he finds an opportunity to give, not in a boisterous way but in a very clinical, matter-of-fact manner. He outlines his volunteer work, his daily interactions, his observations of beauty. In the beginning, I found his sincerity repulsive because I didn’t like how human it made him. I shuddered to think of his hands dispensing anything good, even though that was specifically what I had asked of him. He had been solidly in the monster category prior to these missives, but he was slowly becoming multi-dimensional. He eventually started telling me of his sobriety progress, then his falters with sobriety, then his milestones. He told me Andrew’s mother talked with him regularly, and that she asked to see him when she found out she was terminally ill. In an email last year, he described how she held him, and they both cried, and she gifted him forgiveness, which he could barely accept. 

How can I forgive him when he is the reason Andrew will never again show up at my door holding garlic bread before me like an offering of raw love? I’ll never sit in the living room while he cooks us dinner and I pretend to read while I’m actually peering over the edge of my book and drinking in everything about the way he moves, because even watching him chop an onion stirred something so deep within me that it calmed and terrified me at the same time. How can I forgive this man for taking away someone who I still wake up with things I want to say to, over four years later? It is unfathomable to offer absolution to the person who removed Andrew’s beautiful, bellowing laugh from the chorus of sounds that exist in the universe and left him as a broken thing on the dark, cold road that night. 

I received another email a few weeks ago. He was coming up on his one-year sober anniversary. He sent me the information of where the meeting was, said he didn’t expect me to come, but that I could if I wanted to. I didn’t respond to that email either but woke up every day and re-read it. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to bring myself to show up, but I imagined Andrew would have gone to each and every AA meeting with this man. He would have listened to his progress in making amends and squeezed his shoulder, smiled, and told him he was proud of how far he has come. He was not a religious man, but I never met a person more willing to dispense grace. He fully believed no one could be reduced to one thing, one moment, and he was quick to forgive. Even if it had been me in the car instead of Andrew, he would have shown up for this man. I hold no doubts about that. 

I am in a period of emptying myself. I am pouring excess love I find hiding in nooks and crannies into the hearts of my friends. I am running every morning until my lungs are crumpled paper bags and the unsettling dreams from the night before flee my mind. I am giving blood as often as I can, which feels medieval, this bloodletting, but it makes me feel refreshed and new. My heart has shed its skin after a period of growth so painful that I was afraid it was calcifying, but it instead emerged softer and larger. I am delicately pruning the parts of myself that no longer serve me, and it felt like the time had come to remove this anger that had wrapped itself around my every nerve. 

I stood outside of the church basement chain smoking cigarettes—a rarity these days—until I felt ready to go inside. I sat on one of the folding chairs in the back and joined in the serenity prayer and listened to everyone share. I have been to a handful of recovery meetings to see if they brought me any peace but found they are more helpful to other people; I found peace in sobriety through other means. AA is largely about humbling yourself, whereas I have discovered that my path to sobriety necessarily makes my life larger, more significant, that I was drinking to shrink myself. 

When it was his turn, he made his way to the front without noticing me and started sharing. He spoke of Andrew with sadness, regret, and reverence. He listed everything he knew about him in such a manner that I wondered if he repeated those things to himself every morning. He was uncomfortable with all the attention, but it was clear that it was very important to him to tell the room about Andrew. He delved into his own struggle with alcohol prior to the accident, his time spent in prison, his struggle when he got out. He lost his will to live for a while and still hasn’t fully regained it, but he spoke of a vow he made to the love of Andrew’s life. He said he tore away Andrew’s chance to say his own vows, but that he would continue living as long as possible to fulfill the promise he made to put more good into the world. 

It was then that he saw me in the crowd. He glanced up from the podium and our eyes locked, and it’s not that I forgive him, because I don’t. I’m not sure that I ever will, and I think forgiveness is an unrealistic expectation and it doesn’t make you the bigger person or unburden you. It’s not that I forgive him, but in that moment, our eyes roving each other’s faces in the church basement, he stopped being the villain in my life. I stopped hating him. And that will have to be enough for both of us, because I cannot be his redemption, as I am only human. That is between him and his higher power. And he cannot be the source of all my anger, because he isn’t. A significant part, yes, but it doesn’t serve me to hold onto it. Funneling everything negative I felt towards him for so long was exhausting and caused me to ignore lots of other things in my life that are fixable. 

Thrown by seeing me, he rushed through the end of his speech, turned bright red when everyone clapped as he received his one-year chip and returned to his seat and stared at the floor. There were some closing remarks, then we adjourned for cake and coffee. I thought about leaving before he could even turn around, but I found myself rooted to the floor as he made his way over to me. He thanked me for coming without looking at me, eyes cast down as he fidgeted with his hands. At a loss for a decent transition, I blurted out that I was just over three years sober. He glanced up from his boots and smiled, ever so briefly, and I was suddenly glad to have created a bridge to common ground with a man I had never even wanted to meet. 

I told him a little about my experience with sobriety, the parts I still find challenging, my favorite things about it. I broke off a small part of myself and presented it to him as a peace offering, and he cradled it in his hands like it was a divine gift. I watched this piece of myself grow as I talked more and more, more than I intended to, but things kept spilling out of me. I am in a period of emptying myself, and he, a willing receptacle, accepted all that I poured into him.

During one of the many awkward pauses in conversation, he answered the question that I had been afraid to ask. He told me that after the accident he had immediately run to the driver’s side. Andrew was still conscious when he got there, and he reached through the shattered window and held his hand. His last words were my name, said over and over, before he passed out and did not wake up again. He was not alone. His hand was held. Even though I would have preferred just about anyone else in the world be there in Andrew’s last moments, ideally me, decades and decades from that night, he was not alone. His hand was held.

He had said it many times before and I know he meant it every time, but he looked directly into my eyes and said it again: he was sorry. He promised to continue trying to put more kindness into the world to try and fill a fraction of the deficit left by Andrew’s death, and he promised he would do everything in his power to stay sober. I breached the space between us, put a hand on his shoulder, and gave him the words I knew Andrew would have given him: I was proud of how far he had come. 

I cannot forgive him, but I can be kind to him. I can give him encouraging words. I can match the acts of good that he emails me about monthly, and I can write of them to him. He is alone, and I am not. I have rebuilt my life from scratch since the events of 2018, and I love what I have become and what I have yet to be. Andrew’s absence is no longer a vast and unfillable maw, but a reminder that I know exactly how to give love and that I am capable of allowing someone to know me in my entirety and love me all the same. This man is in the process of rebuilding his life, too, and while I cannot give him absolution, I can give him grace.