100425 Julian of Norwich pp. 73-78

I must have had a sense that he would die. I used to place my hand over his heart and then slowly draw it away, measuring the distance it took for my hand to stop feeling his heart beat. The distance between hand and heart seemed to grow over that summer, and I would show him each time how far away my hand could be and still keep his heart beat in my palm. It became a ritual. On some level I must have understood that death existed, but when you are fourteen, what you don’t know is so much more important than what you do know. You don’t know that life is an onion skin between existing and gone. You don’t know a person can slip so easily from breath to memory. Some things rely entirely on intuition, or on belief, when no other measure is available. This you don’t know, until the entire world tilts and shakes out everything.
At first I could not believe in death. I could not fathom that all that blood draining onto the road was all that he was in the end. Curiously what jarred me even more than this was the realization, almost instantaneous, that I could no longer see into the eyes I had studied and read and depended on for access. It was through the small details of the eyes that I knew he was leaving, an odd fact given the other major details of blood and flesh and motorcycle so outlandishly disorganized on the road. It was through the eyes that I understood the blank unreachableness between the living and the nearly dead, while his mouth mouthed sounds that must have been words that I missed the meaning of entirely. Later, I stumbled down the road inappropriately alive, with his helmet under my arm, like a preposterously useless limb.
For days I expected to wake to see his not-dead self waving at me from the porch of his trailer. Sometimes I saw him, plain as day, washing his car in the driveway, or standing outside the Co-op. He seemed always to appear like the rainbow after the flood, as if his phantom body offered a secret pact. The last time I saw him was just before my family moved out of the area, the area that held him in the ether and kept me expecting to see his not-dead self smiling at me. I was doing the final clean out of the kitchen cupboards in my own trailer, and he was sitting on a kitchen chair in an otherwise empty room. "Well," he said, "won’t you at least look at me." I knew he was there even before he spoke. I felt his eyes boring into my back, but I had refused to turn and look over my shoulder. I was angry. These eyes boring through me were eyes I knew so unbelievably well that I could predict when to walk on egg shells, when to smile, when to laugh, when to simply pray the storm would not come. These were the eyes that I depended on knowing for my very survival. These were the eyes that only had to flash to get me to do anything he wanted. These were the eyes that could follow me across a room and communicate instantly that I would later pay, that I had made a wrong move, that every detail of my life was being weighed and appraised for future correction. These were the eyes that made contact with mine even through my back, or over distance as if they could be sent out on their own like spies. These were the eyes that told me every minute of every day that I was chattel. "Well," he said again, and hearing his voice, after so long, caused such pain that I had to look at him. He smiled then, and vanished. The guilt of my relief sliced right through me. And here is where the gritty truth begins.
Something happened to me when he died. I caught an inward glimpse of my future adult self assessing and assimilating what he had done to my life. This is the way it is with sexual abuse. You never fully allow yourself this kind of mental clarity, but sometimes against your will, it sneaks in pregnant with accusation and fresh condemnation of your compliance. When you are fourteen what you don’t know is so much more important than what you think you know. You don’t know that the worst kind of abuse can come disguised as love. It would be years before I could come to terms with those last mouthed words that I had not yet grasped the meaning of. "Forgive me," he had mouthed, and there was a part of me grasping what I did not yet fully understand. I could smell the power I had as if it were gun powder in the palms of my hands. I could have demolished him, obliterated him in his last moments. I considered dancing on his body, declaring my escape from the dirt clinging to a raped girl, the guilt of my compliance washed away, but for years I remembered only my grief. I did not remember this momentary evil on my part. It had come and gone like a flash of lightening you catch out of the corner of your eye and wonder about later. Yet, in that barely registered instant I knew, somehow, the power of forgiveness through the force of my temptation to withhold it. We think of revelation as flashes of light, bestowing us with gifts of insight instantly transferred into wisdom fully formed. This moment passed through 30 more years. For many of those years other's would condemn me for that forgiveness. Therapists would claim this forgiveness as a form of mental illness. Boyfriends would claim I must have liked the abuse, if I was so willing to forgive. My mother slapped me across the face and told me she had raised me better than that. It seemed that to forgive some crimes made you a willing participant after the fact. Friends never forgave me my forgiveness. Forgiveness can look like so many other things. The moment was held out to me, again and again, like a lump of clay repeatedly pushed and forced back into the palms of my hands. It has been turned over and over, torn me open again and again, until finally taking the shape of revelation. The potter worked slowly over time with this tiny morsel, reworking the clay through out the years, steadily and persistently easing me back towards this tiny point in time, until the forgiveness I hesitated over emerged, not as a momentary gift granted and received, but as forgiveness walked through and lived.