I can't remember if I have identified my oldest brother and primary sexual abuser by name here before. I'm pretty sure that last week was the first time to do so at Lifering's main email list. I also identified by name for the first time Tim, the third of my three older brothers, also an abuser after first being abused by Walt.
Ten months or so ago, Walt told his world, including me, that he had pulmonary fibrosis. It's kind of like an adult-version, progressive version of cystic fibrosis. Except that there's no new miracle drug.
He inquired in St. Louis hospitals about the possibility of a lung transplant. Apparently that's a no go.
So, early this month, Walt, after saying he almost surely has less than a year left (pictures confirm — he looks like dad about a year before his COPD death), asked for forgiveness for being "a poor brother," for not protecting me, and for otherwise nonspecific acts and actions. Nonspecific. Note that.
Eons ago, he copped to me and to sis about sexual abuse, only to say that his ordination as a Lutheran minister was proof he was "beyond that " now.
Well, here's my response to his request for forgiveness.
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Walt, the delay in response wasn’t deliberate. Rather, it was trying to figure out exactly what to tell you.
I could have given you a facile, a glib, or a multivalent response that would mean one thing for you, and anther for me. Some parts of what I see may actually still do that. That multivalent response would be, “whatever you really think you need forgiveness for, you have it."
The deeper reality is that, more than the cliché of “I was another person then,” that was another life then. Marie said five years and change ago that “this would have been dad’s 90th birthday” and I had forgotten all about it. Forgot that this year would have been his 95th until I started typing.
That’s an entirely different life, in part because my life today would have been different had that been different. Various overt and covert sexual abuses, physical, emotional, and religious abuse, mental illness in one parent which I recognized by or before I was 10 years old, mental health problems with the other parent which run on that side of our family for generations, and more, all made that life what it was.
Within that, whatever you really think you need forgiveness for, you have it.
That’s an entirely different life for me in another way.
A few months ago, you asked me to pray for your outcome whatever the result. Well, I’m a secularist. I don’t do that. It’s not because of any animus toward you. It’s just that I don’t do that.
Life in general is massively contingent, but, I don’t think that either you or Tim protecting me from anything, or anything else in your actions or his, likely would have changed that part of who I became, although it might have. Since life in general is massively contingent, I don’t know for sure.
That said, since I am a secularist, per that “whatever you really think you need forgiveness for, you have it”? To use a medieval Christian term, if you are seeking not to die “unshriven,” you will have to find that elsewhere. Between the two of us, Lutheran pastoral confessional office / Catholic confessional booth / AA “fifth step” laundry lists haven’t been further discussed. We had brief long-ago communication about that.
“Closure” — and its value and worthiness — I know as a student of psychology to be more myth than real. Beyond that, personally, I never got it from dad, knew I never really could get it, and, still afraid of his anger decades after childhood, never did push that hard. Mom was too mentally ill — not her modest-yet-growing dementia but the mental illness she already manifested when I was growing up, mainly — to even understand that she had behaviors and actions from which any of us would have wanted to seek at least a degree of closure.
Ultimately, “closure,” to the partial degree it’s possible and of value, is an inside job. And, life has myriad scales of gray and ambiguity. I’ll leave it at that.
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So, he's hoist back on the petard of his own ambiguity. I took neither the high road nor the low road but rather a sideways road.
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