What is forgiveness, but a pass?

I learned about my father’s passing many months after his death, when a surrogate court sent me an obligatory legal notice: An estate had been created in his name. In his will, my father passed me over, stating not once but twice that under no circumstances was I to receive any of his money, even if all other possible beneficiaries were deceased. In my father’s view, it seemed, I was unforgivable.

Before I learned to swim, my father treaded in the deep end of our town pool, lifting his leathery tan arms, opening his hands to catch me. When I jumped, he took his arms down and I slipped underwater, floundering for a few seconds before my father pulled me up to the surface, holding my body against his. He laughed hysterically as I coughed and tried to catch my breath, the water lapping at our shoulders.

He said we should try again. This time, he promised he’d catch me. I got out of the pool and went to the edge. I bent my knees and hesitated. My legs shook.

“I’ll catch you,” my father said, his head and hands beckoning.

I wanted him to be the kind of father who would catch me, so I held my breath, closed my eyes and jumped, hoping that this time ― this time ― he’d keep his word. He rarely did.

As a girl, I often drowned in my father’s sadism ― his torrents of psychological and sexual abuse. In my 30s, when I began to speak and write about my childhood experiences, people I knew and people I didn’t know asked the same question: “Have you forgiven him?” Some urged me to forgive him, citing forgiveness as an edict, offering lines from the bible. My father was a flawed human being who deserved forgiveness. Good people forgive. Was I a good person?

My father wasn’t all bad. He could be caring. When I was growing up, he sat beside my bed when I was sick, gave me a pep talk when I felt anxious before my violin audition, and came to the Girl Scouts Pop Hop, doing the do-si-do with me even though, according to my mother, he hated to dance. For years, I pretended that good father was the whole of him, until I couldn’t pretend any longer.

In “The Courage to Heal,” a book I read in my 30s while in the early stages of recovering from complex PTSD, authors Ellen Bass and Laura Davis write, “Developing compassion and forgiveness for your abuser… is not a required part of the healing process.”

I felt relieved to know that experts believed forgiveness wasn’t necessary. For most of my life, I saw forgiveness as something a victim offered an offender after the offender held himself accountable for his actions and gave a heartfelt apology. In the grander scheme of forgiveness was my sense of presidential pardons, an exemption from punishment for a committed crime.

My father never offered an apology for his behaviour, nor was he ever officially reported for or convicted of any crime. Though when I was an adult, I held him accountable in our conversations, and then also after our estrangement, in part of a memoir I published in my mid-40s, two years prior to his death. While he once, over the phone, admitted he’d done the things I’d claimed, he quickly retracted his statement. He said my perception of his behaviour was incorrect, and my unforgivable accusations were akin to sticking a knife in his chest: He was the victim.

In a research study on forgiveness, Harvard University epidemiology professor Tyler Vanderwheele states that forgiveness may boost mental health and wellbeing. Vanderwheele defines forgiveness as “replac[ing] ill will toward the offender with good will” and names empathising with the offender as an essential step toward forgiving.

I sometimes wonder if my father ever felt empathy or good will. I felt empathy and good will towards my “good” father, but not the abuser father, the greater whole of him. But ultimately, empathy and good will had nothing to do with my coming to forgive my father.

A dog did.

When I was a child, I begged for a dog, but my father said we couldn’t have one because he was allergic. (Years later, after he divorced my mother and remarried, he got a dog and insisted he never had a dog allergy.) My father told me that, as consolation, he’d be my dog. He got down on all fours and barked and panted. I was enamoured and enthralled until he pushed me over and lowered his body onto me. I had no power to prevent what happened next.

Decades later, in my mid-40s, living solo during the pandemic, I adopted Beau, a yellow lab mix from Mississippi, who arrived with severe separation anxiety. When I left my apartment to go to work, Beau went to doggie day care, a place where he felt happy, safe and loved ― until he was attacked by another dog. Beau’s injuries were so serious that he needed emergency surgery to repair the damage. For days after, he wouldn’t stop crying, panting, pacing and hiding in my bathtub.

The vet prescribed a sedative (Xanax) that the clinic didn’t have in stock. Because most pharmacies forbid dogs, my only option was to go to the CVS drive-thru with Beau in tow. I pulled up, put the prescription in the tube, pressed the button, heard it airlift, and waited.

The intercom voice was high-pitched, taut. “What’s your dad’s name? I can’t read the handwriting.”

Beau whimpered in the backseat.

“It’s not my dad,” I said, leaning my mouth toward the plastic device, hearing my voice rise. The vet had noted “dog” on the prescription. “It’s my dog.”

In that moment, the seed of forgiveness took, though I wouldn’t know it until months later when I came to see that Beau’s trauma, and the aftermath, had triggered my history with my father, and with it, all of my unresolved feelings: shock, anger, betrayal, the loss of safety in a place where safety was promised, the terrifying lack of control over what happened to my body, the question of whether I’d live or die — above all, the grief that the good father I’d wanted and needed was forever gone and the bond between us destroyed.

Even before Beau’s assault, my connection to my father reverberated in my dog’s simple presence ― his panting, his barking, his clumsy way of playing. Worse, in proximity to a scooter rider or rollerblader or other random triggers, Beau suddenly turned from a quiet, sweet companion into a lunging, growling beast ― something my nervous system registered as akin to my father’s quick tonal shift, from caring man to violent abuser.

Only when I learned to disconnect my dog from my father could I fully accept the truth of my past and be present, with compassion, understanding and unconditional love for Beau. In the days after his attack, Beau’s suffering gave me the opportunity to heal the part of myself who still suffered from my childhood violations. Only then did I begin to grieve what I’d lost. I never expected forgiveness to follow.

Forgiving my father wasn’t something I wanted to do. Forgiveness didn’t even feel like a choice, it was just something I came to feel.

I realised forgiving my father wasn’t about whether he deserved to be forgiven or punished. Forgiveness wasn’t for him; it was for me. Forgiveness was my exhale.

Forgiving my father came as a release of my resentment and his corrosive grip on my life. Forgiveness was my letting go of the pain of my father’s actions and my attachment to the good father I wanted and needed, a construct long dead. Forgiveness was part of my process of mourning the loss of someone I loved and had once believed in, in order to survive.

I came to understand that forgiveness isn’t a pass, but a passage. When I forgave my father, he wasn’t exonerated. He didn’t receive any benefit, not because he was no longer alive, but because forgiveness, as I’ve come to know it, isn’t an outward act at all, but an inward gift of emancipation: I’m no longer my father’s victim. I’m simply me. Free.

Tracy Strauss the author of the narrative nonfiction book “I Just Haven’t Met You Yet: Finding Empowerment in Dating, Love, and Life.” Former essays editor of The Rumpus, her writing has appeared in Glamour, Oprah Magazine, New York Magazine, Poets & Writers Magazine, and Ms., among other publications. She currently teaches writing at Harvard University and is writing a memoir about her rescue dog, Beau. When she isn’t moonlighting as a Zumba instructor, you can find her on Instagram at @pawfessorbeauandco, on Twitter at @TracyS_Writer and on Facebook at facebook.com/TracyStraussAuthor.

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