"A new spring."
Thoughts on forgiveness. Part two.
APRIL 29—Easter weekend passed, and yellow made its appearance in our yard and neighborhood. The forsythia blossomed, and daffodils in remarkable variety and profusion appeared along Ashpohtag Road. Despite cheerful evidence of spring, I remained haunted by my companion’s Easter morning discovery of Sarah Craig’s gravestone—by Sarah’s tragic death—hit by a drunk driver—and by the inscription engraved on her granite memorial: “A rising star—killed.”
Scouring the internet, I found a long article about the incident and its aftermath in the Hartford Courant. I learned that Sarah’s mother and younger brother watched her die. Adding insult to unimaginable injury, townsfolk circled the wagons to protect one of their own—a man known to be an alcoholic. Sarah’s brother, all of fourteen, was harassed. Friends of the man who killed Sarah gunned their engines when they passed him walking home, along the same road on which his sister died.
Sometimes there seems no comfort to be found. Or if there is, it unfolds slowly.
Spring 1978.
I put the phone down and in the silence, I can still hear my grandmother’s voice—broken by grief—and the terrible news she has shared. Some moments pass and a new sound intrudes—tires on gravel. I run out the front door and find my sister sitting in the car, sobbing. Having collected the newspaper from the box at the end our long dirt road, she paused to read the front-page headlines—we have both just learned of our cousin’s death. Lenore. Killed in a drunk-driving accident at age thirteen.
Two teenagers died that night, the other a friend of Lenore’s. The tragedy unleashed a torrent of blame that swept through our small town like a sickness. Letters from angry parents filled the editorial page. Fingers pointed at the police, who, knowing about the weekend beer parties attended by local teens, did nothing to shut them down. What of the parents? I wondered. And still do. My aunt and uncle, unaware of what their child was up to, thought she was baby sitting that night. For a time I quit reading the paper.
Acceptance.
Three days after Easter Sunday I arose once again in pre-dawn darkness and made the drive to South Norfolk Cemetery—this time alone. I visited Sarah. Standing before her grave I was surprised to see a faint inscription at the top of the headstone, one I had missed before: “Seek joy.”
The two words seemed almost a command—at once desperate and hopeful. I did not want “killed” to be the final word on Sarah’s life. And I imagined that a search for joy is what her mother will spend the rest of her days doing. Then I noticed upon the mirror-like surface of the polished granite a reflection of the sunrise. The first light of day.
It is the words of a friend that remain with me now. Her thoughts on forgiveness and acceptance, so beautifully expressed, arrived in an email. This is her response to my previous contemplation of these topics:
Might I add to the idea of “acceptance” the voice of an Amish man in Pennsylvania who lost a daughter to an angry young man who entered her small schoolhouse and killed a number of children—maybe 7, I think.
The first thing those Amish people of the community did was visit the family of the killer who lived nearby and embrace them. Among the members embracing the family of the killer were the parents of the killed children.
When asked a year later how he was able to forgive the killer, the father said that forgiveness was not static... that, for him, it had to be renewed daily. So, he accepted not only that his young child was murdered but accepted that he would never “get over it” and instead committed himself to living with the daily burden/release of finding forgiveness for the killer.
This story, for me, gestures toward the everyday heroism of forgiveness... and allows us not to hate ourselves if we can’t find a solid place from which to move on.
Perhaps forgiveness is a practice rather than an achievement. Perhaps.... Forgiveness is not often a steady state but a place of daily refreshing... a going to the water.
She concluded with a benediction: “I hope you find that place on many days.”
* * *
Forty-three springs have passed since my young cousin died, and still sorrow lingers. And worse: sly and slippery layers of anger and judgment—blame. It is as if Sarah has opened a door in my heart allowing light to shine in—the radiance of awareness. I feel with fresh sadness all that has been so long buried in the dark, but I see with new clarity, too. And I do what I have not been able to until now. I go to the water. I accept and forgive.
Note: Funneling grief into activism and working with a lawyer, Sarah’s mother successfully changed the Dram Shop law in Connecticut, so increasing liability damages for businesses selling alcohol to a patron who is visibly intoxicated or known to have a drinking problem.