Unboxing Day

This came up in a search here, and this.  I read them, and wince, burn with shame.  

Emotion, then.  Then and now.  Then, resentment, unforgiveness, inchoate rage, distrust -- a longer list of low emotions.  Now, regret that he is dead and I cannot undo my part in it, my prolonging of the ugly, my passive feckless punishment of a lonely, sad, stuck father who was tormented by regret, craving forgiveness, unable to heal.  

I betrayed him.  Because I betrayed my duty.  Not about honoring -- forgiving.  Because his power to harm ended when I fled his house, like, as I have said, like Lot from Sodom.  It's not that I have scars.  It's that I did not have scars -- kept the wounds open, covered but raw.  I did that.  And because of the pain that I was the current cause of, I refused to be kind, open, warm, human with my old, isolated, pathetic father.

No one would have been better positioned to be a blessing to him.  But I refused.  For this, I deserve every pain I have had.  Even the pain he caused in my childhood.  Selfishness is a time traveler -- so is forgiveness.  It can change the past.  I could have changed the past, his, mine.  Instead I cowered in my soul behind a wall of barely civil resentment.  Low.  Very low.  

I have been a blessing to various people.  I have been a life-changing influence.  But only because it was easy.  I did not do the hard thing.  In some ways it would be the most important thing.  It certainly looms in my soul.  A starving monster that does not care who or what it devours.  It was on me, to feed it, to tame it.  Instead I let it starve, ignoring the fact that it could never die.  I had supposed it wanted to eat me, continue eating me.  But something more nutritious would have been better.  

Kindness, love, generosity.  Just words.  The monomyth of the hero's journey is just a story.  Episodes of a sloppy soap opera.  Later we might go back, review, pick and choose details to weave into something actually meaningful. We don't see any meaning while it's happening.  

So having the habit of kindness is valuable.  First, we'd have less cause for regret.  More, that would be the heroic part of the hero's journey.  Without virtue, there are no heroes.  

Well, that's all.  I don't hug my mother.  Why would I think I'd hug my father, if he were alive again, somehow.  That's why God destroyed Sodom. It's the name of this blog, the first post I ever put up here.  We get lots of chances, and learn from hardly any of them.  

It's not that hell is other people.  Hell is being ourselves.  If it is.  

J