Freedom in Forgiveness

This is perhaps the most personal post I have ever written.

As we get ready to celebrate Independence Day as a nation this weekend, it made me think about the word freedom and just what it means to me personally. Over the last year and a half, we have seen the entire world argue about the balance of freedom and social responsibility. During that time, the majority of us saw liberties we often took for granted become precious - the ability to travel, socialize with others, touch each other’s faces, and for some, the freedom to go to work without fear of dying.

But for this post, I am talking about a different kind of freedom. This is a freedom from within - a freedom that is not bound by country, religion, laws, injustice, and other external things. This is a freedom of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the freedom to be amid dirt and continually getting dirty, knowing what you're made of can never be changed by the circumstances, past, or how you are being treated. Forgiveness is the grittiness of the character inside you - fire, dirt, pressure, persecution, and our own feelings, still result in us acting in the character of love.

In May, after years of not seeing dad, my mom and I were looking for my dad. We thought he was dead. Just about 3 weeks ago, we finally found him. He was in a care home facility, in isolation, and rapidly deteriorating in his cognition. It was a roller coaster ride. I went from frantically going through my contacts asking them to look for dad on my behalf, trying to reach out to my dad’s side of the family who rejected me, considering making a trip to the Philippines to investigate and find him to now, talking to him for hours wondering if he recognized me and if that conversation was going to be the last.

We found out he was taken into the care home about 2 months after I helped my mom escape back in April 2019. Dad was currently in the isolation ward of the care home. Why? Because he was dad.

Here was a man whose nickname in the family was Hitler or Tito Hitler. Now his real name is Jesus. In the professional world, he goes by Jess or Jesse. But in his family, everyone knows him as Hitler. I understand every family is messy, but messy doesn’t even begin to describe the dysfunction in my dad’s family. Yet even to them, my dad’s methods were extreme even to their standards.

It was not a term of endearment; instead, a title my father earned for the things he did and does. My father was cruel, abusive, and as manipulative as it gets. My dad gets what he wants by all means necessary. He sees the world and people as resources. He is an accountant by trade but also sees his life from this lens.

Everything was accounting - income and expense, asset or liability. Whether it's dating, friends, marriage, and children. His advise to me was to always have extra, reserves, and always keep assets and cut losses.

But for all that description, my father was the epitome of mental sharpness. My dad was a master detective, able to assess the intentions of another person within seconds and able to manipulate any situation in his favor. His willpower is beyond human. He quits any addiction within a day; when he decides he is done with something, he is done with it.

And now, here he was. It was hard looking at my father, so weak and mentally hit or miss.

My father has Parkinson's'. And he is now at the stage when dementia also begins to kick in. For the first 2 days of talking to him for hours, he thought I was someone else - his favorite son who served in the Marines and lived in New York. My half-brother hates him and wants nothing to do with him. Yet, for a few days, I had to pretend that I was him because my father simply could not identify nor cognitively connect with who I really was.

It made me mad. Here was the man who abused my mother and me for years. The kind of abuse that at the age of 27, watching Law and Order made me ask my wife why my life was an episode. My wife had to explain to me how wrong it was. The kind of abuse that caused my mom and me 2 years ago to have to escape in the middle of the night and live in fear for a week as fugitives.

For most of my childhood, I grew up in a prison that he built. For those of you reading this familiar with the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES), I score an 8 out of 10 on that scale. An eight. It measures the number of traumatic experiences you have had before the age of 18. This was important because childhood trauma is responsible for a big chunk of workplace absenteeism and healthcare costs, emergency response, mental health, and criminal justice. So, the fifth finding from the ACE Study is that childhood adversity contributes to most of our significant chronic health, mental health, economic health, and social health issues.

A score of one on that scale increases your chances of getting a chronic disease as an adult. People with an ACE score of 4 are twice as likely to be smokers and seven times more likely to be alcoholics. An ACE score of 4 increases the risk of emphysema or chronic bronchitis by nearly 400 percent and suicide by 1200 percent. People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more autoimmune diseases. People with an ACE score of 6 or higher are at risk of their lifespan being shortened by 20 years.

And I scored eight thanks to my father.

Yet, here he was in front of me, weak and incapable. And now I was pretending to be the son who hates him so much that when I tried telling him a few years ago about dad’s condition, he said that he hopes he dies a slow, excruciating death. I had to pretend to be that son just so he can laugh.

It made me angry. A part of me surfaced agonizing and wanting to pay back the cruelty he dealt with me and my mom. Part of me just wanted to hang up. But I did neither. Because that’s not who I am, nor is that the person I want to be.

And it’s ok that I am not ok. That’s part of forgiveness. We don’t need to be ok with what happened or happening to us. It doesn’t diminish the fullness of the emotions; it simply does not dictate how we will act regardless of what we feel.

So for the next two days of calling him, I would try the first 10 minutes to remind him who I was, and then I would give up and spend the next hour or two hours pretending to be someone.

Then finally, on the 3rd day, with the help of his caregiver, it clicked. At the end of the hour conversation, the caregiver who has been listening to our conversations did not let us end the conversation without him knowing who I was.

“Sir, this is the same son who has been calling you. Jansen. Not the son, you think, but your youngest. Jansen.”

His eyes grew wide, and he realized I was not my brother; I was, in fact, Jansen, his only son with his most recent wife, my mother. He grabbed the phone from the nurse and said, “Give me one good reason why I should not kill you.” To which I candidly responded, “Because I am the only child of yours who will talk to you, and you know that only me and mom are the only ones who will even visit you.”

He laughed, and then we resumed talking for another hour, but this time, he knew who I was. The next few days were hit and miss. My mom and I talked about our mutual desire to see dad in person and make sure that he was well cared for.

For most of my life, I had avoided being like my father. Any moment when I recognized I was like him, I began to frantically try to change it. I was scared of becoming like him. When he first disowned me for getting married, it shattered my identity and made me stay away from everything he did.

But eventually, my faith led me to forgive him. When we reconciled the first time, I didn’t even bring the past up. I still got angry, and I fought back whenever he tried to manipulate things. He stayed the way he was, and I stayed the way I am.

I stopped trying to avoid becoming like him. In fact, there is no becoming like him. My dad, like myself, is human, with all the flaws and beauty. And despite being a broken man from such a broken childhood, he tried his best with what he knew. Despite never healing from the abuses done to him as a child, he made several attempts to ensure that we were better off than he ever was. Did that excuse his behaviors? No. We might not be responsible for our childhood, but we do have a responsibility to heal from it. But who really heals? Aren’t we all in a continuous process of getting wounded and healing?

And so it clicked. It doesn’t matter what he does to me or how he acts. I will set my boundaries; I will not let him treat me in certain ways. But I will never cut him off, and whenever I am too angry not to be cruel, I will pause and continue when I feel better. But I will always be there because I love him. Not because I don’t want to be like him, but because I want to be the person that I want to be - someone who loves my dad as unconditionally as I have been loved.

And that was it. I realized I didn’t need to live life avoiding becoming like him. Instead, I just needed the freedom to live and grow as myself.

And that is the freedom of forgiveness.