And then there was Forgiveness

Image: Fotor AI Art

Yesterday I talked to my sister. Without getting into too much of her personal business, I’ll just make a broad outline. In 2020 she had bone cancer and an entirely different cancer in her abdomen near her kidneys. She beat that even in the middle of the Covid crisis.

Just recently she was back in the hospital and they found another mass in her abdomen. Three years cancer free and starting again. Since I am the older sister I called her, thinking that she would be a mess. After all, to be fighting cancer again in only three years, she had to be.

Here is where I had to throw all of my assumptions out of the window. In three years she had changed into a different person. Instead of me giving comfort, she was the one assauging my fears and letting me know that she was absolutely fine— a little weak, but fine.

We talked of forgiveness.

We had some violent childhood experiences. Even today my writings and my poetry reflect some of the things we saw and felt as children.

“I had to learn forgiveness to heal,” she told me.

As a twenty year chronic illness patient who connects to a dialysis machine every night, those words hit me extremely hard. I have been told by psychologists and friends who are psychologists that trauma in childhood will manifest as auto-immune disease in adults.

“I still have much to forgive.”

Yes, I still have much to forgive. I had always been the protector to my younger brothers and sisters. They are all grown up now, living life, and raising their own children. But these words told me that I had to do my own work to forgive. That if I forgave those who hurt me, that I could heal myself.

My sister will do chemo-therapy. She is by no means out of the woods. Today, I meditated on forgiveness.