by Annette Hatton

Created on: August 17, 2010

Grudges, Revenge and Forgiveness

My biological father shared with me a wealth of life values among them the need for forgiveness. He said forgiveness was not an emotion, though it could sever connections to our good emotions and that it is not a feeling we have, rather it is a willful action we produce.2001 I began learning how exacting the battle and how significant this principle.

My daughter, Fiorinda, was born in January 1972 then died that April. I finished her midnight nursing, laid her across my tummy, scooted down on the bed and fell back asleep. When I woke the sun was up and she was lying beside me, blue. The doctor said she died because three-month-old babies have no coughing reflex. She could not expel the fluids from her lungs and consequently drowned.

Twenty-nine years later the pain of believing I killed my daughter remained. Memories of her lifeless blue body made sleep problematical, often impossible. Guilt ever present, ever diligent waited impatiently with bated breath to seize my unguarded mind. My culpability stood in the way of any forgiveness.

Doctors and psychologists ask if I ever contemplated suicide. No, but there were times I found scant few reasons to live. Parents who buried a child know time does not heal a broken heart. Time merely puts a few stitches in the cavernous rip so we can continue putting one foot in front of the next, consciously breathing in and breathing out.

Dad, I loved and respected him with all his faults. He had mesothelioma, asbestos cancer, a prolonged horrible death sentence. When he called asking me to sit with him in his last few days I flew to his side. Several times he asked my forgiveness, then explained why. Finally he said, “I want you to forgive me for what I did to you and Fiorinda.”

I had lived with dad the last months of my pregnancy and while I recuperated. He adored Fiorinda often holding her as he preached and often taking her to bed with him after her midnight feeding. “What did you do to Fiorinda aside from loving her?" What he told me was so atrociously repulsive suffice to say dad was a well-protected closet child-molester and his favorite perversion was nursing infant females. She had choked to death unable to cough and drowned because of the fluid in her lungs.

The truth hit me as time stood still. I watched from somewhere distant as I convulsed, hyperventilated and tried to scream a scream that stuck in be bottom of my

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>