I have been laying awake for the last hour, struggling within myself not to be attached to my feelings of anger and sadness for what you have done. I have attempted to meditate, reviewed the blessing of my life and basically did all I could do to let these feelings pass except write this to you. I wish to let it out of me now in order that the light it is exposed to shall end such attachment. So here I sit alone in the darkness allowing my spirit to write absent of any thought to guide it from this abyss. Such honesty may prove painful, but necessary, on this path to more enlightened moments. My sadness is only compounded in my seeming need to write that which could prove so painful to others.
You have stolen too much from me, and as I regress back into a feeling of anger over what you have done I realize that it is truly just sadness disguised in a more soluble form of emotion to me. You have beaten tears out of me, you have lied anger into me, and you have stolen from me all I could have been. That is certainly not true of this moment, I am as I must be, but you must realize that what YOU are has offered little to this world beyond children stolen from their essence and driven into lonely darkness. Such a legacy left by someone who I wish could feel the selfless love around her is truly something that wreaks such painful havoc such as the desperate sadness I feel at this moment.
You have lied, and in your lies you have taken much more than you have given from the souls of those who, through birth, lay committed to your care and love. You remain this moment so selfish of love and unselfish of hate that you spread that hate like a disease around you. You have belittled your daughter into a life of such servitude that the truth smells so foul she must run from it. You have created in your world a reality so devoid of truth that any semblance of it has been removed, often with reasons just as fabricated as the lies that created them. You have driven your son into a life of ended despair that caused him to offer similar pain to the ones he loves the most. You have not been the light; that beacon of love that the ships you send into the world may find direction. No, you have been the bastion of darkness that causes those ships to run aground, stuck in the mud as helpless vessels of the pure hatred you have born into them.
You have poisoned me, and in such a condition we spread that poison to others who you have also rejected in your failed reality. You have caused me to reject a grandmother whose only fault was to not be part of the ingredient to your affliction. You caused me to hardly know a grandfather whose only memory I have was one of patient, caring love. You have stolen years from a father and his son, and in doing so created such pain that both seemed to have relived over and over again the only attachments to joy they could find from each other. This is just a small tasting of the poison you have shared with the world around you, a world who neither deserved such a fate nor asked for it.
Today, however, you failed. I have found my father, and understand in my short conversation with him that we share a bit more than just a bloodline. We share what you have created, your masterpiece of pain that left a aged man with a trembling voice and a younger version of him with tears in his eyes. Today you failed to beat every tear from my eyes. No, I shared a few with the world around me as an antidote to the poison you have fed it, and I left it a hope for continued health tomorrow.
And as I look into my mind’s eye I see my own children, one who is left to tears over the thought of “Mr. and Mrs. Grasso” who were once her grandparents and the other two much luckier in having never met them, and I renew an oath to work to keep your poison from their hearts. I am so ravaged by the illness at times I am unsure of my abilities in this regard, but committed just the same to ending your cycle in me. I can only hope that the new memories and visions in my heart can replace those you have created. I pray the love and sanity I have found grow wildly in my soul to replace the scars and fear you have burrowed into it. I realize that I have this power to remove you like a tumor because only I can create you into anything other than a distant memory. That is where you belong – in the words of one of my favorite songs – “In My Rear View Mirror”.
You have created you the monster, but I keep it alive. It is high time I finish the exorcism, and in meeting the man who should have always been a part of my life I pray to do just that. I realize why you needed to remove him, he knew the truth and you needed to keep us from it. Rather than be the truth you created it, and in doing so turned a man who was nothing more than a good husband and father into a monster so much like you. I find it odd that your description of him – the monster you created – is actually a self-description, and I find it odd that as you sit still at night you don’t see that irony. It is YOU who sought removal of your self from the lives of your son and his family who could have so unselfishly loved you, and it was YOU who forced the removal of a man, my father, from his children while destroying all he worked for in the process.
And the song replays like a broken record along the time line of your life. Misery, tears, anger, hostility and separation follow in your wake as if you are a tornado spawned from hell and not satisfied until all beauty is removed from heaven above it. I wonder if the price was worth the trip, as it seems more long for you to be in their rear view mirrors than want you in the car with them.
I have forgiven the beatings you provided me…as from the same song they “made me wise”. I am not sure I have forgiven you the tears my daughter sheds at the very discussion of your selfishness. It would seem, given what I know of you, the reaction you craved. You get your importance from the misery of others, and if there is one piece of advice I offered my daughter at your expense it was to not give you such power. It is what you crave, what quenches your thirst, and to steal it away from you is the only way to slay the beast that lives in your soul. Perhaps when her tears no longer are created at the thought of you the forgiveness will be given me to share.
So now, I will walk this path given me in complete bliss at the opportunity it has brought. Time will tell how complete this path makes me, but I have confidence that I will be as I always am: where I need be. My only desire, if you can call it that, is that I walk the rest of my journey cured of the illness you have bequeathed me. I have found the antidote, love, I just need to perfect my taste for it. Such perfection will be the end of you.
In spite of all of this I still love you, my mother, and feel an immense degree of sadness over your condition. Perhaps that sadness is magnified by the fact that your condition is so easily cured, for I have found that the truth is truly a cure for all blights on the soul. I just wonder if you have not lived for so long in your fantasy that you can no longer see a different reality. Such sadness cannot be born long on a soul, take it from your son who has had to live it to some degree for much too long. So, despite my anger and sadness I will always have my arms prepared to open for you should you choose to find love and truth in your life. That seems to be proof enough to my spirit that I am truly finding cure of what you have made of it. And in that, I end this with a smile and a hopeful recognition of what fate can bestow.