I remember seeing his mom about 6 months after her husband's death at flag football practice.
She looked miserable and exhausted, standing on the sidelines with her eyes fixed somewhere off in the distance.
I asked her how she was holding up, and with her son having developed a severe separation anxiety disorder that he had not had prior to the very sudden death of his father from an unknown-origin heart failure, she slowly enunciated to me in the most raw and honest way without even turning her head to make eye contact, "every day is awful."
Fast forward 3 years, and my son's friend's separation anxiety is gone. His mother, working and dating someone new, no longer looks miserable and exhausted, and in fact, looks happy.
I think about them sometimes, especially those first months right after the most central figure in both their lives was taken from them completely unexpectedly so early on in the lifecycle of their small family, and I wonder: how did they find reconciliation?
I have sometimes used the words forgiveness and reconciliation interchangeably.
Because for me, forgiveness is not an inter-personal process. For me, forgiveness is an intra-personal process- me with me.
Google defines reconciliation in two ways:
And I know this may sound strange, but sometimes, I find that turning to science for help with forgiveness, or reconciliation, can help.
Because science can help me "square" or "harmonize" or "understand" enough, so that I might make my internal struggle more "compatible" with reality.
Take for example alcoholism.
This disease has had enormous impact on the lives of multiple generations of family members up to and including today with the recent news that one family member now has diabetes.
Well, from a science perspective, that makes sense.
According to mayoclinic.org, excessive alcohol use causes the pancreas to become chronically inflamed. When the pancreas is inflamed, it cannot produce insulin as efficiently. If insulin is not being produced as it should, the human body can develop diabetes.
And there we are.
I know for some people this approach of applying science for the basis of reconciliation or forgiveness may sound a bit aloof, or maybe even cold.
I don't disagree. It may be.
Yet, I still find it helpful sometimes as I try to wrap my heart around something as huge as forgiveness.
A couple of years ago I was first introduced to the scientific work of a neuroscientist named Rachel Yehuda who has looked at the role of genetics and epigenetics in cross-generational trauma.
Specifically, she has studied the biology, the DNA, of the children of Holocaust Survivors and the off-spring of women who were pregnant and working in the Twin Towers in New York City on 9/11.
Now, I want to say here in full disclosure, my comparatively teeny tiny brain does not even begin to fully grasp Dr. Yehuda's scientific research.
And yet, almost mysteriously, I also find great solace in her work.
I find a sense of "peace" (another Google synonym for reconciliation) in the fact that there are and were larger scientific, biological, forces going on in the life of my ancestors and in my own life when traumatic events happened.
According to an NPR interview with Dr.Yehuda in 2015:
There’s another kind of change that involves giving your child — either at conception, or in utero, or post conception a set of circumstances — and the child is forced to make an adaptation to those circumstances.
Personally, I think about Dr. Yehuda's research in terms of someone like my great-grandmother who immigrated from Ukraine in the early 20th century.
As I understand it, she was living in terror with an extremely abusive husband when she first arrived in the United States with 2 of her young children which included my grandfather.
However, not long after their arrival, and my great-grandmother took steps to divorce her abuser, she engaged in her own act of violence toward one of her daughters that led to all 3 of her children being removed from her care for several years and going into the early incarnation of our present day foster care system.
This is a tough story to hold- especially when I know the more recent effects in the generations closer to me. But when I contemplate this cross-generational family trauma in the framework provided by Dr. Yehuda, it helps me to hold the story with more compassion and understanding, which for me are two essential components of forgiveness.
Science also give me hope, because Dr. Yehuda also says:
...We’re just starting to understand that just because you’re born with a certain set of genes, you’re not in a biologic prison as a result of those genes. That changes can be made to how those genes function that can help.
Another aspect of science that I've let marinate in this process of forgiveness that feels at times more like alchemy than algorithm, is the notion in physics that free-will does not exist.
Free will is the sensation of making the choice. Even though, behind the scenes, the laws of physics were pulling the strings.
I heard these words three years ago in an interview with Columbia University physicist and mathematician Brian Green on NPR's podcast On Being.
The laws of physics were pulling the strings.
Is that really true? And if it is, what does that mean in terms of reconciliation and forgiveness?
Dr. Green goes on to say,
...You need to redefine the meaning of the word choose. Choose is the sensation of choosing. Now it is the fact that the laws of physics were just playing themselves out, and that is fundamentally why you did what you did. But to choose is to have the sensation of making that choice. And we all have that sensation.
The "sensation" of choice.
I'll confess that I am not sure how this all fits together, and that I still feel this interior resistance or agnosticism toward this scientific principal, but I don't know that it's not because the paradigm shift that it would require would just be too great for my ridiculously human heart shape.
I think that is okay though.
Because now 91 year-old Buddhist teacher, author and activist Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in his 1988 book (one of my favorites) The Sun My Heart,
Understanding is not an accumulation of knowledge. To the contrary, it is the result of the struggle to become free of knowledge. Understanding shatters old knowledge to make room for the new that accords better with reality. When Copernicus discovered that the Earth goes around the sun, most of the astronomical knowledge of the time had to be discarded, including the ideas of above and below. Today, physics is struggling valiantly to free itself from the ideas of identity and cause/effect that underlie classical science. Science, lie the Tao (Way), urges us to get rid of all preconceived notions.
So, like alchemy, I let these ideas just rest there quietly inside of me; like a large soup pot on the back of the stove, simmering, for as long as need be, until forgiveness, reconciliation, or maybe even transcendence, becomes possible.
May it be so.
[Be on the look out for Forgiving Our Ancestors Part VII coming soon...]
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