A Forgiving at Assisi

In the early days after my father's death, I went over in my mind various experiences I had with him throughout the years. There were the times my father rejected me with the words "I'm ashamed of you" and "What do you want to do that for?"

After thinking of these events, I again read his eighty-year-long diary, and his letters written to me over forty years. I slowly began to see the influence of his desperate childhood. After his mother died when he was eleven, he ran away from home because he did not like the stepmother. He was damaged for life at a very early age because of the influence of his own father. Because of his early childhood influences, my father grew into a warped personality and then projected his own misery onto others, including his three wives and two children. In the process he almost defeated them. My father was never able to develop as a human being. The secret accumulation of the money was to fill a void in his life, but here he was not successful. As a teenager he worked in his brother’s printing office. He quit that job after four months. It was the beginning of his work as a "tramp printer", traveling from place to place doing various tasks in a printing office. My father felt inferior when he saw the well-dressed confident college students. This inferiority feeling was to last a lifetime.

My parent’s marriage lasted 23 years. They almost separated four months after their wedding, when my father was fired from a job. His next job lasted two months. A job in New York State lasted two years. Then he moved to Pittsburgh where he stayed another 20 years. During all of these years my mother fought depression and frustration while my father, with a diminished sense of self-worth, retreated into a self-imposed shell.

My mother, after her divorce from my father, went back, at the age of 53, to teaching school. She would continue to teach for another 13 years and live another 40. During the teaching years, she complained of discipline, slow learning students, and being so tired. She wanted to plan for something better, but she never knew what it was.

I now was able to see both of my parents in a different light and compare one person with the other. My mother's great emphasis on success made her blind to the achievement of her two children. My father, feeling threatened, was not able to tolerate a complaining partner whom he could not dominate. They were both preoccupied with their own lives and saw themselves as innocent victims, not willing to see solutions from the other person's perspective.

Exactly four years after my mother divorced my father he married for the third time. The new wife was then thirty-eight. He was fifty-nine. During the first few years of their marriage they lived in rented rooms, ate all of their meals in restaurants, and traveled by Greyhound bus. They had no automobile. My father went from job to job, a week here, a week there, earning as a printer not more than a dollar an hour. He became suspicious of most people, was ashamed of the work he was doing, and felt he was just passing the time. The last forty-two years of my father's life were full of frustration. He wanted to move to Florida. He never did. He tried four times to visit me in California. He never came. He made two trips to Europe. Each trip was cut short. He made four one-week ocean trips. On each of them his camera was not working.

Even after I reviewed my father's life I was full of guilt feelings. I also wondered about the fairness of the situation. One answer came from a friend. She said, "Why should life be fair? Why should a parent give an estate away in a certain way?" I turned to my own research in self-esteem and began to realize that my father, with his feeling of inferiority as he worked as a tramp printer, was never able to recapture the play and joy of childhood because he had no childhood or teen age years. When his mother died when he was eleven, he felt abandoned and rejected.

A clinical psychologist helped me to finally understand and accept my father. The psychologist said my father was "perhaps a schizophrenic", the will that he wrote was "insulting", and the money he had accumulated was "merely for the sake of accumulating". I was now satisfied I had done everything I could have done. For some questions there is no answer and that is the answer. My response was the acceptance of my father and his actions despite all the difficulties and the unfairness. My attitude had changed. What I understood about my father and learned about myself was more valuable than any money I might have received from him.

Worth magazine in the May 1996 issue had a feature story on my father called "The Master Passion". When the article came out, the Senior Editor of Worth, Jane Berentson, wrote to me: "Sometimes journalism transcends the ordinary and gets to something more important. I feel this is true of ‘The Master Passion.’ Thank you for sharing your history with us and our readers. I think you are a hero--a brave and honorable man."

When Robert H. Schuller, pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, read my story, he wrote me: "Thank you for sharing your story on how you overcame and learned to forgive. Keep on, Keeping on! Life is not fair, but God is good. Look at your accomplishments."

The last chapter of this memoir takes place in the earthquake-damaged cathedral at Assisi. The final answer was in a religious context because my search had been spiritual at heart. I had a vision of my father, and in an imagined conversation with him there was understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness. I was finally free. I had overcome Mr. J. O.