Monthly Archives: October 2014

Currently reading

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Lately in my creative nonfiction class, we have been reading and writing memoir. To help me write my own (short) memoir piece, I read Chasing Daylight by Eugene O’Kelly.

Eugene O’Kelly was the CEO of KPMG before he died in 2005 of brain cancer. The memoir, written in the three months between his diagnosis and his death, was published posthumously in 2008.

If someone hadn’t read memoir before, this book would be a good one to start with. It does not use extensive figurative language, it has a lot of summary, but it is relatively short and extremely powerful.

The subtitle of the book is How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life. O’Kelly didn’t have much time to live, but he had enough to obsess over it and let it ruin him. That is not what he did. Instead, he thought of the dying process similar to how he approached his business organization. Instead his first line of the first chapter is “I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live.”

I do not usually recommend reading the end before reading the middle of a book, but O’Kelly’s wife, Corinne, wrote a phenomenal afterword. In it, she wrote about the events right around his time of death, the events that he could not. In the afterword, a hospice doctor visits and tells her about patients who was not close to his family and was severely agitated until he died, restless. The hospice doctor told Corinne that “Your husband isn’t agitated. He’s peaceful.” He had accepted his disease and resolved any unresolved relationships.

I can’t help think of my grandma who has Dementia. Her husband made a choice not to tell her what disease was setting in, so she never knew what was happening. And when she dies, she will have no concrete memory of the past six years. At least Eugene O’Kelly knew and could say goodbye, could make amends.

Death has always puzzled us. It has intrigued us. It is an unknown that many have conquered, but none truly understand.

The Power of Forgiveness

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Last Friday, I got the opportunity to see the film “The Power of Forgiveness,” which is directed by Martin Doblmeier, in my philosophy class. Afterwards, I got to sit in on a Q & A with the director himself.

In the film, Doblmeier explores the idea of forgiveness in communities that have been wronged grievously, including Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, the Amish in Pennsylvania, the Jews, those in the Columbine shooting, and some others.

The documentary did not try to educate its audience on how to forgive. Quite the contrary, it acknowledged that everyone, every community  has a different approach to forgiveness. For the Amish, forgiveness is almost automatic, something that they are taught to do all the time. They even applied this concept to the school shooting that happened in their very own backyard, so to speak. Some members talked about how it was a little more difficult than usual, but still they forgave somewhat out of habit. That does not mean that they forgot or even became less angry. Oh no. After all, forgiving is not forgetting. It is letting go of the pain.

I am in my early twenties. I don’t think I have enough years of experience and wisdom to forgive everything and everyone.

I do forgive my roommate from my freshman year who hurt me greatly.

I do forgive mean comments that have come my way over the years.

I do not quite forgive James Holmes, the man who opened fire in a movie theater that I have grown up going to.

I do not forgive Hitler, a man who lived and died before I was even a thought, but still instills terror in me.

One of my classmates stood up at the end of the period and asked if forgiveness isn’t a little selfish because it is typically done for your own well-being and not for the good of the one who wronged you.

I can see his point, but I think the opposite of forgiveness is vengeance and letting the wrong destroy your life and is infinitely more selfish. By letting your pain consume you, you are saying that it matters more than everybody else’s pain.

And the truth is: everybody is in pain of some sort. You are not alone, even if struggles vary from person to person. And it very well may be that part of that struggle is forgiving someone. And forgiving is hard. Hard to understand and do.

But I think that forgiveness brings us together and gives us peace, which is, I believe what human beings crave. In the end.