Grandpa and the Burden of Forgiveness
I have always had an interesting relationship with my paternal grandfather, Larry. Interesting is an ambiguous and undescriptive word, though it works better than other overly intense adjectives like strained, artificial, or neglectful. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have an uninteresting relationship with my grandfather, or that we don’t have much of a relationship at all, though even this would go too far, and so I settle for “interesting.”
By the time I was born, grandpa’s life story had more or less been written. He grew up in a large family in the Mountain West, rode horses, and teased his sisters. When he was nineteen, he lived in Scotland for his two-year missionary service for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In Scotland, he met my grandmother, helped facilitate her move to the United States, and within a few years, married her.
Larry maintained a small ranch, maintaining that love for horses his entire life. He worked odd jobs that never lasted long and raised seven children with my grandmother. Later, after my dad returned from Brazil and his missionary service, grandpa divorced grandma, moved in with his girlfriend turned common-law wife, and slowly drifted away from his family. This was his state of being as long as I knew him.
If you went to visit Grandpa in his Idaho home tucked back in the barren hills southeast of Boise, he would welcome you as a gracious host. Every year—maybe every other—he made a single day’s appearance at a Farnsworth family reunion.
Because of his persistent absence, I knew my grandpa more through stories and his mythical legacy. Most canonized were tales of his amazing grit, like the time he barreled down a hill like The Man from Snowy River to save a boy scout or the time he crawled on his hands and knees to an upstairs window of his house to shoot a horse who had just bucked him off. These, and many like them, were the legends we heard at every Farnsworth gathering.
When I turned eight, he sent me a silver dollar as a present, and each December, he sent all of his grandchildren a $10 McDonald’s gift card. He never attended a birthday, wedding, sporting event, graduation, or significant occasion in my life or the life of any of my siblings. It wasn’t until I was older that I felt any disappointment in this. When I was young, he was simply Grandpa Larry, the rough, white-bearded man who’d give you a scruffy hug whenever he saw you. Plus, he was the only grandpa I had; my mom’s father and my namesake passed away the year I was born.
And so, despite the infrequent visits, I felt a strong connection with grandpa. This isn’t surprising; at that age, about eight years old, I possessed an embarrassingly tender love for extended family. This manifested itself most with my cousins, aunts and uncles, and grandparents, including Larry, who lived in Idaho and who we saw only once or twice a year.
After a family reunion or a weekend trip, I would sit in the back of our minivan and bawl because we had to say goodbye. My mom had this silky, beige blanket with a picture of two cats sitting around a fishbowl which I would drape over my head so my parents or siblings wouldn’t see me cry. Of course, they all knew what was happening and heard me blubbering like a seal in the corner of the van. All of that is to say that even though Grandpa and I didn’t really see each other, I felt an immense attachment.
To try and keep in more regular contact, I took to sending him hand-written letters. He sent me photos and postcards and included some sketches of motorcycles that his stepson had drawn which I traced and attempted to emulate. This lasted maybe a year before the habit faded.
Another reason I felt so close to Grandpa was that I wanted to help him. From a young age, I felt hyper-aware of Grandpa’s shortcomings and knew that he wasn’t living up to the religious doctrines our family espoused. This, I believed, could be reversed by heartfelt prayer. From ages seven to twelve, I asked God almost every night that grandpa would come back to the Church. If I ever forgot to include it in my prayers, I guiltily thought a single ommission would undermine the entire effort.
Larry never came back to Church, and eventually, I stopped asking God to help. I wonder if I stopped because I wasn’t willing to admit that the prayer wasn’t answered. In other words, if I stopped praying, then God wasn’t letting me down. He could remain a God who answered prayers, I just wouldn’t be praying for that particular blessing.
Over time, the question in my mind changed from “when will grandpa come back to Church?” to “why won’t he come back to Church?” and finally to a hard-hearted, “well, if grandpa doesn’t want to change, that’s on him, not me.” It was not God’s withholding or my own lack of faith that had so far yielded no results. It was grandpa and his own stubbornness. Only he was to blame.
Though I was becoming more and more jaded about his eternal prospects, I still attempted to maintain a relationship with grandpa. One memorable moment came a few months before I left for my own missionary service to New Zealand when my dad and I visited Larry in Idaho.
The night is still vivid to me. We arrived after the sun had set behind the bald, dusty foothills that surrounded his house. The home had continuous floor-to-ceiling windows on the main level which enlarged the darkness outside the house and intensified the light within. We sat around a wooden table for dinner and he shared stories from his time in Scotland. After dinner, I played him a few songs on the guitar.
I felt something that night I had never felt before: undivided attention and affection from a grandfather. That night in bed, the thought crossed my mind that I would likely never feel it again.
After I got to New Zealand, I deployed the hand-written letter method once more. Full of arrogant, spiritual bravado, I implored him to repent, return to Church, and reconcile with his family. Grandpa apparently happily received the letter, though it made no effect on his trajectory.
In the years after I returned from New Zealand, I saw Larry only a handful of times. Once at a Christmas party, a quick visit to his house on our way to family in Boise, and another couple of times at family reunions. Gratefully, he was able to meet Mickelle and even Nelson. Nevertheless, I privately condemned his seemingly apathetic attitude towards both his family and his church.
Less than a week into 2022, my dad sent a text to our family group saying that grandpa had been taken to the hospital with low oxygen levels and general intolerance to food brought on by COVID-19. We learned a few hours later that complications from COVID caused a major heart attack and kidney failure. A day later, Larry was gone.
In the 30 hours between the first text and the last, I felt a slew of different emotions. Here they are, in no particular order:
Apathy towards death. Doesn’t it claim us all?
Guilt that I hadn’t done more in the last five years to stay close to Larry.
Anger that he never corrected his ways.
Guilt that I was angry and judgmental.
Self-pity that I was somehow suffering more than others because I had once had a strong relationship with him.
Guilt that I tried to compare my own grieving to that of my family.
Amazement and then guilt that I had never stopped to consider the nature of my own father’s relationship with Grandpa.
Grateful that I have such a remarkable, involved father.
Disbelief that grandpa could actually be dying. Hadn’t he proven unkillable in all his wild shenanigans? As he loved to say, you can’t kill a weed.
Terrible sadness that he was gone, and gone so quickly.
Mostly, I still felt how I had the last several years: consigned to the fact that Larry had done wrong by his family and his faith and would suffer the just recompense for his mistakes.
My dad did not share the same vengeance. In a series of texts and calls, he laid out the case why my siblings and I should not be so quick to cast judgment, yet stronger than the reasons he gave was the pure and holy hope he possessed. Dad did not want to condemn Larry, and so he hoped for a God who would not condemn him either. He put it simply, quoting a Mennonite pastor, “Never give up on Jesus.”
That phrase, “never give up on Jesus,” contained a multitude of compassionate and wise reactions. It meant that only God had a perfect understanding and could see Grandpa’s whole life, including the thoughts and challenges hidden from his children and grandchildren. It meant that if my dad, or any of us, were to judge grandpa, it meant that we had in fact given up on Jesus. It meant we should not limit our own faith in a God we profess to be all-knowing and all-loving.
What is the nature of God? Is He justice or mercy, condemnation or understanding, factual or contextual? Is he the God who says, “I the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance,” or the God who later, in the same book of scripture, says, “notwithstanding their sins, my bowels are filled with compassion towards them”?
The cop-out answer is that both statements are true but codependent in order for mortals to conceive of a heaven that would let us in. More important than which is true, whether it’s justice or whether it’s mercy, and more important than how both virtues operate together, is the question of which God we choose to focus on.
I had chosen the God of unbending justice and my father had chosen the God of compassion. Who was right? Neither of us has the power to enact either scenario; we are not Gods, nor are we grandpa’s jury. We do, however, have to live with the consequences of our thinking.
Had I maintained my cold-hearted judgment, what did it say about me? What did it say about the kind of world I wished to inhabit or the limits of my love, tolerance, and faith?
What did compassion say about my father and his world? In my father’s world, we forgive the shortcomings of others, especially the shortcomings that cause us the most harm, and we plead with God to extend mercy to us and those we love.
Is it blasphemous to imagine such a God? To emphasize this side of His character? I’m not suggesting God gives no commandments or has no responsibility to justice. To eliminate the God of justice, law, and commandments would be to eliminate God in his entirety.
I am suggesting that we let God handle all of that Himself. Judgment is God’s burden to bear. That jurisdiction is not granted to mortals.
Ours is a different burden, the burden of forgiveness, because of us “it is required to forgive all men.”
Forgiveness often feels harder than judgment, but sometimes I wonder why? Why should we be eager to play the referee? Why do we unnecessarily burden ourselves with judgment when we could emulate mercy?
I read a poem by Wallace Stevens recently that I took to be rather atheistic, but on second reading, especially after this experience with my grandfather, I see it as spiritually hopeful. He writes:
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
This idea, he says, is:
…a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
The atheist might read those lines and suggest there is no God, that he is only imagination. I read those lines and aspire to imagine the most merciful God I can. Who is God if not the ultimate end of our imagination?
The God we fashion depends on the limits of our ability to conceive of the divine. Will we conjure up a punitive God or a compassionate God?
I have come to imagine the merciful God just like my father and feel a weight lifted from my back. I love my grandpa, yet by allowing my imagination to focus on punishment, I willed into existence a vengeful God that suited my indifferent, callous mind.
Ironically, I’m back to where I was as a child, offering prayers for Grandpa that are full of concern and love, believing in a God who can answer those prayers.
I also find myself wishing for God’s mercy for my family, friends, and even myself. Isn’t that ultimately what we all want? For God to say, “I understand, and I forgive.” Should I not attempt to adhere to this same divinity and forgive others, just as I wish grandpa and myself to be forgiven?
At least this is what I imagine.