Prescribed Burn

I remember one night when I was driving through the Smoky Mountains, it was late, I was tired I probably shouldn’t have still been driving.  Suddenly around a bend, I saw flames in the distance and in the sky. I thought I was hallucinating. I had to get some sleep. But it was a fire and it was in the sky – it was a mountain but without a moon, star or exit ramp light around. It could have been a burning bush, a prophecy.

Image via Vecteezy

I pulled over, slept, ate something before I took off, and asked the lady at the counter about the fire?  Controlled burn she said, dead trees. Got to get rid of the dead wood before it turns into kindling and some fool sets it alight on accident leaving firefighters on the back foot.

Controlled burns are sometimes called prescribed burns - prescribed to mitigate risk of forest fires, farmers rid their land of invasive species sucking all the precious nutrients from precious topsoil.

I was listening to a podcast the other day. The host was interviewing a mother of a murdered daughter. The young woman, her daughter was brutally killed by a boyfriend, bludgeoned to death. The mother spoke of her beautiful child – twenty-something, just starting on a new career path, more friends than she knew what to do with, she lit up the room – any room she walked into.

The details of the murder were stunning in their brutality. The mother – enough time had passed for her to talk about it all in an even tone. Her voice was strangely comforting to me even as she talked about the darkest most horrible thing of all.

Maybe she is in her 60s maybe she was a school teacher or piano instructor – picture a career a woman of a certain age may have had where love and compassion and understanding were requisite – her voice never raised during the interview. 

The host asked how she felt about the man who murdered her daughter – he was her boyfriend for years and the family knew him well of course. And she said the most profound yet simple thing: I do not forgive him.

Parents of murdered children, in some cases, become advocates against whatever and whoever murdered their child. Sandy Hook parents, Parkland parents push lawmakers to reform gun laws, parents of domestic violence victims fight to raise awareness of the pervasiveness of DV.

This woman too had found a cause it seemed: the culture of forgiveness, society’s expectations and deification on the forgiving victim is basically bullshit. It is possible for her to never forgive that man and still live her life. Why should she ever forgive him? The idea is ridiculous to her. Instead she will never forgive him and unlike what movies, infotainment narratives, stories of valor of victimhood through forgiveness, yet endure and in fact thrive.

She didn’t say this but this is what I heard: It is okay not to forgive, forgiveness is not required to be whole.

I was talking with my daughter the other day and our conversation drifted into gossip and a decent amount of bitching at least for my part. I have been lost since my father died sometimes willingly adrift other times hopelessly lost.  I told her, my kid almost 33 years old, that I had willingly burnt several bridges with in-laws. After my dad died certain things were clear. In that instance, I told her, some bridges need to be - are prescribed as a matter of life and death to be - burnt to the ground.