Walking Away Free
The Myth of Forgiveness
You might have noticed my recent silence here on the platform. I had to step away from my apartment in the Bronx and travel south to navigate a severe medical crisis involving my family.
Many of you subscribe to Find Your Colors to explore the mechanics of processing trauma. You show up here to learn how to build internal vibrancy and find healing from old wounds through spiritual effort. Over the past two weeks, I was forced to put those exact practices to the ultimate test in the face of the man who manufactured my oldest wounds.
The essay below is an unfiltered reflection on that journey…
One Final Goodbye
As I sit in my apartment in the Bronx writing this, I’m astonished that I’m actually home. It’s as if the events of the past two weeks never happened. My mind is dizzy from the whirlwind of emotions and shock. Yet here I am, stepping back into my regular life after spending two weeks in hell.
Back in November, we learned that my father had glioblastoma, a very severe brain tumor. He endured the surgery and they removed it all, but the aftermath of that type of surgery, especially at his age, was detrimental. Glioblastoma is an end-of-life diagnosis.
As he began to deteriorate, I received another call: his heart was failing. He needed open-heart surgery at 82 years old. The doctors informed me that he weighed 125 pounds. He was incoherent, non-responsive, and in a position where if he had gone under for surgery, he would not have come back.
It was then that myself, my mother, and my sister joined together on the phone. My mother and sister were focused on getting him to heal, getting him back to normal so he could just be the way he was.
It became my responsibility to inform them that that wasn’t possible. I had to be the one to break the news to my mother that Daddy wasn’t coming back. That he would never be the same. I gave them the information, of what the tumor, the brain surgery, and the stage 4 congestive heart failure all mean together. That’s when we shifted from talks of surgery and palliative care to talks of hospice.
The three of us made the decision together, and then we hung up. I created a group chat with my mom and my sister where I gave them some attempt at inspiration, just trying to lift them up and hold them together. My mom said she understood what I was saying. My sister said she just didn’t have any words. I told her not having words is fine and that we’d get through this together. She said she was going to go be with my mom. I didn’t hear back from her for a while.
About an hour later, I got a call from my mother. My sister had locked herself out of the house and gotten extremely stressed out. She called my aunt and started walking to the hospital, which isn’t far from where they live. She fell. She had a seizure. The EMTs came and she had another seizure. They airlifted her to the hospital in Asheville.
My sister was diagnosed with lung cancer three years ago, the same week I was diagnosed with leukemia. Her cancer had metastasized and moved to her brain. A distant metastasis of a recurring lung cancer. The prognosis for this is very small.
I asked my mother if she wanted me to come. She said yes. I bought a plane ticket immediately and flew to North Carolina.
For the first few days my sister wasn’t there. It was just me, my mom, my dad, and an older cousin. I had planned to only stay two weeks because I have an upcoming apartment move and my own chemotherapy treatments waiting for me back in New York. I packed my bags and went down to help my sister heal and get everyone ready as we dealt with the looming death of my father.
Once I arrived, I realized that despite the fact that everyone was sick, and some of them were dying, no one had any end-of-life paperwork done. No power of attorney. No living will. No DNR. None of it. I had started trying to get this work done way back in November. It took me the full two weeks before I was able to get papers signed, and only for my father. I was never able to get papers for my sister or my mother.
My sister’s case is severe. Her prognosis is not good in any capacity. When I tried to talk to her about the actual biology of her brain tumor, the fact that she’d had a quarter of her lungs removed after her lobectomy, and what that means for her body, she accused me of being negative. Literally discussing the definition of the diagnosis and what is happening. Not for the sake of being morbid, but for the sake of preparation. For ensuring that everyone is taken care of and that their wishes are respected.
I find it astonishing that I share DNA with people who demand total blindness in the name of comfort. That being practical and responsible and making adult decisions is somehow being negative.
As an adult, I have built my whole life around finding the light. I practice witchcraft. I study paganism. I write books about healing trauma through spiritual effort. I’m all about that woo-woo shit. Manifestation, the power of positive thought, the law of attraction, all of it. These are valuable practices. But being realistic and being prepared is not negative.
Yet here I was, being told by the very people who manufactured every toxic emotion of my childhood that I needed to focus on positivity. That everything would just work out if I just believed it. As if my own personal life structure was being weaponized against me.
Yes, thoughts influence what happens. We can alter our situations through positivity and light. But we all die. We can’t stop that. We can be educated about it. We can be prepared for it. We can make sure that we’re not a burden on our family after we’re gone. We can make sure that our children are prepared instead of blindsided because we kept telling them everything was okay when it wasn’t.
They brought a hospital bed into my parents’ home and set it up in the living room. My father sat on that bed, his actual deathbed, and flat-out declared he was just going to ignore the diagnosis. He wasn’t going to think about it, and then it wouldn’t be real. He said he just wasn’t going to pay attention to the negative stuff. He told me there was nothing seriously wrong with him.
That’s when everything snapped into focus.
I had spent decades wondering how a father could just turn his back on his own son and throw him out like garbage. Never looking back. Now I finally knew. Acknowledging that he abandoned me would require looking at something ugly, so he just erased it from his mind.
You can destroy people for your entire life without any shame or effect on yourself personally, as long as you simply refuse to look at the wreckage.
It is the most dangerous kind of toxic positivity. It wipes away personal responsibility and leaves a trail of victims bleeding out in the background.
Being back in that house was a total mindfuck. It wasn’t the house I grew up in. It was a house my parents had lived in for fifteen years that I had never seen. My cousin who was there was surprised to learn I’d never even been. I hadn’t seen my father in twenty years. And although this wasn’t my childhood home, it held all of the same stifling energy. I am endlessly grateful that I put twenty years of distance between myself and that family. It took an ocean of therapy to survive them the first time. Walking through the door was like entering a time capsule of a life I spent decades dismantling.
On the first day, after about ten minutes, my cousin saw me suffocating and took me to get food just so I could breathe. We sat in the Sonic parking lot and I laughed as I stared off into the distance.
I told her, “The fact that they even asked me to come down here makes me want to scream about the laws of audacity.”
She simply smiled at me, because she knew it was true.
Then I said, “But how could I not have come? They needed me. Of course I would be here.”
I asked her if it made me pathetic. As if I’d waited decades for them to throw me a bone. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
I spent thirty-four years in therapy unknotting the mess I survived as a kid. During that time, I used to wonder what it would be like to actually stand in front of my father again and say something. I never believed the universe would put me in that position.
I went down there ready to play the part of a normal family. But then I was angry, because I showed up and it was the same people. Then I found myself wondering. Is every family like this?
I think of that film August: Osage County, the whole family gathering as the father is dying. They fought. They fought hard. Is that just what families do?
When I was a kid, I used to watch Roseanne. Blue-collar family struggling to pay bills, working dead-end jobs just trying to make ends meet. They fought like a real family. They reminded me of mine, except at the end of thirty minutes, you knew they still loved each other. That was the fantasy. Because my family was just like theirs. Loud, obnoxious, large, and poor. But there wasn’t love. Not discernibly. Not from their end. If I’m being honest, that’s always made me angry. I’m still bitter about it.
I put aside my bitterness. I put aside my resentment and showed up ready to help. They wanted the idea of my help, but they hated the physical reality of me standing in their house.
My presence cost me a lot. I paused my own chemotherapy in New York to travel South. I put my survival on hold to manage the decline of a man who despised me. A man I felt the exact same about. They couldn’t even acknowledge the sacrifice. It’s not that I needed anyone to say thank you, or that I wanted praise for doing the right thing. But after changing my father’s diaper. Honestly, a thank you wouldn’t have hurt as much as an “I don’t need you.”
Everything revolved around his hospital bed. He was drowning in terminal delirium, his lungs filling with fluid, his brain falling in and out of coherent thought. But the muscle memory of his abuse still controlled that house. It was only the second day when he looked at me from his deathbed and demanded that I leave. He could barely remember the days of the week, but he could remember that kicking me out was the dynamic he and I shared. Every single day, even though he did not have the strength to stand, he demanded I get out of his house. And of course, like always, my mother and sister just nodded along. They bowed to a broken king who didn’t know his head from a hole in the ground.
I stood in that room day after day defending my right to be there.
I walked into a living room vibrating with Fox News blaring at volume level 247. My deaf mother sat right in the middle of that aggressive static, hearing absolutely none of it. The room was so loud you could not even hear yourself talk without yelling from your chest to be heard. And then, in all that swirling chaos, Greg Gutfeld already screaming at a bone-shattering volume, my deaf mother looked me in the eyes and told me that I was too loud.
I knew exactly what she meant. It wasn’t my volume that was too loud. It was that my existence took up too much space and ruined the delicate little illusion she needed to survive.
She tried to tell me she didn’t ask me to come. But that wasn’t true. I had stayed away from these people for twenty years. I’d never gone anywhere near that house, never even seen it, because I wasn’t invited. I never would have shown up had I not been told to come.
The moment I lost my compassionate concern was when my mother, for the first time in my life, looked at me and said I was too much.
This was the person who had always been my champion against that phrase. She always told me that everyone else wasn’t enough. But now she was saying the one thing that actually landed. It only landed because it came from her.
I tried to tell myself she was just upset. She was dealing with so much. She’d been with my father since she was fifteen, and she’s seventy-six. That’s an entire lifetime. Her whole world was falling apart. Of course she was being mean. Of course she was taking it out on me.
But then I told myself, and I told them, that my years of being the whipping boy in this family ended a long time ago. No matter what you’re going through, you don’t get to take it out on me. You don’t have the right and you don’t have the permission.
It all hit a boiling point when my father looked at me from those pillows and delivered the exact same threat he used twenty years ago. He told me I needed to find a place to go. That he’d put me out on the streets and have me thrown in jail. Such a tired, worn-out statement.
This from the man who got fined by the fire department for calling 911 too many times without an emergency, in his wild attempts to have me arrested for talking back or saying the word no.
Two decades ago, those words were a death sentence for a terrified boy. I’ve lost count of the number of times my father put me in jail, calling in favors with his judge friends so they could lock me up through family vacation. Threats of jail used to carry weight. They used to bring fear.
The man I am today just laughed.
That laugh broke the spell. I stood over him and told him I would love to see him try. I told him to go find his phone, figure out how to turn it on, and see if he could remember what he was doing long enough to dial the police. I reminded him he didn’t even know how to use the remote control anymore.
I told him I came there so I could help my family and witness as each member of my family dies right in front of me.
To that he said, “Poor you. How do you think we feel?”
I looked the man square in the eyes and said, “I think you’re upset, and you’re hurt, and you’re disappointed. Because it is upsetting, and it hurts, and it is disappointing. But just because you are those things doesn’t mean you have to be hateful. So stop being ungrateful that people actually care enough to help.”
I told him I was leaving. But not because he commanded it. I was leaving because I built a life that had absolutely nothing to do with him. That I would leave when it was time to leave, and until then, I was staying, and I was helping my family get through this. That there was nothing he could do about it, because he had no power.
Those words hung in the air right alongside the smell of chicken-fried steak and gravy. I stripped him of his illusion and handed him the cold reality. I had total agency. He was just drowning in his own failing biology.
Before I walked out, I had my final words with my father. I told him I have no idea what comes next. But I said if he gets a chance at a next life, he needs to try to be good. I told him he failed at being a good father and he failed at being a good man. And if he’s given the opportunity to choose, he needs to choose a life where he can be a good person, so that his soul can have that experience.
Then I packed up my survival and flew back to the Bronx. I left them to their stagnant obedience and the sounds of war and hatred on volume level 247.
See, people think we are required to give our forgiveness. We are told that if we don’t forgive, we can’t heal.
That’s a lie.
Not everyone deserves our forgiveness, and we are not required to give it. We get to decide where we go, who we see, and who we allow in our lives. We get to decide who we offer forgiveness to and why. If they don’t deserve it, they don’t deserve it.
Because as I just learned, even on his deathbed, he’s not sorry.
Forgiving someone for something they feel absolutely zero remorse for isn’t going to make anyone feel better. Being guilted into forgiving someone simply out of shame is far more dangerous and far more damaging than denying them the forgiveness they’re not seeking.
Forgiveness of the shameless, guilt-free abuser is just one more moment when the thing you survived gets to hurt. One more moment when the person who victimized you gets to be absolved. Gaslighting survivors into forgiving those who harmed them is just putting more abuse on top of us.
The societal demand for unconditional forgiveness functions as a mechanism of control. It shifts the moral burden from the abuser directly onto the survivor. Forcing a victim to absolve a remorseless perpetrator prioritizes the comfort of the collective over the actual healing of the individual.
I have spent years exploring how to process trauma through spiritual and practical effort. I stared directly into the eyes of a dying man who was the source of most of my trauma, and he refused to take responsibility. In that moment, I dismantled the myth that healing requires his absolution.
True liberation comes from reclaiming agency. Withholding forgiveness is not bitterness. It’s a boundary. He can go to his grave with his lack of remorse. It’s not he who has to live with himself anymore.
Within a few months, he’ll be nothing but dust in a jar. I’m going to have to live with myself for the rest of my life, and that would be a lot harder knowing I handed one more piece of my peace to a man who didn’t deserve it.
I didn’t get closure. I gave absolutely no forgiveness.
But I finally walked away free.
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Watch the Experience
I documented my experience in North Carolina as I navigated the complexities of hospice with a formerly estranged family. It is a raw and honest account of my experience from my perspective. If you're interested, check out UncleJeffIsHere on tiktok
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As always if you read this all the way to the end or if you listened to it all the way through then you're absolutely my hero. So I just want to thank you for allowing me the time out of your day and the space in your brain to share my story with the world.
I love you. I believe in you. You are already levels above where they are, so fly, my friend. You aren’t held by the chains that consume them. You just focus in front of you, and keep flying. 🙏🏻❤️