I grew up as the oldest of six children in a tiny Midwest town near Kalamazoo, Michigan. In that little town I lived a fairly sheltered and protected childhood. It seemed that almost everyone in town was related somehow. And, everybody else knew everybody else.
My mother was a combination seamstress, bread and cookie baker, Cub Scout den mother, nurse, and cheerleader who thought—until the day she died at age 93—that I could do no wrong.
But my father was different. Unlike Mom, he had a volatile temper. Anger was always simmering under the surface. He didn't care where he was or who was around; he let people know what he thought. Often. And loudly. Even before Ann and I were married, Ann's mother said that Bob Cohrs was the meanest man she'd ever met. And coming from a woman who grew up the way she did, that was quite a statement.
Every morning at the breakfast table I watched Dad walk out the back door and drive off to work in a car pool with three local men who all were employed at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. He was an engineer. He always wore a white shirt with a clip-on tie and a pocket protector holding mechanical pencils.
On weekends, I watched Dad in his basement workshop, which was filled with wonderful smells: turpentine, paint, linseed oil, sawdust, and Sir Walter Raleigh Pipe Tobacco. Dad smoked a pipe while he worked. And I liked being down there with him while he was sawing, sanding, painting, hammering, and smoking that pipe.
When he turned on his table saw motor the house lights dimmed briefly, and we heard that loud whine all over the house. It was a Wonderfully Dangerous Machine.
Dad was dangerous, too: Verbally Volatile.
His anger was like an erupting volcano. It wasn't just anger. It was rage. Like a nuclear blast set off by a small spark which ignited the initiator of a massive, devastating explosion that rained radioactive fallout on everyone who was anywhere near Ground Zero.
I tried to explain this effect to him a few years ago, but he didn't understand it. HE thought he was pretty even-tempered!
So, I tried another analogy. "Dad, expressing your rage is like vomiting. When someone's stomach is upset it always feels better right after all that bile is purged. You vomited on everyone around you. You felt better, but we were all slimed. And, there was no defense."
Not surprisingly, he was also very critical. All through high school I was a top musician, earning high grades in competitions at local, regional, and state levels. After a particularly good performance at a state contest in the spring of my junior year, I was pretty proud of what I had just done. But, on the way out of the room, Dad said, "You busted a note in measure 47." As if I didn’t know. Couldn't he just say, "You did a good job"?
As a result, my childhood mental image of God was rather like Dad: Critical and Volatile.
Why was Dad so detached, and critical, and angry for so long? He died four years ago at age 98, and although he had mellowed some because of a stroke in his seventies, he was still detached, and critical, and angry. I learned all of those qualities from him, and I grew up without real friendships. Just like Dad.
Dad had been in the third grade when his three-year-old sister Maybelle died of spinal meningitis. When asked about that loss, he had always said, "That kind of thing happens. In the 1920’s, people got sick and they died. So what?" And he would shrug. He said he didn't have any recollections about it, and he claimed that her death had no effect on him at all.
But, twenty years ago he involuntarily revealed something while Ann and I were questioning him about his alleged lack of memory about Maybelle's death. Ann said, "Of course you must remember something that significant!" He denied it, so she intentionally pressed him further and he became more and more agitated. His face got red, the veins on his forehead bulged, and he EXPLODED:
"I didn't know what was going on in the other room! The door was closed, the doctor was with her in there, my mother was crying, I couldn't hear what they were saying . . . ."
That little eight-year-old boy had felt alone and scared, ignored, isolated, shut out, not included, uncared for, unprotected, insignificant, and frightened.
That's what it really was: FEAR.
And, because the little boy could not process his fear, the fear generated anger. Children are the best recorders, but the worst interpreters, of history. Small wonder then, that--even as an adult--he acted so disconnected, so self-centered, so intolerant, so ANGRY.
When I was going through some serious counseling about 25 years ago, I became aware (as far as I could remember) that Dad had never told me he loved me.
My first reaction? He OWED that to me. That’s what I decided. I was angry at him. Now I knew one of the reasons why.
But it was only after I forgave him that I really understood that he had nothing to give. Nothing to give to me or to anyone else. In many ways, at age 97 he was still that scared and frightened and ANGRY little eight-year-old.
When there is major trauma in our lives, we can stop growing emotionally and get stuck at that mental-emotional age until we deal with it.
For a lifetime, Dad dumped every unpleasant and disagreeable thing into an imaginary box, and then subconsciously locked that box.
Did he change as he neared the end of his life? Not much.
In his final years he expressed a little more appreciation for a few things and some people, but he still believed that relational problems were the fault of other people.
Along my journey, I forgave him. It took only me; it required nothing from him.
God’s Word commands us to forgive. Even if he never changes. Even if he gets worse.
Though I never verbally itemized to him all his offenses, I knew that I had forgiven him just the same. So, I was no longer angry at him all the time. I was no longer so resentful. I acted differently.
Twenty years ago, he and I talked late one night about some serious conflicts between him and my mother. I passed along some of the basic principles I had learned in my counseling.
He said, "How the hell did you get so smart?" Then he stood up and gave me a hug, as if that was normal. Then he said, "I love you." And we both went off to bed.
Because he was so volatile and critical, I had kept him at a distance for most of my lifetime. Whenever he had pointed out some deficiency, I felt resentment building up inside.
Somehow, my internal forgiveness seemed to allow him—just that once—to say words that I never thought I'd hear.
I never heard him say those words again. But I do know this: I didn't need to.
Maybe God never meant Dad's hug for me at all. Maybe it was for Dad.
Curiously, that hug happened as if it was a natural thing between us. And Dad verbalized—just that one time—what I somehow had known all along: he really did love me.
My forgiveness allowed me to relate to him differently, and that allowed him to see and hear me differently.
My forgiveness to him was not for him. The forgiveness was for me.
Written April 26, 2022