2005年NPR美国国家公共电台三月-After a Long Estrangement, Is Forgiveness

Some people carry an old hurt around for a long time. Is it possible to forgive someone if they don't apologize or express remorse 1 for their actions? The commentator 2 Mubarak Dahir has been wrestling with that question.

I got another letter from my father. I've been getting them for a decade now, ever since I stopped talking to him. The odds 3 were never good that my father, Sarber, would be able to embrace his gay son. Sarber was raised in the Arab world, where talk about sex of any kind is taboo 4 and where homosexuality remains 5 unspoken. Before he found out I was gay, Sarber spoke 6 to me only once about homosexuality when I was a teenager. "If a man ever touches you there," he said, "kick the guy in the groin." Years later, I was away at college when my mother found personal letters I thought were safely hidden in my bedroom at home. My mother eventually progressed from thinking I was mentally ill to mailing me condoms to help assure I was practising safer sex. But the leap was just too big for my father. When he retired 7 and moved with my mother back to the Middle East, I couldn't help but think it was partly to escape me. But he could never escape that I would not bear a son to carry on the family name. Soon after my parents moved back to the Middle East, Sarber decided 8 that, after 30 years of marriage, he was divorcing my mother for an arranged marriage with a woman still young enough to have children. If I would not produce a grandson the burden of carrying on the family name was once again his. So my mother moved back to the United States, and at the age of a grandfather, Sarber became a new dad again. He eventually fathered 4 more kids, 2 daughters and 2 sons. But as far as I was concerned, he’d lost his older son, me, forever. He sends me half a dozen letters a year, but I never write back. I open his latest letter already knowing what's inside. He talks about his age, now 80 and his fragile health. Why don't you write me back, he asks. I keep my father's letters in a filing cabinet and when I reread them, it's not what's in them that stands out, it's what's missing from them. He never writes "I'm sorry". He never asks for forgiveness. All these years, I've held out for those simple words, insisting I can't budge 9 until he acknowledges his wrongdoing, not against me, but against my now dead mother. I wonder if I could forgive him, even if he asked. But I know the time left to make whatever kind of peace with him I may be able to find is shrinking. I vow 10 that this last letter won't go unanswered. I only wish I knew what to say.

Mubarak Dahir lives in Florida.