When I was eight years old I wished death upon my father. It was a silent prayer I recited again & again one evening as I lay awake on my mother’s floor manically watching the door for some sign of his return. I knew he was in jail that night; I had seen them take him away with my own eyes. But that is how you know his terror was viscerally felt, as the fear he cultivated in me remained even when his presence had dissolved.
And though fear was enough to wish him dead, fear was not the only emotion I harbored. I also held a calculated and decided anger. “Could this pain be worse than mourning?” I thought to myself. “Surely not.” Simultaneously, a grimmer thought entered my mind — “He is going to kill my mother,” I told myself, “Then, he is going to kill me.” Even if he did not charge through that threshold wielding a knife (he had done it before), even if he didn’t break a wine bottle against a wall and wave it over her face (he had done it before), this cycle would eventually kill my mother. The stress of the abuse coupled with the fear she felt for her children alongside a longstanding (albeit misplaced) guilt might very well be the end of her.
So at eight years old, I wished death upon my father. Then, at nineteen years old, I did it again. By this time, so much had changed. My parents had long been divorced. My mother was far away on a parallel coast happily engaged to a new, loving suitor. My father was no longer a towering, spritely 48 year-old man. On the contrary, he was now a skinny grey lonely thing, reeling from the downfall of his third marriage and battling stage 2 prostrate cancer. His daughters, my two sisters and I, were the only women left in his life, and that summer I was his designated caretaker.
One evening, upon returning home from work after walking two miles from the train station in the sweltering Newark heat, I intersected my father’s warpath. He was in clear distress from the side affects of chemotherapy, gripping his side in pain. “Did you pick up my medicine from Walgreens?” he inquires. A look of confusion washes over my face, as I knew my younger sister had been home all day and was supposed to have picked up the prescription hours ago. I shake my head “No,” and explain to my father that there must be some sort of misunderstanding. *Clash* A pot flies across the kitchen, hitting the wall nearest me. My whole body fills with heat as I prepare to absorb his manic rage. “You had one job. You don’t care anything about me! You were always out to get me, just like your mother. You’re a bitch, just like your mother. I want you out of my house, bitch! I would rather die alone.” I run into my room and lock the door, frantically calling my mother. “He’s going crazy, mom,” I whisper into the receiver, “He won’t stop calling me names and throwing things. I’m terrified,” I explain haphazardly through whispered sobs. In a calm though exasperated voice, my mother tells me to quickly gather my things and head to the train station. I throw everything in a bag and head for the door. “Don’t come back! I never want to see you again, bitch.” For that two mile walk back across the overpass, the words continue to hit my back like metal ammunition, ripping my flesh away until all I feel is the useless jelly of wishing, wishing my father was gone and wishing this pain was over.
Perhaps I should have wished my father redemption. Maybe I should have prayed that in the morning he felt anew, free of the anger and pain that transmutated into the collateral trauma of every woman in his life. But damn it, I wished him death. And it was not out of bitter confusion or juvenile vindictiveness. I desired peace for us both, for us all. I knew well the abuse my father had faced in his own life, physical and mental torture by his mother, a decade in prison. Time and time again I had done the math on my father’s pain, accounted for his past lives, and yet I could not make it add up to a semblance of a justification for the pain he brought to mine. I wanted our shared peace to be absolute and unquestionable. We all had endured long enough.
There exists a twisted fact that only the truly pained will understand: vengeance is a kind of empathy. You place yourself in another person’s existence, and wish suffering upon them anyway. “Feel what I feel,” you beg. But the pain does not materialize for them. They are more powerful than you. They are stronger and louder and more violent than you could ever hope to be. So you wish them death. And despite popular belief, that wish doesn’t exist in a vacuum independent of other emotions. That wish lives right alongside love, admiration, and a silly hope that tomorrow they will be better men.
I wished death upon my father. I wished death upon my own assailants. I wished death upon the police in my neighborhood who terrorized poor black people. I wished death upon the man who stabbed my best friend in the back and left him to die alone in the street. And no matter how sick and twisted that may seem to the innocent, passive bystander, a fundamental fact remains: wishing was all it was. Like an old penny collecting algae on the floor of a fountain, my wish sat lonely and unfulfilled. The only thing that ever died was something inside of me — a little bit of optimism, my faith in men, my security of self.
I am not explaining this to you because I desire your understanding. People who fear their own mortality will always be discomfited by death, even in the hypothetical realm. You cannot absolve me of the crime of wishing anymore than I can condemn my enemies to death for the rain they’ve brought my life. If life and death are truly in the power of the tongue then only so far as the words we say to ourselves. “I wish you were dead” did not kill my father. However, “You will get through this” and “You are stronger than you know” did help me save my own life in the times I thought it was almost over. If I have any regrets, it was not in the crime of wishing for the demise of others, but that my tongue fell short in wishing for the wrong thing. So today, I will wish for peace from wishing. Instead I pray a little prayer for myself, my father, and all those wound up tight in the confusing tragedies of life. I pray for our absolute and unshakeable peace, even in the face of death. Ameen.