Physical scars are sometimes the most obvious—and sometimes the easiest to heal.
Shortly after graduating from UR, I stopped my car to give two mountain bikers a flashlight in Crested Butte, Colo. I had just been on a night hike, so it was very dark and I could barely see the boys in my rear-view mirror. I pulled over to see if they needed more light. When I got out of my car, a drunk driver struck all three of us.
After the surgeon reattached pieces of my femur with a titanium plate and ten screws, I lay in bed most days for six weeks, while my broken hip and pelvis stabilized, wondering whether I’d be able to walk again. A few months later, after transfusions, surgeries, and intense physical therapy, I left the country with crutches and a brace, determined to fulfill a teaching contract in southeastern Hungary.
I refused to let the drunk driver take away my dream. While he might have taken away my ability to walk—temporarily, I hoped—there was no way I would let him significantly alter my future again.
Six months after the accident, on a bone-chilling January morning in a Hungarian village, one of my students knocked on the door with a rolled up fax from the mayor’s office. I closed the door and sat down to read a letter signed by the driver, Patrick Pash, asking for forgiveness. It was the most unexpected and unwelcome letter I had ever received.
At that moment, forgiveness had become the other f-word. It never felt good to say it. It never felt good to hear it. And it certainly didn’t feel like anything I’d ever like to do. Forgiveness seemed to belong to another group of people who had an uncanny disposition for kindness. “Spiritual” people. I was not feeling particularly generous of spirit in those days. Patrick did not deserve my kindness.
I dismissed his request and any remote possibility of ever responding, then shoved the letter into a file folder that I did not open for another 12 years.
Still, Patrick’s request for forgiveness haunted me for the next decade, well into my early 30s. Ignoring him only kept me in survival mode. Anyone who’s been there understands the tragedy of never being able to experience any sustained joy because of a choice to stay stuck in the past. No achievements could breach the wall I had built to protect myself. I was angry, and I wanted Patrick to know it. I refused to reread his letter or acknowledge any amount of pain that he, too, must have suffered as a result of the injuries he inflicted.
I wanted to prove to myself and others that the driver hadn’t affected me, that no one needed to worry about me. I was fine. It was only broken bones, after all. I remained positive. I vowed never to be seen as a victim. I was not prone to pity and spoke of myself as a survivor, using the word over and over as if it had become my new identity.
In those early years, I had fooled a lot of people who mistook my positivity as courage when really it was the opposite. I had yet to know what true courage meant. Though I learned to walk again, I had no idea how I’d ever recover from the limp in my heart, which I showed to no one. A fire fed off my anger and fear, but I silenced my rage by ignoring Patrick Pash. This was moving on, I believed.
But living in denial didn’t do much for me other than generate ironic humor. By choosing not to forgive, I also chose to suffer. The very pain I wanted Patrick to feel I had inflicted on myself. I couldn’t see it then, but the more I withheld my heart by refusing to forgive, thinking I was causing him to suffer, the more I only made myself suffer.
The ratio became clear: forgive more, suffer less. A simple choice now, but back then, very hard. The wounds were festering.
If someone had told me the night of the accident that I would need to forgive in order to heal myself completely, I would have smiled politely while striking that tip from the records. Why would I or anyone release another person from responsibility for their actions? I did not ask myself one other question: Why did I refuse to take responsibility for my own?
The very notion that I also had played a part in creating this accident overshadowed my best intentions to heal completely. After all, I had chosen to stop my car that night on a dark mountain road. I didn’t want the boys to get hit, but we all got hit as pedestrians by a small pick-up truck. Ironic?
I had to do something with the moment of impact that remained stuck inside my body. The events played out like a movie scene almost daily. I became freakishly paranoid of other people’s driving habits well into my marriage. Post-traumatic stress followed me for years like a ghost until I discovered that writing would help to release it.
Instead of answering the driver’s letter directly, I wrote a book that eventually became Kingdom of Simplicity, a novel about a 16-year-old Amish boy faced with forgiving the person who destroyed his family. I used Eli Yoder, the Amish kid, to disguise myself and work through the stages of forgiveness, which, for me, turned out to be a lot like death: anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance. I would never have power to change what happened in 1994, but I had a choice in how I dealt with the aftermath.
After reading Fred Luskin’s book Forgive for Good, I realized that forgiveness begins with the motivation to not suffer anymore. I wanted that for Eli Yoder. I wanted that for myself. I wanted to live honestly and have my smile reflect my heart.
Why is it so hard to forgive the people who hurt us? Why was it so hard to forgive myself? I was still clinging to the belief that the driver didn’t deserve my forgiveness. I had a few things to understand: When you forgive, you don’t forget. Forgiveness is not about making everything OK, nor is it about inviting an unhealthy person back into your life and calling it reconciliation. Forgiveness is simply a choice to be present by letting go of the past—clearly much easier said than done. Everyone has their own timeline.
I was so very wrong when I first read Patrick’s letter. He wasn’t asking me to be kind. He was taking responsibility and apologizing for his actions, and he was giving me a chance to recognize his sincere remorse and pain. His tone had been genuine, but I had not discerned that through my own clouded emotional body at the time. I wish I had because my healing and my life would have changed far more quickly for the better.
I could see the struggle of this man’s spirit, and in that, recognize my own. He was hurting as much as I, and when I let go of punishing him and myself, my life changed.
A few weeks after the book was published, I learned that I was pregnant. And almost one year after I finally wrote a letter to Patrick—15 years after I received his letter on that cold winter morning halfway around the world—I gave birth to my daughter.
We named her Gracelyn because she was made of the very thing I had needed to move on.
Holly Payne, ’94, is a novelist, writing coach, and editor who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. She will be leading Skywriter Ranch, an annual summer writing retreat in Crested Butte, Colo., August 10–17. She can be reached at holly@skywriterbooks.com or through her website, hollylynnpayne.com. Her 2009 novel Kingdom of Simplicity received the Benjamin Franklin Award, a Marin Arts Council Grant, and a nomination for a national book award in Belgium. It has been translated for readers in the Netherlands, Taiwan, and soon China, with Turkish rights pending.
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