Where There's Hope

by Elizabeth A. Smart

  “Were you able to see your children in the backseat?”

  “Initially, it was a struggle to even move. When I was finally able to turn enough to see Ben, he had a significant gash on his head. It wasn’t bleeding. Same thought. I wasn’t able to touch him or feel for a pulse, but knowing that kind of head trauma and no blood and no sign of movement—that was not good. When I looked at Anna, her hair was covering her face. No movement at all. I couldn’t see Sam, who was sitting directly behind me. I couldn’t hear anything.”

  Chris was told later that Michelle, Ben, and Anna all died from “aortic separation”: the force of the impact separating the heart from the carotid artery. We hear about tragedies of this magnitude on the news, and of course we feel heartbroken, we have compassion, but something about this detail makes it unbearably real. I feel it in my own bones. Tears brim in my eyes, but Chris is calm. No tears. I can’t imagine how, but he seems to have truly come to peace with what happened. I wonder if perhaps he’s spoken about it so much that it no longer feels like his life. There are times I feel that way, when I’ve been doing a lot of speaking about being kidnapped and raped. I don’t become numb to it, but the magnitude of it all takes me outside of myself sometimes.

  I move the story forward as gently as I can. “So you knew then. That they were dead.”

  Chris nods. “After that realization, the grief hit. It was immediate, soul-compressing grief and anguish, quick and powerful—shocking how powerful it was. I felt like my life was done, and that’s what I wanted. I remember putting my head against the window and trying to force my spirit out of my body. It was too much to be asked to see what I was seeing. It was almost out of body, because I heard a noise, and I didn’t know where it was coming from, and then I realized it was coming from me. I was crying and wailing and making a horrible noise. In the midst of that, I saw the car that had just struck us. It was upside down, maybe fifty or a hundred feet up the road from us. When I saw the car, I quieted just enough to hear three words. Let it go. It felt so real—as if someone was speaking right over my shoulder. Like if I turned around, I would see someone there. Someone telling me, Let it go.”

  The moment is so vivid, I can almost hear it myself. I ask Chris, “What did those words mean to you?”

  “I felt it was specifically saying that I had to move forward with faith, not with anger or a desire for justice. I was going to do it the Lord’s way, which would put me on a path of forgiveness, extension of mercy, relying on the Savior’s grace. I needed to let go of my expectations that my wife and I would live our lives together into our nineties, let go of everything, my hopes and dreams. The only thing I was ever given was my ability to choose, to make decisions, and to let go of all other expectation or anticipation.”

  I understand all this, but I get stuck on the practical application, like tires spinning in powder snow: Let it go? How could you? Why would you? And why would a merciful God even ask that of anyone?

  First responders used the “jaws of life” to extract Chris from the car, and as they were putting him into the ambulance, he heard Sam cry out. According to paramedics, as father and son were rushed to the hospital in critical condition, Chris kept saying, “We need to forgive the other driver.” The first responders were astonished. They were fuming, sickened by what they were seeing, angry at the drunk driver. In the emergency room, Chris was told that the other driver was seventeen and had been drinking.

  “I felt so broken,” says Chris. “My lungs were filling up with water, so I felt like I was drowning. But I don’t think my soul has ever felt so liberated. So free. Full of love. I knew the Savior was telling me, ‘You know I love that boy as much as I love you and your family.’”

  Maybe because I’m expecting, I can’t help asking, “Did you ever see the baby?”

  “At the funeral,” he says. “First I closed the lid of Anna’s casket, and then I closed the lid of Ben’s casket, and then right before we closed Michelle’s casket, they handed me this tiny baby. He looked so much like Sam, it was unbelievable. I took the baby and nestled him in my wife’s arms, gave her a kiss, and closed the casket.”

  Looking away from Chris, trying to hide the tears running down my face, I see the statue again. “Is that your family?”

  “Yes. Some friends got together after everything and had it made for me.”

  To me, it seems like the most significant thing in the room, a mother with her two children, cradling her baby in her arms. It’s so beautiful, it makes me want to cry all the more. I swallow hard and go back to my list of questions. “Chris, do you ever feel anger toward Cameron, the young man who was driving drunk and hit you?”

  “I definitely felt tons of anger. Tons of struggle. I haven’t been spared any of the growing pains, so to speak. That’s what happens when you’re confronted with such a tragic kind of catastrophic change in your life and in your goals and plans and dreams and everything else, but through all of that, I think the one blessing that I have been given is that I’ve never directed my anger at Cameron.”

  I’ve listened to Chris’s story many times, read his book, and listened to clips from speeches, but when he talks about Cameron, it always blows me away. There’s no anger or malice; in fact, he shows the exact opposite: forgiveness and genuine concern. When I ask him if he feels the consequences faced by Cameron were just, Chris says, “I decided before the trial to let it go.”

  “Is that when you met Cameron?”

  “We saw each other in court a couple months after the accident. We made eye contact, and he mouthed, ‘I’m sorry,’ but that was it.”

  The choice before the court was whether to try the seventeen-year-old as an adult. As an adult, Cameron could face thirty-five years in prison with hardened adult criminals. As a juvenile, he’d go to a juvenile detention center until age twenty-one, and then he’d be released with his record expunged.

  “When I was on the stand,” says Chris, “after all the evidence was shown and everything else, the judge asked me what I thought the penalty should be, and I told him, ‘That’s why you get paid the big bucks.’ It made him laugh, but it was my way of saying, ‘That’s your job. I’m not going to answer that question.’ I honestly did want what was best for Cameron. I didn’t want him to become another tragedy, another victim of that night.”

  Cameron was tried as a juvenile, and about a year after the accident, Chris went to the detention facility to visit him. He told Cameron, “I bear you no ill will. We are brothers in this.”

  “Do you think that was a turning point for him?” I ask. “Meeting with you face-to-face?”

  “Absolutely. When I first came into the room, it was just him and me and a counselor, and he had been lifting weights out there, so he was bulked up. He could have taken me easily. He was incredibly solemn, and his posture was very defensive. He had no idea. When I came in, I had a smile on my face and shook his hand, and I think it completely took him aback. He asked some prepared questions about how the crash had impacted my family and about my life going forward. The counselor said, ‘Anything else you want to ask Mr. Williams?’ And he just … the tears started to flow. He said, ‘After everything I did to your family, how can you forgive me? How does somebody do that? How do you get there?’ I told him that I was able to kind of bear witness. That for me, it was the grace of the Savior, that enabling power that helped me to do what I was doing, and he should know that he’s got to do the same thing I did: pick a date and let it go. Just let it go, and move forward, and not let this define who he is.”

  “You told him to pick an actual date on the calendar and then to move on after that day?”

  Chris nods, and again I feel tears in my eyes. No doubt that is easier said than done, but think how freeing that would be for this kid—for anyone who feels genuine remorse. It would be life-changing, I imagine.

  I ask Chris, “Is that something that came to you in that moment? Or was that something you’ve practiced in your own life? I mean—I really think it
’s brilliant, actually.”

  “A lot of it was based on what I experienced. By that time, I’d had a year to reflect on it, a year to realize all of the blessings that personally have been coming because I made that choice. It didn’t make it easier, didn’t make the pain stop, but at least it gave me something to focus on. My path forward—that was my choice, so that’s what I wanted him to do too. Have that let it go moment.”

  “Do you think he followed your advice?”

  “Yes, absolutely. In fact, I had a chance to meet him in October of last year. I went to his wedding reception. He got released early, when he was twenty. He’s absolutely made a decision. He has completely reinvented himself. He’s been, I would say, almost reborn, which is wonderful. He’s married now. Has a great home and a great job. He is a totally different person. That boy doesn’t exist anymore.”

  * * *

  Most of us are taught when we’re small children that forgiveness happens when you apologize, and as small children, we most often have our parents standing right behind us, forcing us to mutter, “Sorry.” Then as we grow into adults, it changes from that simple forced “sorry” into something else. I’ve thought and thought about how to describe it. I’m not sure I have the right words to articulate it. Sometimes it flies out of our mouths, second nature, and it’s questionable whether or not we actually mean it.

  So it’s not unreasonable to be a little skeptical when we’re on the receiving end of an apology. The part of this dynamic I hadn’t considered is the aspect Chris’s story brings to light: the fact that the most difficult person to forgive is oneself. When we’ve been wronged, it’s almost like the bigger or more traumatic the event has been, the more noble we look for forgiving, but when it comes to forgiving ourselves for wronging someone else—or wrongly feeling responsible for something terrible that’s happened to us—it is almost impossible to let go. It’s somehow easier to forgive strangers than to forgive ourselves or the people we know and love. There seems to be a spectrum—many levels and kinds of forgiveness—and quite honestly, it gets confusing.

  I decide it would be a good idea to ask an expert, someone who hears confession and leads people through the act of atonement, and immediately archbishop John Wester of the Catholic Church comes to mind. I haven’t actually met the archbishop yet, but I’ve been invited to speak at an event where he’s going to be honored. The event planner who invited me has told me a lot about him, and everyone I’ve talked to about the event goes on for at least ten minutes singing his praises. So not long after my meeting with Chris, I call the archbishop, explain the basic idea of my quest, and ask if he has just a few minutes to talk. I quickly learn that Archbishop Wester seldom talks for just a few minutes, but I end up feeling deeply grateful for his thoughtful pauses and long, contemplative answers.

  “What is forgiveness,” I ask, “and how does it bring healing?”

  He begins by repeating a wise saying that’s been attributed in various forms to everyone from Confucius to Oprah: Forgiveness is giving up hope of a better past.

  “Forgiveness is very important in healing,” he goes on, “because forgiveness is not whitewashing, or pretending something didn’t happen, or floating on the Good Ship Lollipop as if everything is great. In reality, everything isn’t great. We have murder, rape, terrorism, bigotry, suffering. I think forgiveness is the ability to look at life the way it is, to accept that it’s not perfect, and to go on. It admits the problem, and it moves forward.”

  This works for either side of the equation, it seems to me: the acceptance that yesterday can’t be changed and the willingness to allow a fresh start tomorrow. In the context of Chris’s story, the archbishop’s explanation crystalizes something I’ve been trying to get my head around for a long time. It resonates with me, this concept of forgiveness as a bargain we make with ourselves. When I give up the hope of a better past, making the choice to forgive, that forgiveness is not going to help or punish the other person. Forgiveness is for me. And this approach seems like the opposite of another old saying that’s never resonated with me: Forgive and forget.

  “If you slap me, I can forgive you, but I’ll always remember it,” the archbishop clarifies. “If I’m driving drunk and I kill somebody, I can’t change that, but by true forgiveness, I can move on. Forgiveness means I integrate it into my life—that’s part of who I am. I can become a new person and not let that take me over.”

  The analogy takes my breath away, because it takes me back to that vivid moment Chris described: Let it go. Forgiveness was a pact he made with himself, and the boy who killed Chris’s family had to make that pact within himself as well. But I wonder if a kid that age would have had the capacity to get there if Chris had not led the way.

  “Forgiveness is very powerful,” says Archbishop Wester. “The trouble is, you can’t be forgiven until you know you’ve sinned. If I don’t admit that I slapped you, then I’ll never get forgiveness. Some people come to a priest to confess their sins, but they never confess their sins; they confess somebody else’s. They blame the other person. You know, they say, ‘My husband did this’ or ‘My wife did that.’ So I say, ‘Okay, tell your husband or wife to come to confession.’”

  This also resonates with me. I can immediately think of two people who are guilty of the worst crimes imaginable but have never acknowledged the slightest wrongdoing. I’m often asked, “Have you forgiven your captors?” My answer is yes. Yes, I have. But I’ve never known how to explain to people that my forgiving them doesn’t mean that I’d ever invite them into my home for Sunday dinner. In fact, I hope I go the rest of my life without ever seeing or speaking to them again. It makes a difference, I think, that the teenage driver who took the lives of Chris’s family did something irresponsible with horrific, unintended consequences about which he felt crushing remorse, whereas Mitchell and Barzee carefully planned the harm they did to me. It was intentional and even somehow justified in their minds. Mitchell and Barzee—unlike Cameron White—have never expressed any remorse or a need to be forgiven. My forgiving them will not make a difference in how they live the rest of their lives. But it does make a difference for me. That’s the point. If I were still holding on to the past, and dwelling on all of the terrible things they did to me all the time, they would be completely and wholly unaffected, but I would be destroying myself.

  Forgiveness is not for the benefit of the other person; it’s for yourself.

  Thinking of it in the terms that Archbishop Wester used, it’s much easier for me to explain: I can’t change the fact that I was kidnapped, raped, held hostage for nine months. I’ll never forget what happened to me. It changed me in many ways. But I can accept the fact that it happened, and I can choose to move on. I will never go back to being the same girl I was before I was kidnapped. What matters is the woman I choose to be now—and in the future—as I move forward.

  Mom helped me see that after I was rescued. She didn’t call it forgiveness at the time, but she led me toward that idea of forgiveness as giving up hope for a better past. I was in Mom’s bedroom the morning after I returned home, and we were talking about all that had changed while I was gone. I was giving her a hard time because she hadn’t folded my clothes in my closet. She’d left it exactly as I had, all messy and disorganized, as most fourteen-year-olds’ closets would be.

  As I went to take a shower, Mom said, “Elizabeth, what these people have done to you is terrible. There aren’t words strong enough to describe how wicked and evil they are. They’ve stolen nine months of your life that you will never get back. The best punishment you could ever give them is to be happy—to move on and do exactly what you want. Because feeling sorry for yourself and holding on to what happened is only allowing them to steal more of your life away from you, and they don’t deserve a single second more.”

  She went on to say that God is our ultimate judge, that He would make everything up to me that I’d lost, and that the people who’d hurt me would also receive their just reward. Sh
e said they should be happy for every day they are on earth, because it says in the Bible that if someone hurts a child, it’s better for them to be at the bottom of the ocean with a millstone tied about their neck than to face God’s wrath.

  Her advice has stayed with me ever since that day. I think I realized even then that she was right. My captors don’t care how I feel. If I am as miserable and as unhappy as they are, so much the better for them. The best thing I can do is accept that there were things taken from me—time, innocence, my safe and peaceful childhood—precious things that I will never get back. Now I have to move on to live my life the best way I know how.

  None of us is perfect or will have a perfect life. No doubt we all struggle with something. But to live with the realization that forgiveness is for ourselves means that we can actually use that powerful healing tool in our lives. We will always have problems and struggles and failures, but we will also have hope and knowledge that we can always move forward. So as tragic as Chris’s story is, I find it equally hopeful. We can come back. We can forgive and be forgiven.

  * * *

  A few years ago, I had the opportunity to be included in creating an online class on psychology. I’m certainly no expert on the subject, but the other person involved was Dr. Paul Jenkins, the author of The Love Choice and Pathological Positivity, who readily affirms that he is “a man of faith” and that his faith brings both context and meaning to his work. We became good friends, and he said he’d be happy to answer my questions about his practice and about the psychology of resilience and hope in general. (More about that later.) It wasn’t my intention to ask him about forgiveness per se, but we end up spending quite a lot of time on the topic. His take on forgiveness is quite straightforward: “Snakes are going to be snakes. Forgiveness is about acknowledging that the snake is a snake, and if it bites you, you’re not going to chase it down. You’re going to focus on getting the venom out of your system.”