Forgiveness

Life is filled with a long list of people who cross our paths like firefly’s dancing in the night.  Some stay longer than others.  Some mark us in positive ways and some, not so much.  There is a precious list of those we love, a vastly larger list of those we know, perhaps admire and a hopefully shorter list of those we detest.  Bad feelings can stick to us like fungus yet a skill I have been working on for 56 years is how to let those feelings go.  Sometimes it can be terribly difficult.  Like the scorn I feel for a guy named Barry Wilson who back stabbed me in a previous office interfering with a chance for me to move back and resume a former job after an overseas assignment.  His actions caused me to sell my house and relocate my life.  Life can at times feel like a catalog of miserable interactions as they tend to stand out much more prominently than the positive ones.  One particular memory reared its head this week when I learned that a previous boss of mine had passed away.  

Senator Johnny Ellis

It was one of my first jobs out of college.  In the beginning it seemed like a dream, yet it quickly devolved into a nightmare.  I was hired on as a legislative aid for a Representative in the State of Alaska named Johnny Ellis.  Johnny was a career politician.  He assumed his legislative seat in his early 20’s and at the time of my employment was amazingly only 6 years older than me.  He seemed much older in his mannerisms and arrogant nature, and I felt as though he was 20 years my senior.  He was a Democrat, and I was a passionate young progressive, so I thought it was a great fit.  It would be my job to handle his legislative constituent correspondence and while I was initially hired on at his Anchorage legislative office, we would be bound for Juneau and the legislative session there.  

That is the way Alaska worked.  Long before Anchorage was much of anything the state capital had been located in a city with no road connection to the rest of the state.  To even call it a city was a bit of a misnomer.  The population of the village was scarcely 25,000.  Periodically during my youth there had been attempts to move it to Anchorage, but a battle always ensued between Anchorage and Fairbanks and the effort would come to nothing.  At one point some idiotic compromise was struck and voted for in 1976 that would have moved the capital to Willow, a speck on the map 70 miles north of Anchorage.  Willow with a population of less than 2,000 made Juneau look like New York City.  The idea of building a new capital there was shear lunacy and in the end, cooler heads and budget minded people prevailed.

In retrospect I probably could have been a better employee, but I was young, newly married and trying to figure out where I fit into the professional world.  I needed to work for someone that engendered in me a desire to emulate, a person to look up to, admire.   Johnny was young, charismatic and I hoped that he would be that person.  In reality, he was the polar opposite.  Idealism quickly gave way to the most regrettable condition many politicians fall into, that of gamesmanship.  Out witting your opponent and fighting with the other party becomes more important than any legislative priority or humanistic mission.  Fueling this was a man who viewed his legislative staff as disposable servants to use and abuse as he saw fit.  I could do a long ripping personality assessment but Ellis, a closeted gay man, must have had so many internal issues the only way he could express himself was by lashing out at others.

The life of a legislative aid while outwardly impressive is anything but.  The rare boss appreciates you but the majority of them do not.  Many seem to see themselves not as elected servants, but more as feudal barons.  They have been anointed and as such are the pre-eminent figure in their own fiefdom.  By extending employment to their staff, they see themselves as deserving payback in service and loyalty.  This service is often more akin to slavery.  Hired staff while nominally state employees have no rights what-so-ever.  They can be abused with no recourse and fired at the momentary whim of the politician.  I don’t know if there is any position in America with less labor protection than the legislative aid.  

At the time, I was 23, fresh out of college and struggling to support myself and my wife.  I had no money and the simple act of relocating my life from Anchorage to Juneau for a 5-6-month exercise containing the 90-day legislative session was onerous at best.  There was no moving expenditure, it was all on me, and Ellis expected his staff to be with him in Juneau during the session.  Our office consisted of myself, a young blond demonic woman named Kimberly and a wonderful administrative assistant named Renee Chapman.  For a time, there was a useless intern named Rex.  We worked closely with a man named Jim Nordlund who was Johnny Ellis’ friend and travel partner.  He also was the Chief of Staff for the Health and Human Services Committee.  

Everything might have been copasetic had Ellis treated us like human beings but instead he chose a path of a cruel form of mental abuse.  He thrilled himself by playing Kimberly and myself against each other while quietly inferring that after Juneau one of us would be axed at the expense of the other.  The result was an office filled with toxicity.  With no money my wife and I were living in an unfurnished apartment in Juneau.  Had it not been for Renee lending us her car to make shopping runs from time to time our life would have been even more abysmal.    

The experience was dreadful, and I came out loathing the man for everything he was and the torture he had caused me.  I can recall nights laying on the floor in Juneau tossing on an inflatable mattress and breaking down physically from the stress.  Tears streaming down my face I wondered what in the hell I was doing.  Day after day work was a sadistic routine of demeaning comments and negativity against anything I did.  I can still recall one evening that I was forced to host the office at my apartment.  It didn’t matter that I protested telling them I had no furniture or anything to host with.  It was an event pushed by Ellis mostly as a way of laughing at me and my existence.  

When the session ended Kimberly did all she could to endear herself to Ellis and after being used as forced labor for numerous Ellis sponsored community events pandering to elderly voters in his district, I was let go.  I suppose I should have embraced the elements of his vote pandering more.  Weekends were spent with activities like painting poor people's houses, visiting the senior center or serving food at the food bank yet my loathing for the man forcing my obligatory attendance far outweighed the mission itself.  

In the end good won over evil and I was offered a secretarial job at the University of Alaska working for a friend of my father who ran the Department of Automotive Technology.  In the meantime, a federal application for employment I had made came through and I began my career with the Drug Enforcement Administration.  

When my mother passed away from cancer in 1999, I was visited by a myriad of conflicting emotions largely governed by actions she tried to make prior to her death.  Much of this revolved around my own feelings of insecurity as she attempted to cleanse what she considered the sins of her past.  As a young woman she twice gave birth to children, one a boy and one a girl.  Both were adopted away at birth.  It was an era before legalized abortion and was fundamental in creating the strong, empowered feminist that she was.  The experiences also left her riddled with guilt that she carried with her through her life.  Eventually after extraordinary effort in a pre-internet era, she located both then adult “children” and made contact with them.  The daughter became a presence in her life and was near her when she passed away.  In my world I had been her faithful son and had lived my life with her as my only mother.  To be treated equally with them was exceedingly painful for me.  In the waning moments of my mother’s life before I was able to return home to her, she wavered in splitting what little she had between me and her newly found daughter.  This would have been a disaster as she had also chosen to reconcile with my father with whom she had divorced a few years prior.  The way things turned out I was able to return her house to him as I am sure she would have wanted.  

Her lawyer was contacted and consulted.  He determined that she was heavily under the influence of narcotics and declined to modify any details concerning her will.  I don’t know if my mother ever understood the pain this caused me.  I like to think that if she had, she would have never requested what she did.   I had been raised by a stepfather and blood meant little to me.  For me life was a question of relationship, and I didn’t understand how she did not recognize me as an elevated part of her life.  How could she even consider this final gesture for a child that had their own family and had never been hers aside from a moment at birth?  I do not know if the daughter had requested anything from her or what their final conversations were.  I like to think it was a thought that only she had.  Sadly, I was not present when she passed.  At the time I was in the Philippines rushing to try to get home as quickly as I could.  I once tried to to write the woman, her birth daughter, to express myself but must have done a miserable job as she never responded to me.  

It was at her funeral when just prior to my speaking my stepfather gave me advice.  I don’t remember exactly how the conversation flowed but it was basically let go of the anger and allow the positive to dominate my memory.   I was consumed with tears while I eulogized her, and his words sank into my soul.  

Subsequent to her death every time I walked by her photo on my wall it was difficult for me to look at.  I was filled with so many conflicting emotions I did not want to confront them by looking into her eyes.  As days turned to months and months to years my father's words came to dominate my memories.  I let the anger and questions go.  Instead, I remembered the mother that loved me to no end and with whom I lamented her loss.  The mother that had she lived, would be closer to me and who I am than any other person in this world.   Stupidity and negativity of youth would have vanished as every day I am alive would undoubtedly have reminded me how much I loved her.  It seems like as I age, I realize how similar I am to her and how much we would have embraced our commonality.  

Anger and negativity are poison.  Harboring it if nothing else caters to the ultimate success in the ambition of those that caused it.  It allows them to live immortally within you and dominate a corner of yourself and your life.   If it is based on emotions or questions that can never be resolved, it exists like a burning ember that refuses to extinguish.   

From time to time, I Google my past and it was then that I realized Johnny Ellis had died.  At 61 he succumbed to prostate cancer and MS.  Six years my senior his health had declined rapidly.   I wonder if he even remembered me in his later years or had any idea of the cruelty he had exercised.  Still at this point, with his passing, it didn’t really matter anymore.  With my father’s wisdom I have decide to release my anger.  Instead, I will simply recognize the person that at least gave me a chance at a job no matter what his ultimate intentions were.  I am sure he did good things with his legislative power over the course of his career even if he avoided the greatest thing he could have ever done.  This would have simply been to openly recognize his homosexuality and embrace the person that he was.  If he had done so he would have been remembered as a man beyond himself but sadly, I don’t believe that’s who he was.  

Living with anger is far easier than letting it go but once you do, it is liberating.  There is a kind of cleansing to the soul that lifts you like a cloud floating in the sky.  Forgiveness is truly one of the most powerful l emotions we have, and its consequences can reform us in a way more profoundly than almost any other emotion.  

Johnny Ellis, I forgive you.  Mom, I love you more than you ever knew.  Barry Wilson, I despise you and am still working through what you did however, I have found a positive path as you have released me in life to write my final chapter. (I am not perfect but working on it.)