The Brutality and Redemptive Power of Karma…

He died in prison. If that isn’t karma, then I am not sure what is. I suppose one could make any definition of karma work though:

“What goes around, comes around…” Unknown

“It is destiny or fate…” Webster’s Dictionary

“Karma in cat sitting in my lap because it loves me…” Taylor Swift

Being a Buddhist now for most of my life, I guess I do tend to believe that karma is the culmination of all your deeds and acts from all prior existences, that in turn work themselves out, or rather even themselves out in this lifetime, and if they don’t, then into the next.

This would be what I believe, I believe. It is not what I really believe.

I believe he died in prison because that was his destiny. His fate. The punishment for all the things he took from me and other little girls like me. Luring us with all our specialness and then fucking us up forever.

I wish I could say I was happy about his ending, but I am not. So many lives lay wasted at his hand. His son, his daughter (perhaps the first victim), his wife, and all of us little girls lost, forced to grow up way too soon.

I guess what I can say is that I am not sad he is gone. Locked away for the heinous crimes, punished, not for mine, but for others like me. That was good enough, I suppose. He was removed from all the places he could destroy others, to a place where all the others go who are destroyed and destroying. He lived out his days in a hell I have only visited with a bar card to always ensure my evening release.

I do not know what killed him. Probably old age. It really doesn’t matter anymore how he ended his life. I am sure he found Jesus…men like him always do. And I guess only Jesus or perhaps the Buddha would know what to do with a man like him. God knows the rest of us did not.

So many others ignored the signs, dismissed his violent tendencies, his controlling nature and his love for little girls. A great pretense that all was on the up and up…which would regrettably include my own parents. They provided unknowing access to a monster that would remove their child from them forever right before their eyes that refused to see.

Did he get what he deserved? I am sure he did not. He did rot the rest of his life away behind bars while the rest of us lived behind the bars he installed and caused in us. The stunted growth, the precocious knowledge of sex and all its vagaries, the problems with intimacy and vulnerability. We learned the repugnant sound of the door creak to our bedroom, the slice of the washcloth in the bath, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes that tended to linger on our tender skin for days…years.

Did I get what I deserved? That is the question you ask forever, you know. That is the question that haunts you in everything you live and do and breathe from there forward. That is the question you answer for yourself repeatedly, every single day of your life. Of course I deserved it, that was my karma. But for what? What horrific misdeed had I committed in some previous existence? In this one?

You spend the entirety of your life attempting to see how you, a sunny child with a lovely disposition for adventure and laughter and the outdoors, deserved that particular fate. And then it takes you your lifetime to come to terms with it. If you are very lucky…

For me, I drank myself almost to death attempting to work it all out. I compulsively called the suicide hotline while I got blindly drunk on a 5th of Jack every night. That could have been my fate. And a worthy fate for someone who deserved it.

I was struck sober one day and placed in the loving arms of Alcoholics Anonymous and it was there this question of getting what you deserved was answered, with finality and a very subtle period.

It happened at the end of my 5th step. I held it back. I wasn’t sure I was going to say anything about it. I had never talked it about it, to anyone, ever. I had never shared it. Fuck, I had barely admitted it to myself…so it lingered there on page 457 of my 5th step…the cause for most of the shit that littered the other 456 pages that came before…my feeble and futile attempt to become a being that could hold the pain, the loss, the grief and the trauma and not destroy herself in the process.

I almost didn’t say it. But something welled up inside me and I could not leave her house with it. I had to leave it with her. I needed her to tell me exactly what part of all this shit was mine. What had I done to deserve it?

I blurted it out because that is the only way something like that can be uttered after a 21 year hold back. Sober, defensive, defiant and hostile, so removed from any other kind of feeling or vulnerability.

I choked out the awful secret truth and for a moment we were suspended in time. We just hung there in the moment that stretched out before me with an expanse that I am sure knew no horizon…I do not believe I breathed. I am not sure she did either. I remember wishing I could grab the words just spoken back, like they were some sort of net I had just cast overboard…all that was required is to now reach over and hoist them back into the boat. Away from her knowledge and experience. Back into the recesses of my mind.

But you can’t take a thing like that back. You can’t say, “kidding!” And have a proper laugh. No, something like that putrefies the air and leaves an acrid taste in your nose and mouth. But, there is some relief in the explosion and revelation of that secret once the sulfuric haze clears. Like the excision of a festering boil, you weep because there is nothing else to do. Except I didn’t. There were no tears, they were long dried up and hadn’t been seen in decades. It isn’t that I didn’t want to cry, just that I could not. That would take another few decades to come to fruition.

So it hung there, rancid and repulsive, waiting for whatever fate might befall it next…

Hanging…

Waiting…

Praying…

Dying…

Then she uttered pure salvation…”oh dear child, that was not your fault at all…you were just a child. You have no part in this…”

And I will tell you my spine extended upwards toward the heavens and I no longer reviewed the floor for inconsistencies that didn’t exist. I dared not look directly at her out of fear that she would take those soul saving words of forgiveness away. I had been waiting all my life to hear that. So afraid that I would totally and completely hear something else…hear that it was all my fault as I so feared.

I felt redeemed and seen. The relief I felt was palpable. The room was suddenly expansive and airy. Only a tinge of the sulphuric spice that invaded the room moments before. I felt amazing for the first time, without chemical alteration or enhancement. For a moment, I had come full circle…at least so I thought.

Then she continued…with words that would become my healing, my life line and my becoming…”no, you had no part in all of that…but look what you have done to yourself because of that for all these years.”

Whatever lofty pursuits I had in mind from my immediately previous clemency was popped like a balloon full of confetti, all the tiny particles of me, floating softly to the floor. It would have made this story better if I passed out or something. But the always in control/out of control person would never allow for that to be our fate. No one was ever allowed to see the pain. The loss. The heartbreak. The fear. The exterior package was designed with disguise and deception in mind, always. What you see isn’t always what you get…

We said a prayer and I left her house. Swelled up and deflating in some sort of bizarre twist of physics. I walked to my car befuddled and befogged. A fugue state of being between where I really was and where I was already gone. I had been leaving all my life. My body remained but I always floated nearby, close enough to rush back in case of an emergency, but far enough away so that I didn’t have to witness whatever was going down. You learn how to do that from men like him. It isn’t a gift so much as it is survival tactic for people who need such things at four.

Look what I had done to myself all those years because of him! Look at the mess I had become. Look at what I did to my life. Look at the broken relationships. The fucked up sexual adventures. The inability to stay present and real. The complete lack of authenticity and vulnerability. I was not a human being…no, I was something else altogether. Something that existed in this plane at times, but spent more of her life in some other realm where men like him didn’t exist and things like that didn’t have to happen to kids like me.

And on that day, I picked up the mantel of my life. No longer his victim. I shed that moniker for a better one, warrior or survivor…because I was the only one who knew how close I actually came to never making it out alive. When you have the live like this, you become an adept liar because the secret is what you must keep. Above relationships, above friendships, above everything, always.

I vowed I would no longer allow what he did to be my undoing. It has not been easy. I have faltered. It has not been linear or pretty. I have caused much wreckage in my reclamation. But I have reclaimed the land, land of my body and my soul. He never had my mind, that was something I tucked far away and gave hardly any access.

Sitting at almost 30 years of sobriety sometimes makes me feel like I should be further along. But I don’t entertain thoughts like that very often…I know how easily it could have cut the other way. I should not still be here. But I am. And he is not.

Because of people like her, who say things like that to barely grown women who are anything but grown, stuck in a perpetual and endless cycle of abuse, neglect and addiction. Most never make it out. Many becomes strippers or whores. Most marry men who beat them. Many die alone, killing themselves over sins that were never theirs.

But there was karma in all of this. I survived. I grew up. I got well and then weller and weller. I walked the earth as an evolving free woman, while he shrank into nothingness in a dark prison cell where he finally drew his last breath with no one around to testify to his existence at all.

I got this life. He got his.

And that will forever be the best example of karma I could ever give. Karma is about granting passage to the consequences of others to ensnare and imprison you, but inside karma always hides a tiny key that if you are diligent and patience enough, you can always find…to free yourself. The only thing karma ever asks in return is that you use what you learn to help others find their own keys…and that I have done to the very best of my ability every single fucking day since.

And I know it is real because I am still here…and he is not. I walk the earth a free person today no longer enslaved to the trauma he gave me. And since I am still here to share the light…I do every chance I get. And this feels like the best most important definition of karma I have ever held: when you do your work, you become free and then you use what you learned to help others do the same.

Again…still. In this lifetime and beyond. One day at a fucking time.