What Forgiveness Gave Me

Theresa Trosky
Aug 9, 2017 · 4 min read

In college I had two goals: getting a good job when I graduated and keeping my boyfriend alive.

I failed on both counts.

We started dating my freshman year. He was almost 7 years older than I was. He had a good job, a sweet disposition, a love of classic rock and photography and a kind heart. Unbeknownst to me, he also had a drug addiction and a drinking problem.

By the time I realized the truth, we were living together. I was young and naive and I believed him when he said he’d stop. I believed him when he said he was just experimenting. I believed him when he said it wasn’t a problem.

But it didn’t end. He begged me to help him. He begged me not to leave. He told me he needed me, that he couldn’t make it without me. His mom told me I was the only one who could get through to him.

I believed them.

I convinced him to go to rehab twice, but sobriety never lasted long. I spent my days going to school, studying, working and trying to make sure he was staying clean, sober and alive.

I don’t remember what that final straw was, but I do remember the day I moved out more than 3 years after our relationship started. It was a beautiful, sunny Saturday in November during my senior year. I knew I had to go and all his protestations that I stay, all his promises that he’d get clean, all his begging me to save him could no longer make me change my mind.

Later that evening I found him seizing on the floor of our apartment. I don’t remember the paramedics showing up, I vaguely remember seeing them work on him, I don’t remember leaving the apartment at all.

After being unable to reach his parents in another state, I went to be with him in the hospital. The hospital staff told me that there was a strong possibility that he would die, then they told me I couldn’t stay.

I was completely lost and overwhelmed. I felt such anger, such guilt, such rage, inconsolable grief and despair.

But he survived that day. He went to rehab and I finished school.

I saw him again the day I graduated, happy but without the job offer I always believed I’d have. He asked if he could come congratulate me and I agreed. He was sober, but still had that shaky newness about him. He stayed for awhile then we parted on good terms wishing one another well.

It was the last time I saw him. He took his life a couple of years later, just months after he found me and asked me to come back.

When I got the news the night he died, I went for a long drive to the middle of nowhere, sobbing on and off for hours. I came back from that drive having decided I was done with it and done with him.

In the many years since, I hadn’t forgiven him. For the years he stole from me, for breaking my heart over and over again, for lying and cheating on me with drugs, for ruining my college years, for having the damned gall to leave this earth the way he did.

Until one night shortly after last Christmas when painful memories of him unexpectedly surfaced and the trauma I carried over the years refused to be ignored any longer. I got in the car and went for a drive in the middle of nowhere and everything I had bottled up inside me all these years came screaming out of me in a violent stream of unstoppable rage and grief.

The moment it stopped I was so shaken by the eerie emptiness left inside me that all I could think to do was go home.

Hours later when I unexpectedly came across the photo album with the memories of us neatly tucked inside, I knew it was time to open it.

Looking at those pages I remembered why I loved him. I remembered who he was and how much he loved me.

I remembered that I had chosen to stay.
That I had believed I could save him.
That I had believed that I was responsible for his life.
That saving his life had become in those years more important to me than living my own.

In that moment of Truth I forgave us both.

I’ve spent years unlearning patterns of thought and behavior that got me into that situation and kept me there. The lessons are endless, but if I leave you with anything, I want to leave you with this.

We cannot save anyone else, but even when lives seem to be on the line, we have the power to choose. When our choices go awry, we have the power to forgive.

By understanding my role and his, I claimed that power for myself.

The only thing forgiveness asked of me was to give up my anger and blame. I don’t miss them at all.

In return forgiveness gave me far more than it asked me to give. It healed my hurt heart. It gave me the freedom, peace and grace to let go and move on with my life in ways I hadn’t even recognized I was stuck. It gave me back to me.

If you’re holding on to something from the past just know it’s never too late to forgive. Its grace is always there for you waiting for yous simply to take its hand so it can walk you home.

Theresa Trosky

“We are all just walking each other home.” — Ram Dass

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