Damned If You Do

I was thinking about apologies and guilt this morning. There are quite a few apologies that I am owed, and I would venture to guess that there are more than a few that I owe. I’m not talking about the little things – the bumping into someone on the sidewalk or forgetting to return a phone call from a friend – I mean the karmic destiny, major fuck-up, spend the rest of your life slightly haunted by the fact that you did this or that someone else did it to you. I’m referring to the kinds of actions that end friendships, shatter relationships and ruin lives.

The minute this train of thought pulled into the station (who says TV doesn’t make you think?) the resulting round of self-pity set in – a twinge in the back of your psyche that says ‘Look at all the ways I’ve been wronged’ but the more I thought about all of the apologies I’m owed and will, likely, never receive, I realized that, in most cases, the lack of apology is a greater sign of mercy, grace, and responsibility than the apology could hope to be. It is often been said that the average apology is not an earnest attempt to express guilt – but an attempt to escape guilt. You say you’re sorry, when you bump into someone in line at the grocery store so that, when you wander out into the parking lot, you don’t find them slamming the door of their SUV into your disposable compact car.

We say we’re sorry, in this culture, anyway, for absolution – for forgiveness – when, most of the time, we don’t really deserve it. With children, we send them to sit in the corner or restrict privileges until they apologize for something they’ve done wrong because we want to teach them the importance of repenting for your misdeeds, but are we really teaching them something different? Is the message they’re getting that once you apologize, you’re off the hook and if it is, how do we expect them to carry a different lesson into their adulthood? (Then, perhaps this isn’t a new phenomenon – the Catholic Church has been offering clean souls in exchange for apologies since their inception.)

I’ve often wondered how people can cheat on their spouses – how is it possible that you can come home every night and sleep knowing you’ve betrayed a person who loves you so completely? More than that, I’ve wondered how people can tell a spouse and expect forgiveness in return. How can you hurt someone – deliberately hurt them – and expect that, rather than spending a few nights on a buddies couch with the classifieds section, they will offer you forgiveness. Sure, as humans, we don’t admit to that sort of thing until we’ve come around the pass – realized we were wrong and genuinely, at the time at least, have no intention of perpetuating the relationship, but what right do we have to foist our guilt off on another and beg for them to tell us that everything is going to be OK?

Then there are situations where the damage is done – where the hurt has already been handed out and all parties involved are reeling. What then? There are apologies that I have waited years for – literally – and today it occurred to me that, rather than being angry about the apology that hasn’t come, perhaps I should be grateful that they’ve had the good sense to respect the wishes I put out there quite clearly.

In most cases of emotional wronging, I hand out a blanket ‘stay away from me’ warning and leave it at that – don’t call, don’t send me an e-mail, don’t stop by my house and, for the record, if you bump into me in a public place, walk the other way. It’s a good warning – it has served me well. With those that will listen, it has kept me from constant torment at the hands of people I can’t – or won’t – deal with. A phone call from the wrong person still has the capacity to send me diving for a bottle of Pepto Bismol with my face buried in Kleenex.

A few months ago, I got an e-mail from an old friend that left my in hysterics. Two sleeping pills, a great big hug and a very concerned boyfriend later, I had stopped wanting to hyperventilate or throw up, but I wasn’t ‘OK’ for days. True, the e-mail in question wasn’t a traditional ‘Hey, how are you doing – I haven’t seen you in ages’ outcry, though even that would have left me slightly nauseous. This e-mail was of a different kind – news that a man who tore my life apart had chosen another victim with a side note of ‘woops!’ about the hell that my then-friends put me through after it happened – anyone would have felt a little ill and I have always been able to take things like that to the physical illness extreme. At the time, I didn’t know what to think. It was too much to feel at one time – sick, simply for hearing the name – angry, because he’d attacked someone else – guilty, because I didn’t do more to stop him – and even a little bit self-satisfied because after five years of hell and dirty looks, a friend who betrayed me realized she’d done something wrong. I was so distraught when it first arrived that I actually let Mike reply to it – I had no idea what to do or say because there were just too many disparate emotions colliding with one another and all I could think for a long time was ‘I’d rather not know.’

So, this morning, as I was staring at yet another passive, unintentional and tiny reminder of a friend I don’t have anymore, I could feel the bile building. Defensive mechanism, certainly, to use anger as an anesthesia against fond memories, but most of the time, I can’t care less what my coping mechanisms are called. Twenty minutes and 864 words later, I realized that the missing apology isn’t something I should resent – it’s something I should be glad for. True, it’s always nice, when you’re quite as self-righteous as I am, to spend years doing your best to take the high road and have someone who hurt you come back and say “I’m sorry” but I realized today that the spoken condolences are an easy gesture of absolution and sometimes, doing the thing that is right for the other person involved is infinitely more difficult.

Then, maybe I’m just talking myself into something else.