Forgiveness

I’ve spent a lot of time working through forgiveness issues over the last several years. And then last year I found a profound example of forgiveness in an unexpected place—The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son.

Pat Conroy’s book came out in October 2013, but it didn’t hit my radar until sometime last year when a friend said she was about to read it. I’ve read most of Conroy’s books, but somehow The Great Santini never made it to my nightstand. Surprising after twenty-fours years as the wife of a Marine aviator. It was published in 1976, the year Joe and I became part of the Marine Corps. Maybe that’s why it didn’t interest me, or maybe I just wasn’t into reading that much back then. In the years since, I fell in love with reading and discovered Pat Conroy—dark, often depressing, but a talent that always left me in awe.

Wanting to read The Death of Santini, I decided to read The Great Santini first so I’d know the background story to Conroy’s new book. As a novel, The Great Santini is the fictionalized version of Conroy’s life as the son of his Marine aviator father. It’s based on the true stories of his life, and they were often brutal. The book wasn’t anything like I thought it would be. I expected a Marine Corps story, yet what I read was a moving story of a damaged, dysfunctional family with the patriarch leading the way. I can relate. The publication of The Great Santini tore the Conroy family apart.

Then I read The Death of Santini, Pat Conroy’s memoir. This book touched me so deeply that my immediate thought on reading the last page was wishing I could call Conroy and tell him what an impact his story of forgiveness had on me. The relationship Pat had with his father in the years leading up to his death are nothing short of amazing in light of the hardships of his family life in the decades of his youth. I don’t know how Conroy got to the point of forgiving his father. I don’t know if he’s a believer. He calls himself a Christian writer in one interview I read, but I don’t know if he arrived at the destination of forgiveness in the same way I did. No matter how he got there, his book affected me and my thoughts about my own father. In The Prince of Tides, Conroy wrote, “In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.” That oft-quoted line came out of fiction, but it speaks a truth that will set you free if you only choose to believe it.

Thank you, Mr. Conroy.