The Choice

“If you kill his mother, won’t you be hurting your son?”
Jason stared at the gun in his hand. In visits to come, he would tell
me what ĕlled his mind at this moment. He would tell me about his
father, a violent man who beat into Jason, sometimes with his words,
sometimes with his ĕsts, that this is what a man does: A man is
invulnerable; a man doesn’t cry; a man is in control; a man calls the
shots. He would tell me that he had always intended to be a better
father than his father had been. But he didn’t know how. He didn’t
know how to teach and guide his children without intimidation.
When I asked him to consider how his choice to seek revenge would
affect his son, he was suddenly compelled to search for a possibility
that, up until then, he hadn’t been able to summon. A way to live that
didn’t perpetuate violence and insecurity, that would bring him—and
his son—not to the imprisoning seduction of revenge but to the wide
open sky of his promise and potential.
If I understand anything about that aernoon, about the whole of
my life, it’s that sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the
moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to
unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are
in fact the moments that bring us to understand our worth. It’s as if we
become aware of ourselves as a bridge between all that’s been and all
that will be. We become aware of all we’ve received and what we can
choose—or choose not—to perpetuate. It’s like vertigo, thrilling and
terrifying, the past and the future surrounding us like a vast but
traversable canyon. Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and
time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel
spinning. And what will we power with the wheel of our own life?
Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we
reengage and reenact all the hurts from the past? Will we abandon the
people we love as a consequence of our own abandonment? Will we
make our children pick up the tab for our losses? Or will we take the