Today marks 21 months since my father passed away.
The pain of his loss has not subsided. But lately it is overlaid by another pain, one that washed over me without warning. Memories I thought I had put away. The cruelty still surprises me. Old wounds, it seems, have their own calendar.
Into that pain walked people who should have known better. Among them, those who wore the vocabulary of grace while practicing the grammar of control, demanding blind obedience and speaking of God the way men do when they mean themselves. And others who arrived needing someone to blame more than they needed to grieve.
I will not pretend I did not rage. What kind of person treats the mourning this way? In my mind, I had a bullet for each of them. It was my faith that kept me in check. Vengeance, after all, belongs to the Lord.
The irony is not lost on me. They disrespected my faith and dignity, yet were saved by the very grace they threw away when they came for me at one of my lowest seasons.
My father, Lamberto E. Antonio, spent his life standing where the pain was and naming it, without pretense, without distance. He wrote for the ones the world stepped over. I am trying to do the same, beginning with myself.