A recent obituary penned by some of the children of a recently deceased mother wrote this startling piece for their local press:
Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick born Jan. 4, 1935 and died alone on Sept. 30, 2013. She is survived by her six of eight children whom she spent her lifetime torturing in every way possible. While she neglected and abused her small children, she refused to allow anyone else to care or show compassion toward them. When they became adults she stalked and tortured anyone they dared to love. Everyone she met, adult or child was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.
On behalf of her children whom she so abrasively exposed to her evil and violent life, we celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the afterlife reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty and shame that she delivered on her children. Her surviving children will now live the rest of their lives with the peace of knowing their nightmare finally has some form of closure.
I just heard several hours ago that my stepmother of almost 13 years is dead. Of what and how I do not know. She was young. I know that. So painful is it to even think of her name, I refer to her as ‘she’ throughout my autobiography.
It’s 1:30 a.m. and I can’t sleep. I don’t know what to think or to feel. The above is pretty much what I would like to express to the world. I would like to go to her funeral, stand and let everybody know what this person was truly like and how much damage she did while alive. I want her to get her just desserts even though I know, thanks to Christ, I will never get my own.
I am a pastor. I should know better. I do know better.
I know, deep in my soul, that Jesus experienced every form of suffering when he was in the world. “He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). Jesus was betrayed and tortured. He is well acquainted with your grief, and he will never leave you (John 14:18). I know, therefore, that perceived wisdom (my own included) demands that I forgive this woman who caused me such pain. I know it’s the Christian thing to do. I know that he who has been forgiven much ought to forgive much in return.
I know.
Yet, I want to make public my frustration at crimes she never paid for. At the same time I want to be magnanimous in my forgiveness as Christ has been in his for my sin.
Instead I feel conflicted.
I thought I might dance a little jig or even feel a sense of release and elation at news I long dreamed about and ached for as a kid. This is a woman who drove me to such despair that I attempted to set her on fire in her (drunken) sleep when I was no more than 10 years old. But there is no jig. There is just a heaviness of heart and the nagging itch of my suffering and her evil never admitted in this life. The problem is that I want to feel joy at her passing. I want to rejoice in the belief that she will face the judge of all the earth for her crimes against me. I want to revel in the thought that she is having her own spiritual Nuremburg moment right now. That father time has caught up with her and her sins are about to be found out and brought into that terrible, perfect light. That the angels in glory will see just what a monster she truly was.
