From hell on earth, to her deathbed, to a resurrection

Katie and I were young when we separated for good. Or so we thought.

We met as sixth graders in an east Multnomah County elementary school. The following summer she became the first girl I kissed. Katie had strawberry blond hair, a warm smile, and eyes that sparkled like emeralds. Later she used that beauty to make a living, if you could call it that.

Our romance ended at the beginning of the next school year. I was the dweeb—four feet ten, 87 pounds—with the cutest girlfriend in seventh grade. This was junior high; there were real men to be had.

Katie went her way and I went mine. Three years later, I was living near San Francisco and getting my driver’s license. Katie was in Oregon, getting an abortion. Three years after that I was studying at Berkeley and she was stripping in men’s clubs.

Katie made good money, found the male attention that she craved, and lived like a lot of other women abused or discarded by their fathers.

We lost track of each other, until I found her decades later and asked if she would share her life story with me for my book. She came to Portland and we spent the day together, peeling the onion of her life, a life scarred by abuse she endured at her father’s hands, who in turn had been abused by his parents.

She’d been married five times. She had two children, but left them with their father, moving out of state to live with a man she’d met on the Internet. She chain-smoked, drank, and scammed pain medications from unwitting doctors. Her third suicide attempt came in 2001, when she mixed two bottles of wine with a bottle of Tylenol as the ultimate pain reliever. She went into cardiac arrest and was in a coma for three days.

Surviving that suicide attempt was perhaps her life’s first miracle. Within a few years, she experienced another miracle, with her father. Katie had lived through hell, then in an almost Christ-like sense saw death up close, walked alone in the desert, and resurrected the spirit that had been all but broken by the one man a daughter is supposed to be able to count upon and trust.

“My life was just a party,” she told me early in our afternoon together. “I didn’t want to deal with anything serious. I was like tumbleweed, just blowing in the wind. I’d use any chemical that could keep me from thinking too much about what I should have been thinking about and doing to get my head screwed on. All through my twenties I traveled and partied and made money and pissed it away. I just had so much self-hate and horrible self-esteem.”

During her coma in 2001 she had a communion with God. “That’s when everything turned around for me, because I didn’t see Him, but I knew there was a presence and I was somewhere I’ve never been before in this life. It’s not of this life. It was something completely different.

“I just clearly remember feeling or hearing this thought that said, ‘You have something very large to do. And you have to stay around to get it done.’”

After that suicide attempt and spiritual awakening Katie put herself into therapy. She began to execute her demons one by one, taking a sniper’s aim at the cigarettes, booze, Valium, Xanax, Vicodin and Percoset that she’d used to try patching the hole in her heart.

When her mother had serious health problems five years ago, Katie moved to Nevada to live for a month with her—and her father, the perpetrator of violence against her as a girl. That month turned into two years.

In Nevada, Katie began taking long walks alone in the desert. “I found big therapy there,” she said. “I would just get these very strong thoughts. They were coming from somewhere. That’s where I really grew by leaps and bounds personally.

“From age 51 until 53, that’s when my relationship with my father was repaired, because I was repaired. I got him to try to see life sober, to see the beauty in things around him, to get in touch with himself and his feelings and his past.

“I remember him saying, ‘What are you doing? You seem lighter; you seem happier; you seem freer.’ I told him it was the road trips into the desert. You go out there and park and listen to nothing and you’re going to hear a lot. You can’t run from yourself anymore when there’s nowhere to go.

“And he saw me working with my art, my painting, my jewelry. He got to know how I think and how I feel. We lived together as adults without the bullshit when I was younger.

“We both grew in that two and a half years and our relationship benefited from it immensely. I’m not mad at him anymore. I forgive him for all of it. He was a very sick man and he didn’t know how to ask for help.”

I asked her where in the universe she found the grace to forgive her father. Having heard the details of his transgressions, I couldn’t comprehend her forgiveness.

“You have to forgive, because if you don’t, it festers inside of you like cancer and it eats at you,” she said. “I knew in order to get past it, I had to sincerely forgive my father. And because I have, I’m able to love completely now. It’s freed me.

“It took two years for me to realize the man loves me. He always loved me. He just didn’t have the right tools to show me and he didn’t have the tools to be a good parent. Now when we’re together, we have a great time. And he’s so happy for me and he’s so happy how I’ve turned out. So, it’s almost as if he’s at peace now and he’s let go of his issues and forgiven himself.”

For the first time in his life, he told Katie he loved her when she was 52.  “I about fell over,” she said. “I actually stopped what I was doing and turned around and said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I love you. I think you should know that.’”

He was crying, Katie told me. “I told him that I’ve forgiven him. I cried with him. It choked me up, because I didn’t think he had any sensitivity in him at all. I thought he was just a hard-nosed jerk. But he’s a real soft man. I think the years of abuse that he did to himself and the way his mother treated him, he just didn’t know how to get off that.”

I checked in with Katie by email the next day to see how she was doing. “I slept like a rock,” she replied. “The only difference was my dreams. They were all about forgiveness and letting go of past hurts. Yesterday when we were talking, reliving all that crap, it was confirmation that I have truly forgiven him.

“It’s as if I received validation for my forgiveness. I never loved my father until I spent time with him in the desert and got to know him as an adult. I am truly grateful I have him now, rather than never having him and holding on to the anger and resentment that followed me all my life. How stifling it was for me and him, also.”

I couldn’t help but wonder about the epiphany she had on her death bed, that she still had “something very large to do” and that she had “to stay around to get it done.” Perhaps, I thought, her task was to share her story with fathers, to help shed light on the massive, enduring impact they have on their daughters.