Unable to Let Go
When I began writing the story of the fire again,
I thought it was only a memory.
So many years had already passed.
By all logic,
many of the details
should have faded long ago.
But they hadn’t.
Those images
had not disappeared at all.
Instead,
they slowly began returning,
one by one.
The sound of the phone.
The flames.
The courtroom.
The expressions on those people’s faces.
The evidence that was rejected.
Even the feeling in the air back then
seemed to come back again.
I originally thought
I had already let it go.
But once I truly began writing,
I realized:
I hadn’t.
I could not let it go at all.
So many times,
while writing,
tears would suddenly fall.
And I would have to stop.
There was always a voice inside me asking:
Why?
Why were the people who did wrong
able to go on living like that?
Why were the ones who got hurt
us instead?
I lost so much—
my brother’s work,
my children’s education funds,
my husband’s health,
my own body.
Even years of accumulated stress
eventually formed a lipoma in my left shoulder,
which later had to be surgically removed.
Sometimes,
I truly could not help wondering:
Why me?
During that period,
my heart was filled with grief and resentment.
And the most frightening thing was this—
I began to realize
that kind of pain
was not only emotional.
One night,
I suddenly woke up in pain.
I looked down
and realized my right big toe
was hurting terribly.
Later,
the doctor told me
it was an ingrown toenail.
The nail had grown into the flesh.
But at that moment,
I had another feeling entirely:
as if some kinds of pain
really can grow from the heart
all the way into the body.
That night,
I could not sleep.
So I got up
and began flipping through the Bible.
Then I saw a sentence:
“Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do.”
It was the prayer Jesus spoke on the cross
for the people who were hurting Him.
I looked at those words
and shook my head.
I said to myself:
“I can’t do that.”
I am only human.
I could not, like Jesus,
find a reason
to forgive the people who hurt me.
And in that moment,
I suddenly understood:
some things cannot simply be let go
just because you understand the right lesson.
Some wounds do not disappear
just because enough time has passed.
They simply remain there quietly.
Until one day,
when you touch them again,
you suddenly realize:
you never truly walked out of them at all.
Around that same time,
my family doctor, Margaret,
prayed for me.
She told me:
“What people cannot do,
they can give to God.”
That day,
while she was praying for me,
I suddenly remembered a story.
A story about a Navajo man.
At the time,
I still did not know
how deeply that story would later change me.
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