My father was a restless, illiterate, hard-drinking man who was the third youngest of 14 children. He was also a WWII combat medic veteran who suffered from “shell shock,” now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. He was never around, but I heard stories of him wandering from job to job and from one town to another finding work on cattle farms, driving trucks or whatever menial job he could find. With a third-grade education, the jobs were usually manual labor, and he never stayed long.
As I was entering my ninth year of life, my mother decided I was too much of a burden and allowed me to live with my father, who was living with one of his oldest sisters in Georgia. I never held it against my mother. With her poor education, she couldn’t even take care of herself. And since she was so abusive, it was a temporary escape.
After about five months of living with my father, he also decided I was too much of a burden. However, the real reason was that he was having an affair with a one-armed married woman and did not have time for the responsibility of raising a son, so he took me out to a highway one night and left me there on the side of the road to eventually be found by a Greyhound bus driver heading to Tampa. I guess he was hoping my mother would accept the responsibility of caring for me. By the time I made it back, my mother was living with a man who did not want a little boy hanging around, so she slammed her door in my face.
I had no place to go, so I spent the next six months living in a dumpster, eating out of garbage cans, stealing bread and milk from nearby porches, and begging for pocket change from strangers on the streets of a Cuban neighborhood known as Ybor City. Thankfully, God was watching over me.
I was eventually found by a social worker who placed me in an orphanage, and I was provided an opportunity I would never have received had my father kept me. I would have been just like him, instead of having four college degrees and a profession of helping others deal with suffering in their lives. It was by the grace of God that I had not only survived but thrived in spite of my parents' neglect.
A couple of years ago, I heard my father was dying of emphysema and lung cancer spreading throughout his chest. I went to him and convinced him to accept God as his Lord and Savior. A few days later, I received word that he had passed away in his sleep. I felt sad and grieved for a short while, but also felt better. I had forgiven my father.