"I was daydreaming, my eyes drifting across bags and figures, when I paused at a brown leather bag and a light linen suit. Charming travel outfit, I thought. Relaxed. Timeless. Someone must've had a lovely weekend, maybe somewhere on the Mediterranean. I only saw the man's face as he passed me and suddenly I couldn't breathe. I knew him. He was my father."
"Had he seen me, too? Unlikely. Who expects to run into their estranged daughter, whom they haven't seen in years, on an airport escalator? For a moment, I thought about turning around, going back down, catching up with him and simply saying hello. But there was too much between us for a casual hello. And somehow, I liked the almost cinematic quality of the scene. We had, unknowingly, shared a moment one that was tender, peaceful."
"The American psychiatrist and therapist Phil Stutz knows this phenomenon. In the documentary Stutz, he describes how his own mother was abandoned by her father without warning and spent 40 years trapped in a maze of anger and resentment. She refused to forgive him and held on to the pain. But Stutz is radical in this regard. He says: We don't have time for that kind of bullshit. Life is too short. And the restitution we're hoping for doesn't come"
An unexpected encounter on an airport escalator led to a sudden reappraisal of an estranged father, shifting decades of absence into a small, humanizing observation. Seeing his casual travel clothes and sharing a quiet moment replaced an image of abandonment with an ordinary, sympathetic view. A psychiatrist recounted a case where maternal anger lasted forty years after paternal abandonment, illustrating how prolonged bitterness can trap someone. The psychiatrist urged abandoning long-held resentment, arguing that life is too short and that hoped-for restitution often never arrives. The episode frames forgiveness as an ongoing journey begun by simple, compassionate reassessment.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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