The Weight You Can Put DownChapter 5 of 222 min
The ones you blame
You are doing the cards early this year, because of the post.
There is a list that goes with them, and it is not the card list. It has not changed in a long time and you have never had to stop and think about who is on it.
If the only name on the list is your own, this is not the chapter for that, and the book does it properly elsewhere rather than badly here.
Nothing is asked of you in what follows. It does not want you to drop any of it and it is not building up to anything.
They are not all the same kind.
One of them did the thing that the rest of your life arranged itself around. There is nobody left who was in the room when it happened.
One of them did something small. A sentence at a kitchen table, or the business over the house, or the ring that was supposed to come to you. Small enough that saying it out loud would make you sound like somebody counting teaspoons, and it has sat there for forty years being small and not going.
And one of them did nothing at all. That was the thing. They were in the house, they knew, and they went on setting the table.
Some of them are dead, and that did not finish it. You are still going round it with somebody who left the room some years ago.
And at least one of them is somebody nobody would believe. A woman everybody called a saint, or a man who was marvellous with the grandchildren. There is no version of that you can say at a family table without it being about you by the end of the sentence.
Somebody will have given you the history by now.
What his father did to him. What the war did. That she was nineteen and had nobody.
It explains the mechanism. It settles nothing. That it was done to him first does not make it something other than what it was when it arrived at you.
And there is a reason letting go of it has never been available.
It would feel like agreeing. Not forgiving — agreeing: that it was all right, that it was within the range of things that happen, that the person it happened to was making more of it than it deserved.
So the cards get done, and the list is not on them.
Everybody who has ever raised it wanted you to do something with it. Take it further, or put it down, or understand them better. Nobody has ever simply let you have it.