James - The Power to Forget lyrics

I believe in the power to forget. On December 12, 1969, my world changed forever. My father was murdered. I was 11 years old. In the middle of the night I woke to flashing lights from a police car. A knock at the door, and I heard my mom answer it. Then I heard a man say: “Marlene, Wil's been shot.” See, my dad was a cop. And as happens all too often, he was k**ed during a routine procedure, in this case a burglary investigation. They caught the man who k**ed my father that same night. He was tried and convicted, sentenced to die. That sentence was commuted in 1973 by the Supreme Court, and to this day he is in prison. I think he is, anyway. I don't know for sure, because I have tried my very best to forget him. It was that, or succumb to the hatred that threatened to define my life. For a while I tried forgiveness, since that is supposed to be liberating. When I say for a while, I mean for years. But I failed. There are some things that cannot be forgiven, at least for me. Instead, I have slowly, and carefully, excised his name from my memory. Now and then something will happen; I'll come across a story in the paper about him being up for parole, or a family friend will ask “whatever happened to so-and-so”, and I'll have to start again to forget. It's not easy. Much of our culture, much of our popular literature, is based around the theme of a son avenging the d**h of his father. The whole “find the ba*tard who shot my pa” thing. You may not notice it, but I do. And every time I hear about another officer down, every time Father's Day rolls around on the calendar, I think about my dad. And I think about his d**h. And I deny the existence of the man who k**ed him. Even now, as I write this, his name tries to emerge, tries to struggle free from where I have buried it. But it means that I don't have to live with a constant, aching anger. It means that I don't have to be trapped in that moment of history. It means that I can continue with my life, never forgetting the love I have for my father, or what it meant for him to die, but not being possessed by a need for vengeance. I believe in the power to forget. How many old grudges still fuel the fires of revenge in this world? How often have more people had to die because of a fixation on a memory? How much better would things be if we could just clean the slate, forget the offenses we've suffered and the ones we've inflicted, and move on?