Chapter Ten: Learning to Forgive

I am learning how to forgive myself, Sam. I couldn’t do that in the Shire. I didn’t know how to and I wondered whether I even should try to. I had done many unforgivable things - I had held Sting at your throat, I had tried to kill Smeagol, I had abandoned you and reason and all goodness when I claimed the Ring. I desire it still though that is finally leaving me. Gandalf told me and I quote, “In all our necessities, trails and difficulties, no better or safer aid exists for us than prayer and hope.” So I keep returning to the dark room and tell myself that over and over and over. You already knew it was, even on the Quest, when you were my hope. It took a little longer for me, dearest brother mine, to believe it, but here I have been praying and here I have been believing.

It is here and among these peoples that the gaping wound my failures tore in me is beginning to heal, in the love and light and peace that surrounds me. Not that you didn’t surround me with the same, dearest Sam. It was always there, but I couldn’t always reach for it. You had always forgiven me, always loved me and increasingly I find that so amazing and the desire to thank you for it growing along with my knowledge that I could never thank you properly enough for it. Then I didn’t think I deserved it, I still think that actually, but you always gave it, more and more and more. Such a great gift leaves me humbled and in awe.

The Shire was paradise, but then darkness entered it and me and it could only be exorcized here. You had never done anything shameful, dearheart. I think I needed to be around people who had, who had had to struggle with their own darkness and had already trod on the torturous path to self-forgiveness and returned to the light. I had to learn that it could be done, should be done, had to be done.

Lord Elrond has helped me tremendously. He told me the story of Isildur and the Last Alliance and the battle in which Isildur cut off the hand of Sauron himself and so fell to the power of the Ring. I knew the story of course from Bilbo’s tales, but I had never heard it from someone who had actually been there as Lord Elrond had and from the motivation to wanting to heal me of my wounds. I heard about him taking Isildur into the very chamber we had been in, to the Crack of Doom, and I heard about the man’s failure to destroy the Ring just as I had been unable to. He left me that day with a lot to think about.

I went to the dark room to do it. I know I could have condemned Isildur for not being strong enough to destroy the Ring when he had the chance to do so. It would have saved the world from much darkness. It would have saved so many lives. It would have saved me. But I could not condemn. I understood him, though, and I forgave him. I thought of Smeagol and his fall to the Ring and his endless need for it and I thought of Bilbo and his craving. And I thought of myself. I am finally beginning to believe what Gandalf told me that it was not a personal failure of mine that I could not give up the Ring or that the desire of it continues to haunt me, even when it was itself destroyed. All the Ring-bearers had that burden.

I am understanding other things about myself, the person I once was, the one the Ring twisted me into and the one I was after its destruction when I was too weak and wounded to return to who I had been. I think I am returning now. Or as much as I can. Aragorn told me before that it is natural for one to wish everything to go back to the way it was before a tragedy and it is another wound that has to heal to realize that it is not possible. It’s painful this process of recovery, but it’s also freeing and each day I hope to make more progress so the Frodo who greets you with open arms the day you come is one who has returned to the light, who is a combination of the one who went innocently on the Quest to save the people and land he loved and the one who returned broken, but is now healed and just waiting for you to make him completely whole. Come, my brother. I love you and miss you so. My greatest prayer, hope and desire is that you will see me healed.

A/N: Gandalf’s quote about recourse to prayer is actually from St. John of the Cross.