What The Anger Left Behind

I've resisted posting anything like this for a long time because it sounds dramatic, but a friend read an early draft and told me to just say it plainly. I spent fifteen years angry at my father before he died, and in the weeks after his funeral in Bakersfield I felt something move through that anger like a hand loosening a fist I hadn't realized I was still making, not forgiveness I earned but something given to me faster than I could have arrived at it myself. I'm a calmer person now than I've been since I was a teenager, and I know the calm isn't only mine.