Our common fate, Longfellow once wrote, is that "into each life some rain must fall." But some people have to weather heavier deluges than others, and being a
celebrity is no guarantee against that. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Kelsey Grammer of Cheers and Frasier fame spoke recently about a history of more
family tragedy than anyone should have to bear, and how forgiveness – for
himself and others – has enabled him to cope.
The grandfather who raised him died of cancer
when Grammer was 11. Two years later his estranged father was murdered. His two
half-brothers died in a scuba-diving accident. Most disturbingly, his sister Karen
was 18 years old when she was abducted, raped repeatedly, and brutally murdered
in Colorado by thrill killer Freddie Glenn and accomplices in 1975.
When Glenn was finally eligible for parole in
2009, Grammer wrote a powerful letter to the parole board (part of which he struggled to read aloud to Oprah
Winfrey in an emotional 2012 interview) describing Glenn as a butcher and a monster,
and eulogizing Karen, whose loss had devastated the surviving Grammers. “I was
her big brother,” he wrote. “I was supposed to protect her—I could not. I’ve
never gotten over it. I was supposed to save her. I could not. It very nearly
destroyed me.”
He went on in the letter to describe how
Glenn had further victimized not just those he killed but their families as
well. Then he concluded with his deeply considered reflections on forgiveness:
I am a man of faith and my faith teaches me
that I must forgive. And so I do. I forgive this man for what he has done.
Forgiveness allows me to live my life. It allows me to love my children and my
wife and enjoy the days I have left with them. But I can never escape the
horror of what happened to my sister. I can never accept the notion that he can
pay for that nightmare with anything less than his life. We all make choices.
He made his.
Glenn’s release was denied.
The Vanity
Fair interviewer pointed out that there was no way Kelsey could have been
expected to protect his sister, who lived in another state at the time. “It’s
not rational,” the actor answered. “But it happens anyway. I know a lot of
people who’ve lost their siblings and blame themselves.” At the height of his
success, Grammer said, when he wrestled with alcohol and cocaine addiction,
“That was the time when I could not forgive myself for my sister’s death.” It
was many years before he could begin to rid himself of that burden.
Last year Grammer again successfully opposed
another appeal from Glenn, although he was convinced for the first time of the
killer’s sincere contrition. “I accept that you actually live with remorse
every day of your life, but I live with tragedy every day of mine,” Grammer
told him via video during the hearing. “I accept your apology. I forgive you.
However, I cannot give your release my endorsement. To give that a blessing
would be a betrayal of my sister’s life.”
Grammer does see his own life as obviously
blessed in other ways, and he has “learned to soldier on” despite the
staggering personal losses. “Every one of us is going to experience some
terrible loss,” he concluded in the Vanity
Fair interview. “I just got a big dose. For every story you hear that’s
tragic, there’s another that’s equally tragic or more so. I think you come to
look at it as part of life.”
As all of us who have wrestled with it know,
forgiveness is no easy process, especially when the trespasses against us are
as traumatic as the murder of a loved one; it is a wrenching evolution that can
sometimes feel more painful than the wound we suffered, as the spiritual writer
Marianne Williamson says. Forgiving oneself
is often the most difficult step of all. Kelsey Grammer is living proof of the
demands it places on one’s body and soul to commit to that evolution. But the
alternative is a living death.
Now 60, Grammer is happily married to a woman
named Kayte Walsh, with whom he has two children (he has six in all). “This
lovely young woman,” he says, “lit up my world and changed my heart, which was
a bit calloused and hardened against a lot of things. And we are good, and I
feel young and alive.” I think he has earned that.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 4/20/15)
