NonFiction

Linda Kotis

Ungrudgingly

Four young men stood in front of me. They could not have been on this earth when Carter governed. The tall one, a head above (and I’m five foot eight), moved back and forth like a little boy who had to go potty. He turned and smiled at me, then directed remarks at his friends.“I have a shrine in my apartment to him. All of his books, bunches of pics, and tons of articles. I met him once at a book signing. Convinced him to take a photo with me. He was my man.”

I studied the others waiting for admittance to the seat of the United States Congress. At least a thousand strangers, orderly and expectant, were ahead of me. Older couples, families with children, groups of women, people holding hands, talking, laughing, huddling, scanning the line for hints of movement. Most everyone appeared to have arrived there with someone else, unlike me, present on my own. Among those others, though I was alone, still I felt bound to them in purpose, bound to them in grief.

All of us stood outside at 7:00 PM on January 8, 2025. Two days after the National Weather Service issued a Winter Storm Warning for precipitation, heavy snow, sleet, freezing rain: “Dangerous conditions, significant threat to life or property.”

Four years, two days after the 2021 Winter Storm of Treason: dangerous conditions, threats to democracy, wounds to the United States Capitol Building, death to five police officers in the days following.

Two hundred ninety-seven days after the 48th Vice President of the United States announced on “Face The Nation” he’d forgiven the 45th President for his role in the 2021 Winter Storm of Treason.

The physical residue of the 2025 Winter Storm remained, on the streets in piled dirty crunchy ribbons, in grassy areas made cotton-y white. The Capitol dome rose like a cake-top ornament lit with candles all bright against the inky sky. The political residue of the 2021 Winter Storm of Treason was omnipresent.

I entered hour two of the wait. All pockets of warmth closed, the cold choked the oxygen out of the air. The darkness deepened. Three women on the other side of the line divider next to me and I resorted to putting our right feet in, then our right feet out, then our right feet in, and we shook them all about. Trading knowing grins with each other, no need to voice the lyrics of the childhood jig running through my head.

“This is ridiculous!” I said, to the laughter of the crowd.

Our merriment generated fine moments of heat, though not nearly enough. At one point as my toes numbed up and my fingertips felt the ice-fire, I prayed the end of the wait was in my grasp, for frostbite surely was.

***

I read the articles. Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, was lying in state in the Rotunda of the US Capitol Building. Any who wanted to pay their respects to this southern peanut farmer turned governor turned leader of the free world turned humanitarian could view his casket there. For three days, prior to his state funeral on January 9, 2025 at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC.

The Capitol Building is visible from the Victorian rowhouse of my former neighbor, the one who shares my first name. She moved to Colorado in November 2023 and was back now in January to attend to selling her house. I’d invited myself over to dinner, cognizant of our dwindling time as fellow residents of the nation’s capital. Over burgers I picked up on the way to her home from my office, we chatted about my upcoming retirement and the former President. The neighbor’s husband, body still with us, mind no longer here, had worked in the Carter Administration.

“He liked President Carter a lot,” said his wife. “Thought he was a good man.”

My neighbor’s friend Yvette had accompanied her from Colorado to help with sorting through the house. Yvette told me she visited the Rotunda the night before. “The line wasn’t that long.”

Maybe I should go after we finish dinner.

***

January’s weather lived up to its reputation. Twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit, real feel eight. Temperatures subfreezing and conditions inhospitable for anything outdoors other than walking from garage to car, house to Metro, Metro to office. Not suitable for the three-hour queue I’d end up joining with others from across the nation.

I was not dressed for an outdoor event, in my knee-length red wool coat over a dress, tights and the low-heeled shoes I wore to the office that day. A scarf around my neck matched my wool cap and leather gloves. My former neighbor gave me a muffler to augment the outerwear. Glad she did. The wait bled into a new hour, and the chill seeped into my skin. The addition of the scarf armored me, if only for a small battle with Boreas.

***

I’ve resided in the District of Columbia since December 1999, having made my way here after college and law school in Tennessee and several years in California. And except for a few years owning an apartment in Southwest DC, I’ve always lived within walking distance of the Capitol Building.

This was my first attempt to view a dignitary lying in state. I was in DC for the state funerals of Presidents Ronald Reagan (2004), Gerald Ford (2006), and George H. W. Bush (2018). I was here on the dates when others were lain in state or in honor in the Capitol (1) – Civil Rights Leader Rosa Parks (2005), Associate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2020), and Brian Sicknick (2021), Capitol police officer and victim of the 2021 Winter Storm of Treason.

As I shivered in the January 2025 trail of waitees, I considered my place in this history of reverence. I could have gone to see the others, paid my respects for their service, observed something only a small percentage of the population ever experiences. I suppose the thought floated through my mind at the time.

Why didn’t go before?

I didn’t support Reagan or Bush, though my enmity toward the latter moderated over time. I regarded Bush’s care for the disabled, for the air we breathe, and forgave him his wars.

In 2005, my daughter was two, and I had just started a job with a law firm sharing its first name with a refrigerated dough maker. My days at that point left little for anything other than family duties, billable hours, and household chores.

By the time of the 2020s tributes, work at another firm less taxing and my daughter’s aging into her late teens freed up some time. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic which eviscerated life as we knew it. DC’s rationing of the vaccine precluded my inoculation until I found the shot available in Maryland to all comers (Governor Hogan called it “a federal asset.”) Even after the vaccination, the deaths of thousands foreclosed my eagerness to place myself among scores of the living.

***

Carter was the first president of my young adulthood, the first adventures of an administration I recall on network TV and in my Southern Indiana hometown newspapers. The man who seemed more common than lordly. Who donned a sweater rather than adjust the thermostat during a cold snap.

I remember the upheavals during his term. The days of the Iranian revolution and the corresponding energy crisis. Gas prices soared and fuel was less available. I’d gotten my driver’s license in 1974. Drove to school during my junior and senior years at William Henry Harrison High, named for the 9th President, and to my summer jobs when I was home from college. I understood, and felt, the frustration at the filling stations.

The Iranian hostage crisis chain-linked each day into the next until the time surpassed a rotation around the sun. The photos of the US diplomats dominated the newspaper headlines and nightly broadcasts, the white face coverings transforming each individual into a blank slate for the captors to write their tales of terror. The 1980 rescue mission was a debacle. The eight American soldiers killed in that botched attempt compounded the national grief.

In the mind of my 21-year-old self, Carter personified weakness and failure.

I decided to attend this night’s vigil because in recent years I’d come to admire the man. Read his books and followed his journey of years more out of office than in. I felt a kinship to his southerness because of my extended family, my education at southern universities, my manner of dressing up for church, and my practice of sending handwritten notes of thanks, praise, and condolences. I donated to the Carter Center, volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Tried to comport myself as a citizen of compassion, as he was.

***

The biographies populating the news after his death parroted the same story. Jimmy Carter was “brilliant, talented, competitive.” First president from the Deep South since the Civil War. Educated at the US Naval Academy. Worked as a nuclear engineer. He was also a man of faith and taught Sunday School at Plains Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist congregation. According to presidential historian Michael Beschloss as quoted in the Washington Post, “‘he had very fierce feelings about people, but at the same time, he did like to reconcile.’” (2)

Carter reportedly reconciled with his enemies. He is said to have released his grudges. For the most part, anyway. With President Gerald Ford, his Republican adversary in the 1976 campaign, the campaign that led to Carter’s election as the 39th President. With Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, a potential Democratic rival in the 1980 campaign, the campaign that led to Carter’s re-election defeat. With Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, another Southerner, who distanced himself from Carter in the 1992 campaign, the campaign that led to Clinton’s election as the 42nd President.

Others in the line with me must have read the article. The Washington Post published it on January 1, three days after Carter’s death. As they shuffled down the ramp toward the Capitol Building Visitors Center, were thoughts of reconciliation echoing in their minds, a response to the 2021 Winter Storm of Treason?

***

A New Testament story about God’s grace states: “Then Peter came up and said to Him, ‘Lord, how many times shall my brother sin against me and I still forgive him? Up to seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy-seven times.’” Matthew 18:21-22.

According to Christ’s teachings, forgiveness is a requirement. It is to be offered freely and in abundance to those who cause us harm. In reconciling with enemies and releasing his grudges, Carter lived this lesson.

Holding a grudge is a form of power. It demonstrates to the person grudged that the holder is in the right. It elevates the holder – in his own mind – as a being superior to the grudged. Yet, nursing a grudge robs one of power, the power to move forward and live life fully.

About ten years ago, I was in the throes of a final break-up with a man who had wanted to be my second husband. This silver-haired Alabama alum with the body of an underwear model couldn’t forgive his first wife for the missteps she made in their two-decade marriage. Later, he couldn’t forgive me for ending our romance and then subsequently changing my mind.

We last spoke on an October Sunday in the parking lot of a Presbyterian church I sometimes attended and he sometimes attended, independently of each other. He looked down at me, his eyes both soft and hard, brimming tears and rimming rage, his voice rasping, “I can’t trust that you wouldn’t leave me again.”

It was then I found the words of Father Richard Rohr. The Franciscan friar states that while everyone has experienced pain as the fault of another person, “all, without exception, live under the waterfall of divine mercy. . . . When you understand your own limited but lovely place within this universally imperfect world, you will find it almost natural to become more patient and forgiving with other people too. . . .” Allowing the pain of betrayal to inhabit one’s life carries with it lasting effects. “If you do not transform your pain, you will with 100 percent certainty transmit it to others.” (3)

These truths freed me, allowed me to forgive the rejection, made me pity my former lover. I was released to move forward.

As did I, Carter understood his own limited place within this imperfect world. As did I, Carter transformed his pain so that it would not be transmitted to others.

***

About 10:30PM, finally out of the cold, I rode up the escalator, then was directed around a corner with other queuers to an elevator. Wrong way! Seems like the Capitol Building staff should know where to send us. Maybe they’re as weary as I am, this third and final night of viewing. The staff motioned to a turnaround, then sent us up a set of stairs to the destination.

Halting and silent, I entered the Rotunda, to face the round room full. No phones, no cameras permitted, just the eyes and ears, hearts and minds of men, women, and children were allowed for internally recording the moment. I stood there among the witnesses, all of us, circling the flag-draped casket surrounded by three wreaths of red, white and blue flowers, each the size of a Michelangelo tondo.

I focused on the catafalque originally constructed for the coffin of Abraham Lincoln.

His Proclamation 97 admonished the country to pray for clemency and forgiveness, “that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high and answered with blessings no less than the pardon of our national sins and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.” (4) Lincoln’s plea could have been written about the state of the union this night, one hundred sixty-two years later.

Five men of service, ramrod straight, impassive, stood stock-still, the honor of a lifetime. I waited the twenty minutes to see the changing of the guard, shoulders touching one another when his replacement presented, the only sign of familiarity between the soldiers and sailors.

On my way to the exit, I passed the hundreds of mourners still watching, praying, being, the room so quiet I could almost hear their thoughts.

***

Maybe some people inside the Rotunda were not Carter’s original supporters, didn’t vote for him in the elections.

Maybe some in the circle had once held grudges. Excoriated him for the hostage crisis.

Perhaps the mellowing of age led them to release those grudges, to forgive the real and imagined wrongs.

Perhaps they rejected the present-day cult of revenge and retribution, making sure that enemies pay.

And that’s why they were here.

(1) “Lying in State or in Honor,” The Architect of the Capitol, https://www.aoc.gov/what-we-do/programs-ceremonies/lying-in-state-honor.

(2) Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, “Carter made enemies, then peace. Ask Ford, Kennedy, Clinton,” Washington Post, January 1, 2025, p. A-6.

(3) Father Richard Rohr as told to Mamie Healy, “The Truth About The People You Can’t Forgive,” Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/06/forgiveness-how-to-truly-forgive_n_6397176.html.

(4) “Proclamation 97—Appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer, March 30, 1863,” https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-97-appointing-day-national-humiliation-fasting-and-prayer.