Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (24 page)

The train jolts forward, pulls, tugs, bumps, and navigates the darkness of the tunnels beneath Penn Station and the Hudson River. Emerging from blackness into the stark, industrial daylight of New Jersey, I turn off my Walkman and close my eyes.

Shouldn’t Dad have called Aunt Mary first? She’s had his letter
for over a week now, and she, like the rest of us, has kept this secret. But now, my father’s actions feel inconsistent with his and Mom’s faith; they feel more like a tactical retreat. He is circling the wagons, and leaving Mom’s family out. That’s nothing new, except that he has pulled his own sisters into the circle.

Mom is going to die without ever having seen a doctor, without giving medicine a chance. She is going to die, and we will be left to try to make sense of it with no answers at all, only questions: Was it cancer? Could she have lived if she’d seen a doctor? Should we—should I—have been more forceful? Oh, my God, how on earth could we have let this happen?

Back in January, two days after the space shuttle blew up, I rode this train to Princeton Junction. Thinking then that Mom was close to death, I was resigned that her refusal of medical help was the only path she’d take.

Now, six months later, as I stare out the train window again, watching the freight hoists and chemical plants of northern New Jersey pass by and wondering again if my mother is dead, or still dying, I am filled with dread: I fear the reactions of Grandma, my aunts, my uncle. I
hate
my father. But even now I pity him: he’s my
father
. This polarity unsettles me. He was supposed to love and honor Mom in sickness and in health. But he won’t—can’t—even acknowledge her sickness. Christian Science forbids it. On some level, I believe I’ve had no choice but to respect my parents’ unswerving adherence to faith. But on another level, I know absolutely that I don’t.

When my father decided to go away for two weeks to teach his class, he abandoned Mom to save face in front of a group of people who had come to learn from him the practice of Christian Science healing. This wasn’t love.

But I also recall one of the last times I was allowed to visit Mom. The first thing I noticed as I entered her room was the crystal bud vase on her bedside table, holding a fresh rose. It was always a fresh rose. That afternoon, Mom and I played backgammon. She was
propped up in bed and looked, I thought, not so bad. She was able to roll the dice and move her pieces. But the dice dropped onto the board without much vigor. She beat me handily and smiled. It felt so good to be doing something—anything—with her.

Too soon my father gave me his cue—raised eyebrows—that it was time for me to go. I was angry and upset. I didn’t want to go after only fifteen minutes, but I acquiesced. I kissed my mother on the forehead and left the room. As I passed through the reception area, a nurse came up to me and touched my arm. I bristled. I didn’t want to hear anything she would likely choose to tell me. Dressed in her white uniform, she looked every bit the part of a caring, capable, credentialed health care professional. A fraud, I thought to myself.

“You know, Lucia,” the petite, pretty woman whispered to me in a gentle voice. Just moments before I had wanted to stay by my mother’s side, now I was desperate to get out of there. “Late at night I watch your father and mother dancing, just the two of them, down the hall in the common room. They hold each other and sway. Very slowly. And oh, so tenderly. Usually it’s to Frank Sinatra. Sometimes, Tony Bennett.… I don’t suppose they know I’m watching,” she continued, “and maybe I shouldn’t. But it’s just about the sweetest thing you ever saw.”

The image is a painful one for me, and confusing. It is hard not to see it as love.

The train pulls into New Brunswick station. Oddly, while I wrestle with intensely vacillating and conflicting emotions toward my father, toward my mother I feel almost nothing. Where is
she
in all of this? Several months back I read in a magazine about the five stages of grief. I try to remember them now: denial, anger—Then what, bargaining? Next, depression, and finally, acceptance? I don’t think any of these even apply to me. Or maybe they all do. I’ve been grieving my mother’s death for months already.

Out the window, industrial monochrome has given way to greens and blues. The clouds are clearing, or maybe that was smog
ten miles back. I realize that what I am feeling now, above all else, is a sense of anticipation that the shroud of secrecy is about to be lifted. This is dimly comforting. Any sense of relief feels altogether wrong.

Once again, Dad
spent the night in Mom’s room at Tenacre. It is seven o’clock in the morning now, and we have not heard from him. If this particular Friday were even a few months earlier, I might be feeling a hint of optimism because we weren’t awakened in the middle of the night with a phone call. But sitting silently in Mom’s kitchen, staring at the steam on the surface of my coffee, I feel only regret. The presence of Dad’s sisters, Aunt Lucia and Aunt Nan, confirms for us that the end is near.

I wonder what, exactly, my aunts are thinking and feeling, if they harbor doubts about the choices they’ve made, as much as my siblings and I are surely questioning ours. Have they been torn between preserving Mom’s privacy, respecting her faith, and wanting to take action? Waiting here like this would be harder without them, but we do not discuss our conflicted feelings. We are eating because it is something to do after a sleepless night of waiting. I wonder what Aunt Nan and Aunt Lucia really think of their brother. Of us. Are they judging our lack of action? Do they share our helplessness?

The telephone rings. I look at the clock: 7:20
A.M
. Aunt Nan answers it immediately. The rest of us stare at the floor, listening.
It’s over
, I think.

“That was your father,” Aunt Nan says. “He wants you to go to Tenacre for a family conference, immediately.”

“Careful, Loosh,” Sherm
says as I take the road’s curves too quickly. He is sitting beside me in the passenger seat of our mom’s
Honda Accord. Olivia sits in back. These are the only words spoken during the fifteen-minute drive from our parents’ house in Hopewell to Princeton.

Last weekend, Sherm and I made this same trip for what our parents euphemistically called a visit but was in effect nothing more than a confirmation of our mother’s further decline. For ten minutes we sat in her room silently while she slept. She opened her eyes and smiled her recognition. Then Dad said we should leave, and we complied.

Another day several months back, I had come out from the city for the weekend. Cynthia Jones, one of my parents’ earliest Christian Science friends from their years in Chicago, was staying at the house, to lend her support by cooking for Dad and praying with Mom. A large woman with puffy jowls, she asked me to drive her to Tenacre so she could spend the morning with Mom. I dropped her off at the entrance and watched as she took heavy, labored steps toward the door. Mom was no more than fifteen yards away, on the other side of one wall, and I was forbidden to see her yet Mrs. Jones could. Her Christian Science status gave her clearance. I hated her for that. I thought, if there is any truth to the notion of mental malpractice, Mrs. Jones is definitely headed for trouble.

Two hours later, I returned to Tenacre to pick her up. As she got into the car, I couldn’t look at her. I wouldn’t make pointless conversation. In response to the angry silence, Mrs. Jones put her hand on my forearm and said, “Lucia, you have to remember that God is your real Father-Mother.”

Fuck you
.

I slow down to make the left-hand turn onto the Great Road. Up ahead, we see the large wooden sign marking the entrance.

We park in the visitors’ lot and walk toward South Hall Extension, the building where we last saw our mother.

A well-dressed woman in her sixties appears on the footpath. “Hello,” she says, clearly expecting us. “Why don’t you follow me
to the administration building? Your dad is waiting there in a conference room.”

It’s over
.

My brother, sister, and I exchange silent glances. I hold my breath.

We follow a few paces behind the woman, and Sherman whispers to me that she is the chief administrator and has spent the last couple of nights in the room with Mom. I wonder how he knows this and I don’t. Sherman, Olivia, and I have each been used and manipulated by the secrecy. I grit my teeth.

This woman, a perfect stranger to me, has sat beside my dying mother, maybe even holding her hand, yet we, her own children, have been denied any right to see her. Now, on August 8, when it seems there is nothing left to do but hear an administrator tell us that Mom has passed on—as if it is something beautiful—my brother and sister and I are relevant. The most normal thing for me to feel would be utter, gut-wrenching despair, but all I harbor is bitterness. I wonder why they couldn’t just tell us by phone. It’s probably a legal thing.

The administrator holds the door for us and directs us through the reception area to a room with a large round conference table. Dad is there, wearing the clothes he probably slept in. Sitting on the edge of his chair, his shoulders slumped, he looks both anxious and defeated. His eyes are swollen. He has been crying. We take a seat.

“Mom isn’t doing very well,” Dad says.

She’s alive?

Incongruously, the administrator pushes a large canister of M&M’s toward my father.

“Joanne has had another restless night,” she says. “She is very confused. She is asking to go to Minneapolis. She wants to be with her mother.”

Going to Minneapolis doesn’t sound at all confused. Minneapolis means Mom’s family, and Mom’s family means medical care. It is the first reasonable thing I’ve heard from anyone in nearly seven months.

“I don’t know, kids,” my father says, “she hasn’t been lucid for a few days. She’s saying she wants to see her daddy, and she is very upset with me.”

My mother’s father has been dead for twenty years. Dad shakes his head in disbelief. “Mom thinks I’m forcing her to be here against her will.”

My father looks down at his hands, and his shoulders begin to shake. Sherman, Olivia, and I watch, like bystanders, as he sobs. Not one of us moves to comfort him.

“We have to determine what it is that Joanne wants,” the administrator says. We turn our attention to her. “Because, as you know, this has been her decision all along. If she would rather be in a hospital, it is our responsibility to get her there.”

I am stunned. Olivia, Sherman, and I quickly decide that Olivia should talk to Mom.

She leaves the conference room immediately. We sit in silence and wait. I try to picture the two of them talking. Is Mom ready? Is she wavering? Will Olivia be forceful enough? Suddenly, I find I am almost giddy, soaking up the unexpected fantasy of possibility. Maybe we
can
save Mom. Maybe she will consent to medical treatment. I nervously dig my thumbnails into the nail beds of my fingers until my fingertips ache. Olivia reappears five minutes later. Her face is ashen.

“She’s talking about flying along the ground back to her daddy—like she’s on a magic carpet or something. But I think she’ll go to the hospital. Talk to her, Loosh,” Olivia says, turning to me. “I don’t know. I don’t know. She … it’s … it’s bad.”

I ignore the sign in the reception area and walk directly into my mother’s room. The curtains are closed, and no lights are on; it’s stifling, and the air smells acrid. I am terrified. In the bed I see a ghostly white, jerking body gasping for breath. This can’t be my
mother. I wonder if perhaps I have entered the wrong room. Then on the nightstand, I see the Steuben bud vase. It holds a fresh red rose. The back of my neck is like ice and damp. I kiss my mother’s forehead.

This is my mother. She is fifty years old.

“Hi, Mom,” I whisper. My mother’s eyes stare into mine.

“Now look what you’ve done,” she says. “Why have you … kept … me here?”

I can’t believe what I am hearing.

“I want to go home. I want to see Mother and Daddy.” My mom begins to cry like a child.

“Mom, we can’t take you to Minneapolis, but we can get you to a hospital.”

“That’s non … sense,” my mother says. “There’s … the, you know, the … river.”

I notice a white film around her lips. I cannot make sense of what she is saying without staring at her mouth. Yet it is almost impossible for me to look at her.

“Mom, listen to me,” I say, clutching her hand. It is radiating heat. Suddenly, I have become the mother, and she the child. “Grandma is old. She’s not capable of taking care of you, but—”

“Then take me to Abbott Northwestern,” she says. “Daddy will help me.”

Abbott Northwestern is a hospital in Minneapolis.

“Mom, we can’t take you there, but we
can
get you to Princeton Medical Center.”

“No! No! No!” my mother wails. “No hospital. I want Daddy to take care of me.”

“Mom, nobody—not even your daddy—would transfer you to Abbott Northwestern right now. But if we can take you to the hospital here, then you can go to Minneapolis when you’re feeling better. Okay? Mom?”

“Okay,” she says, breaking into a full sob. I try to hug her, but she turns away.

Olivia walks into the room. “Liv,” I whisper. “Call an ambulance.”

My mother’s breathing is fitful. I watch her eyes roll back into their sockets. Am I watching her die? Her mouth is agape, her tongue extends and tightens. Her lips somehow disappear.

“I love you, Mom.”

Then something occurs to me: If my mother is about to die, maybe there is something she needs to say.

“Mom?” I say softly.