Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (27 page)

When I return home, Sherm is still crashed out on the couch with the dogs, our aunts are asleep in my bedroom, and Dad is breathing quietly, no longer snoring, behind the master bedroom door. I crawl back into the Nook before anyone stirs.

Sherm and I
arrive at the ICU later in the morning to find Dad at Mom’s bedside, holding a full IV bag in each hand while a nurse disconnects the empty ones. My anger toward the situation, the Church, my parents—especially my father—which has been careening toward a point of no return, seems to be losing its power. A Christian Science practitioner in an ICU is the proverbial fish out of water. That he is even trying to adapt is remarkable.

I see, at my father’s feet, the white canvas PBS tote that holds his Bible and
Science and Health
, and the Christian Science quarterly. The tentative tenderness I am feeling is suddenly supplanted once again by an onslaught of anger, resentment, and irritability, which I manage to hold at bay with one question: How does he reconcile all of this?

After less than twenty-four hours, the change in Mom’s appearance is dramatic. She is alert, lying calmly in a bed, hooked up to various pieces of equipment that hum and beep and click rhythmically, one slowly spitting out a stream of paper. Her cheeks are rosy,
not gray. Her lips are full again, whereas yesterday they seemed withered. Her breathing is steady, no longer fitful. Today she looks closer to her true age; sick, but stronger. There is a dark purple bruise on her chest where the doctor inserted the catheter, but if she looks this much better after one day, I reason, there is no telling what medicine will be able to do. I catch Sherm’s eye, and we both smile in silence. However foreign it feels to be here, it feels right.

“Hi, you two,” Mom says. She no longer seems confused.

“Hi, Mom,” Sherm and I say in unison from the foot of the bed before drawing closer. Now we stand opposite our father and the nurse, who look like they are engaged in a game of cat’s cradle with the tubing. I kiss the top of my mother’s head.

“How do you feel?” Sherm asks, holding her right hand, the one free from needles and tubes.

“Fine,” my mother says in a high-pitched whisper, like the ethereal voice of E. B. White’s spider-heroine, Charlotte, in
Charlotte’s Web
.

I look at Sherm.

Always the embodiment of propriety, Mom chats politely with the nurse, mustering short bursts of energy to make abbreviated introductions.

“This is my second daughter, Lucia. A writer. And my son, Sherm, my baby.” Mom grins. “He’s in a rock band. Lead singer. A senior. At Columbia.”

The nurse smiles warmly, and I feel relieved. Since our arrival at the medical center, I’ve worried that the nurses and doctors will view and treat us with suspicion, but so far I haven’t felt this. The nurse, a woman about my age, could not be kinder. I am embarrassed and surprised at my mother’s description of me, and I worry that the nurse may ask what I have written and I’ll have to confess: nothing. In my publishing job, I am little more than a gofer. I look again at Sherm, who clearly shares my self-consciousness. At least he can say he is in a band.

I wonder if Mom is aware that it is August, that Columbia’s graduation
came and went two months ago, without Sherman in it. I remember the Sunday night in May when he called me, sobbing and desperate, just ten hours before final exams were to start. He hadn’t been able to study for months and didn’t know what he should do: sit for the finals and fail, or go talk to a dean. He withdrew two weeks before commencement. All I’ve had to manage, in addition to
this
, is my desk job at Condé Nast.

In contrast to my mother’s, my father’s appearance is unchanged. He is wearing a light blue collared shirt, a bow tie, and summer-weight gray slacks; the whites of his eyes are still bloodshot. Maybe he’s been crying again.

The nurse is having some trouble with the valve on the IV, so she flicks the tubing with her middle finger and squeezes the bag. The solution seems to drip too quickly, or it halts completely. She doesn’t get flustered, but the valve doesn’t cooperate. I wonder what it feels like for my mother to have liquid dripping into her veins; if it feels cold, weird, or like nothing at all. I read somewhere once about a rogue air bubble that almost killed a patient. I resist the urge to ask the nurse about that possibility.

I notice she is wearing an inverted timepiece, a nurse’s watch pinned to the front of her white uniform. My father gave my mother a similar one years ago, when she decided to pursue a career in Christian Science nursing. She was so proud of that watch. Today it sits in her jewelry box on her dresser.

All of a sudden, I feel as though I am viewing this scene through the objective eyes of a reporter. How is it that this patient—who was raised by a doctor and a nurse—made the mutinous decision twenty-odd years ago to turn away from her upbringing and conventional medicine? I could ask myself the same question about my father’s motivations, but his father never carried a black doctor’s bag or wrote prescriptions or made house calls in the middle of the night. His mother never took a patient’s pulse.

It dawns on me that for my whole life up until now—even though I’ve known, intellectually, that my parents converted to Christian
Science—my perception of their faith has been of something constant, immutable. But the truth is that both of my parents rejected the faiths of their upbringings to embrace, fervently and ultimately fanatically, a religion of their choosing.

The nurse jots an entry on Mom’s record. “I’ll be back in a bit,” she says, patting my mother’s leg.

“Your father and I are going to read the Lesson,” Mom announces after she leaves.

My body tenses. Sherm and I are being given our exit cue, just like at Tenacre. I remember a day in late April when I was home for the weekend; I had just visited Mom for all of twelve minutes at Tenacre. My father and I were standing in the kitchen when I had cautiously suggested to Dad that we could take Mom to the hospital and
still
use Christian Science; the discussion quickly escalated to an all-out fight.

“No we can’t!”
my father had exploded, his face reddening. The weight of his body tipped forward onto the balls of his feet, and his fists were clenched at his sides. It was as though an invisible cord, attached to an imaginary point on the floor behind him, was restraining him. I had the panicky feeling, that hollowness in the bones one gets at the sight of a fierce dog behind a fence. The dog jumps, growls, and bares his teeth, ready to attack: will that fence hold? “Christian Science and medicine don’t mix,” my father had said in a more controlled tone. He’d breathed deeply, measuredly, in through his nose, and continued: “And until you accept that, young lady”—his voice had grown nasty and threatening—“you won’t be doing anything to help your mother.… You may even be hurting her!”

Now, in the midst of IV bags and monitoring equipment in the ICU, Mom and Dad are going to read the Lesson. I want to scream. Then I notice my father’s reading glasses on her bedside table. For the last couple of years, I’ve seen him seated behind his desk at home, in his little study, peering over tortoiseshell frames that make him look so professorial, authoritative. At first I was taken aback at
the sight, remembering my Eyeglasses Rebellion, but over time, I got used to it. Only now is the hypocrisy so glaring.

Suddenly my head hurts, and I feel claustrophobic. I need air.

“We’ll see you a bit later,” I try to say cheerfully to Mom, to cover my anger. I know that upsetting her won’t help anything. “Keep it up, Mom. Already, you’re looking so much better,” I add, the phrase like an arrow aimed at my father and at Christian Science. I turn on my heel.

Sherm and I leave the ICU with his arm over my shoulder. We separate; he goes to the cafeteria for a Coke, and I head outside.

I find an empty bench along the circular driveway of the hospital’s main entrance. The air is thick with humidity. Lighting a cigarette, I inhale the smoke defiantly: the daughter of a Christian Science practitioner, outside a hospital where my mother lies dying, most likely of cancer. I rest my elbows on my knees and fix my gaze on the curb to avoid eye contact with anybody.

The presence of my father’s Bible and
Science and Health
in the ICU is an affront to me. And yet—I am trying hard to be less judgmental in light of my mother’s improvement—what harm is there now, really, in reading the Lesson? So it’s hypocritical. So what? Maybe my father is going through the motions of reading the Lesson with Mom to comfort both of them, the way a new retiree keeps putting on his suit. Is that really so bad?

I want my mother to surrender unequivocally to the new reality of the hospital, falling backward into the embracing arms of medicine. But can she do this if she is still reading the Lesson, relying, even in part, on the Church doctrine that has gotten her into this crisis? Psychologically speaking, is it better to deny the reality of illness while treating it medically, or to accept it?

And might I be placing too much stock in the power of medicine? I think of the ravaged breast cancer patient we saw coming out of the elevator yesterday and know there are no assurances.

I can’t answer any of these questions.

It occurs to me that we haven’t heard back from Uncle Jack.
Almost twenty-four hours have passed since I gave him the doctor’s name. We haven’t talked to Grandma either, because Uncle Jack was going to break the news to her. Maybe my uncle wants to hold off telling Grandma about Mom until he has spoken with Dr. Sierocki. Maybe he hasn’t gotten through to him yet. Or perhaps he and Aunt Mary won’t tell Grandma until Aunt Kay returns from Wyoming. The silence disturbs me, nevertheless, given the urgency of Mom’s situation. I wonder if there aren’t other reasons, reasonable ones, for the reticence—outrage, a feeling of betrayal by Mom, by Dad, by Liv and Sherm and me. Maybe he
has
talked with the doctor and that is precisely why we haven’t heard back. I decide to call Uncle Jack again at his office.

I throw the rubbed-out cigarette into the trash and head back upstairs.

“Doctor’s office,” the friendly woman’s voice from the day before answers the phone.

“Hello, this is Lucia. Is my uncle in?”

“One moment, please,” she says. I hear her cover the mouthpiece. The possibly paranoid notion that Uncle Jack is right there only intensifies my suspicion that he is avoiding me, us. Moments later, she speaks again.

“The doctor is in surgery.”

“Will you tell him I called? He can call me at the ICU lobby pay phone.” I give her the number.

My father is sitting next to Sherm at the round table in the waiting room, watching the overhead television, which seems odd: It normally takes forty-five minutes to read the Lesson aloud, but they have stopped after fifteen at most.

“How was Mom when you left her?” I ask. I wonder
why
he left her.

“Oh, gee, I don’t know,” he says, searching for words. That she is “making good progress” would still sound hollow now, even if for the first time since Christmas it might actually be true. If the doctors had performed an overnight miracle—if Mom had been completely
healed—it might be difficult for Dad to accept. Might he be torn, I wonder, between wanting her to get better and not wanting medicine to succeed where Christian Science has failed?

It is inconceivable, yet the thought crosses my mind.

“She’s dozing in and out,” Dad says. There is a wobble in his voice. He starts to cry, and then to shake, a head-to-toe, fevered shiver. I try to comfort him, gently rubbing his back, but I am not drawn into his anguish. I have my own, and it is a complicated mess of scorn and duty and despair. I feel separate, disconnected. Here is a man who is my father, and here is a daughter’s hand, mine, comforting him.

He immediately freezes, straightens, and wipes his eyes with his palm. “I’m okay, I’m all right,” he says, drawing in a quick breath. “I’m okay.”

I know that, according to Christian Science, it isn’t the religion that has failed. It is my mother who has, and probably my father. I remember a particular passage from
Science and Health
that I memorized years ago at Claremont:

According to Mary Baker Eddy, my mother has given in to fear. She has failed to correct her thinking, and that is why she is sick.

There will be consequences for going into the hospital, I am certain. My mother’s practitioner, Mrs. Childs, will no longer “treat” her (not to punish Mom’s decision, Christian Scientists will say, but because medicine and Christian Science are incompatible). And there
will be implicit retribution: Not only will Mrs. Childs stop praying for Mom (even if Dad continues to do so) but she will also never visit Mom here. I doubt that any of my parents’ Christian Science friends will come to the hospital. And what, I wonder, will happen if she ever gets out? Will she be excommunicated? Since she still wants to read the Lesson, she probably isn’t thinking about leaving the Church.

Soon, the shunning will be felt. I didn’t have to grow up Episcopalian or Lutheran to know that church communities typically rally around their members with flowers, hospital visits, and Prayers of the People at times of personal or family crisis, none of which will be forthcoming. There is a fresh pan of lasagna in our refrigerator at home, but it came from Mrs. Florence—the stockbroker’s wife—along with homemade chocolate chip cookies and a fruit salad. What kind of a church turns away from one of its members at her darkest hour? I think of my Dad too. Will his “practice” suffer? (I can no longer use that term without quotes.) Will he be shut out? An expanding sadness for both of my parents outweighs—for now—the anger.