Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (32 page)

“Mom,” I say firmly, “that’s just to keep the light out, remember?”

Mom turns her head away from us to face the window and closes her eyes. I feel cruel.

Olivia sets the eye mask on the bedside table, between two vases of flowers, and looks at me. “It’s okay, Loosh,” she whispers, but I worry that it’s not. My mother’s confusion scares me, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond to it. Should I correct her? Does that make it worse? And why is she like this?

I walk up to the nurses’ station. I’m still uncomfortable asking questions here—I worry I am being judged—but I approach the desk anyway.

“My mom is saying all sorts of weird stuff,” I tell the nurse on duty.

She looks up from her paperwork, and I wonder if I should be disturbing her, but she removes her glasses, suggesting that she will give me as much of her time as I need.

“It’s not uncommon for critically ill patients to become disoriented in the hospital,” she explains. “It is almost always fleeting.”

Almost always
does not reassure me. Mom was like this at Tenacre too. And at Connie’s house, when she couldn’t remember who Bill Cosby was. What if it—this dementia—isn’t fleeting but progressive?

“Keep in mind,” she continues, “your mom has been in the ICU, where it’s hard to distinguish between night and day. Even here, in
the Special Care Unit, she’s having her vital signs checked, blood drawn, IVs changed, around the clock, disrupting normal sleep patterns. The confusion is totally reasonable.”

I feel somewhat better.

Olivia and I wait in silence for Mom to wake up again.

“Liv,” Mom says a few minutes later, “it’s dripping.”

I assume she is referring to the catheter, or the IV bottles.

“I know,” Olivia says sympathetically.

“Oh dear,” Mom says with more disappointment in her voice than discomfort. “Oh no! It’s dripping all over. Drip—dripping all over. Go to the”—she waves a frail and limp arm in the direction of the hallway—“go to the other room …”

She is gasping for breath.

“What, Mom?” I ask, heading for the nurses’ station.

“Take it out!” she orders.
“Take it out!”

I stop in the doorway.

“Mom, I know it’s uncomfortable,” Olivia says gently, “but it has to stay there.”

“No,” Mom says, shaking her head vehemently. “No! Go to the—the other—”

“Other what?” Olivia asks. Both of us are standing now, examining the IV bags, trying desperately to understand Mom’s request.

“The
other room
,” Mom says decisively. “Go to the other room. It’s dripping all over. Go to the other room and move all the furniture. Before it gets ruined!”

I am sitting alone with Mom. She is angry with me, has been since I walked through the door.

“Lucia, if you really love me, you’ll get me out of here.” Her terrified eyes plead with me.

Is she delirious again? Or does she really want to leave here? If
so, where does she want to go? Back to Tenacre? Or does she think that’s where she is?

“Help me,” she weeps. “Help me.”

Why couldn’t she have said this while she was at Tenacre, when I could have done something?

Later in the day
, Aunt Mary, who has returned from Minnesota, is sitting in the vinyl lounge chair on one side of Mom’s bed, and I am half-leaning against the windowsill. The closed blinds are blocking out most of the midday light. Mom is sleeping, I am reading a paperback, Nora Ephron’s
Heartburn
, which I bought in the gift shop, and Aunt Mary is leafing through
Town & Country
.

“I’m scared,” Mom says.

I set my book down and move closer to her so I can hold her hand. I squeeze it gently and search for the right response.

“Are you scared about the surgery?” I ask.

We are still waiting for an exact date from the doctor.

“Wouldn’t you be?” Mom answers wryly.

It is a
bright, crisp Sunday morning in August, and I am heading out for an early jog when my father calls me into his office and asks me to take a seat in the chair opposite his desk.

“I want you to know that I am going ahead with my association address next Saturday,” he tells me.

“You’re what?” I ask. “Mom’s having surgery on Friday!”

“I’ll be there when she goes in for the operation,” he says, his hands folded in front of him, “but I need to be in New York early Friday afternoon. I’ll need the time to … to prepare mentally for my association. Your mom will be pretty out of it after surgery anyway,” he adds.

His association is the daylong meeting held once a year for all the students who have ever attended his two-week Primary class. The agenda and purpose of an association meeting are confidential, presumably to protect against the negative thoughts of others.

I am sickened, literally, by what I feel amounts to his complete failure as a husband, a father, a moral being. I am shaking, I cannot believe what I am hearing.

“And you know,” he continues, “this coming week I’m really counting on you and Sherman and Olivia to help me out with Mom. I’m going to be very busy.”

I am speechless. And I’m certainly not going to help my father out of what he is treating as a simple scheduling conflict.

“I’m really counting on you being out here all week,” my father presses.

My mind races. How dare he leave at such a time! What if the surgery is postponed for a few hours? Then he won’t even be there while Mom waits to go under. And anything might happen on the operating table.

Sherman was right after all. Several times over the last week, he and Olivia and I had debated what Dad would do if Mom’s surgery coincided with his association.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sherman,” I had said. “He will cancel. Obviously.”

I was totally wrong.

“Lucia,” my father continues, “you know I haven’t asked much of you …”

I almost choke. What he has asked of us is unconscionable.

“Fuck … you … Dad,” I suddenly blurt out. My dad is stunned. I go on.

“Mom is having surgery. Your own
wife
is having surgery, and you won’t be there when she comes out of it?” I laugh derisively and shake my head. “You can postpone your association!”

“No I can’t!”
my father shouts, his face turning scarlet. His clenched fists hit the ink blotter in front of him hard enough to make
a loud thud. The desk shudders, and a pen rolls off it and falls to the floor. “This has been scheduled for a year. I have students flying in from all over the country. Some of them can barely afford their airfares as it is. Some are making big sacrifices to get here.”

My father lowers his voice, softens his tone. “Believe me, Lucia, I’ve given this a lot of prayerful thought, and I know your mother supports me—”

The idea that Mom can support
anything
right now is absurd. “So your students’ pocketbooks come before Mom’s health,” I say coolly, deliberately provoking him.

“That’s not true!”

My father begins to cry. He wipes the tears away with his thumb and forefinger, and pauses, trying to collect himself. I wait.

“You think I want to give my address? You think I want to leave your mother’s side?”

I think he’s a monster.

His voice grows louder with each question. “You kids have no idea how hard this is!”

I laugh scornfully and shake my head.

“You and your beloved
cause
. You’re going to heal the world, aren’t you?” My voice cracks, and my eyes start filling with tears. There is no longer any filter on my words. I want to hurt my father. “Well, you’re doing a great job so far.”

“Get out!” he wails.

I don’t move.

He looks away and waves his hand, shooing me out the door.

“Get out.”

I grip the arms of the chair.

“Tell me something, Dad. If the First Lady were going in for surgery, do you think the President of the United States might cancel a meeting? Postpone a trip? You think he might delay a
summit
?”

“You kids don’t understand what I’m—”

“I understand,” I say. “I know the real reason you’re going through with your association address on Saturday.” I get up and
walk to the door. “It wouldn’t look very good if you had to explain to your students that your wife is dying in a hospital.”

I walk out and slam the door behind me.

Mom is in
the operating room. I am trying to imagine the surgical theater: the bright overhead lights, the beeping, clicking, and sucking sounds of various monitors and instruments; the half-masked faces of the various professionals; the surgeon’s brief, muffled orders to the nurse; the whispered assurances of the anesthesiologist. I wonder how accurate my imaginings are, all derived from television and movies. The overwhelming feeling I have, however, is complete frustration. I want to be there, in the room with my mother. I want to see and hear everything for myself. A report from the surgeon might, or might not, be sufficient when it’s all over. But what if her heart is pumping away one moment, and then … nothing? What if, at this very moment, they are pronouncing her dead?

Before the surgery, we—Dad, Sherman, Olivia, and I—stood beside Mom in pre-op, waiting for the orderly to come and wheel her away. I held her hand and concentrated specifically on the
feel
of it, its warmth. I wanted to capture the sensation in my memory.

I look around the surgical family waiting room. Unlike the sparse rooms designated for families of ICU and SCU patients, this is more richly appointed, with comfortable sofas and lounge chairs arranged in clusters to provide separate waiting territories and a certain amount of privacy for each party. There are reading lamps instead of overhead fluorescents, and fanned out on low tables are copies of today’s papers and current—not tattered and outdated—issues of magazines. There is a wall-mounted courtesy phone in one corner, presumably for incoming calls from surgeons. The room is filled with the soothing aroma of fresh-brewed coffee. Dad, Sherman, Olivia, Grandma (who flew back from Minneapolis for
the surgery), Aunt Mary (who, aside from a brief return to Minnesota, has remained here the whole time), Aunt Nan (who drove down from Greenwich), and I are the only people in the waiting room.

The television is on. There is a common effort at courtesy: Dad and Grandma are sharing a sofa, and Olivia and Grandma are smoking together. (Olivia and I have given up hiding our cigarette habit from Dad.) Aunt Nan and Aunt Mary are exchanging bits of news about their children. We all have one eye on the TV, one on the clock. Every once in a while, Dad stands up, walks over to the clock, checks it against his watch, and returns to his seat. He pulls a box of butterscotch candies from his jacket pocket and offers them around.

At one point—way too soon—the courtesy telephone rings, and Sherman jumps up to answer it. The call is for nobody in our group, so we settle back, staring at the television. And we wait.

When I’m not thinking about the operation, I’m revisiting conversations I’ve had over the last two weeks, with various family members and friends, who have dropped in or called to offer their prayers, their sorrow, their reminiscences and observations. Aunt Nan’s daughter Mary, with whom I had brunch back in January, was one of the first callers.

“Hi, Lucia, it’s Mary,” my cousin said, and I immediately wished I had reached her first. I felt that I owed her that. She asked how Mom was doing, how we all were doing, and confessed that she’d told her mom earlier in the summer (which I already knew). I wanted to apologize to Mary—and did—a blanket apology, without specifics because there was so much I was sorry about. She said how sorry she was too, that she hadn’t known what to do. I said that was how we all felt. The conversation was awkward; we stumbled through it.

The last few days have seen the arrival and departure of Uncle Sherm (my father’s oldest brother) and his wife, Aunt Claire; and my father’s two half brothers, Uncle Nick and Uncle Truck. They have tried to comfort us with old family jokes and anecdotes, shared at the dinner table or in the living room or in the hospital waiting room.
They saved some stories for one-on-one conversations. Each was quick to support Dad and slow to voice judgment about what had happened. But I wondered what they were really thinking.

To me, their visits have felt like pilgrimages, and their conversations have sounded disconcertingly like eulogies—for both Mom and Dad. Still, some of the information intrigues me. Really for the first time, I am viewing my parents beyond their roles as parents: Heff and Jo as children, as teenagers, as young adults, before they gave themselves to Christian Science.

“Your dad used
to mix the best martini,” Uncle Nick said, eliciting laughter from everyone at the dinner table, including my father, who nevertheless looked uncomfortable with the tribute. Heff Ewing, martini man. I am fascinated and puzzled. I’ve never seen my father serve alcohol to anyone. In fact, one Christmas, when a new neighbor dropped off a bottle of champagne as a holiday gift (Mom always gave homemade fudge or cookies), my father instructed me to return it, on his behalf, with the polite but firm explanation that, as Christian Scientists, we didn’t drink. Reluctantly, I obeyed, trudging through the snow with the beribboned bottle, humiliated.

“I’ve always felt
protective of your father,” Aunt Nan confessed to me. “He was just a toddler when Mother and Dad divorced. And then Mother remarried, and had Truck and Nick in quick succession, and, well.…”