Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (36 page)

We make phone
calls to Tucson and Minnesota. Olivia takes the first flight back to Newark.

Dad, Sherman, Ham, and I sit in Mom’s corner of the ICU. She is hooked up to a respirator. At regular intervals, the machine causes her chest to heave abruptly outward while a blue plastic tube resembling a vacuum hose collapses in a white plastic box beside her bed. Mom’s neck is swollen and distorted to accommodate the life-sustaining pipe. I hold her clammy and unresponsive hand. Suddenly, I’m aware of a commotion. When I look up, I see that Dad and Aunt Kay are hugging, speaking to each other. Uncle Bear stands behind them in the doorway, viewing for the first time his sister-in-law’s condition.

Aunt Kay motions me over to her. “Lucia,” she says, pulling me toward her. “I am so sorry.”

She hugs me tightly, and then pushes me away to arm’s length and rests her arms on my shoulders so that she can look at me while she’s speaking. “I’ve done a lot of thinking over the last few weeks,” she says.

I lower my gaze to the floor and brace myself for the next bomb to drop.

“There are a lot of things that won’t ever make sense. But I love you,” she says, shaking my shoulders slightly. “And we’ll get through this. Together.”

She pulls me back into a strong embrace.

In the evening, we all go to dinner. Afterward, Dad, Ham, and Sherman drive home; Uncle Bear goes to the hotel; and Aunt Kay comes with me back to the hospital. We check in at the nurses’ station to see how Mom is doing. The nurse tells us that Mom has been weaned from the respirator, is breathing on her own, and is sleeping.

The waiting room is empty except for us. Aunt Kay pulls out her knitting.

Her tone is direct. “You know, Lucia,” she says, “when I’m upset about something, I say things before I think them through.”

She starts to knit, and the needles click rhythmically.

“Uncle Jack is the same way, only he tends to
do
things without thinking them through.”

Aunt Kay’s blue eyes move to the far corner of the ceiling.

“I’m sorry about some of the things I’ve said,” she says.

“I’m sorry too.”

“And Uncle Jack,” she goes on, “he’s not going to cause any trouble.”

I feel my shoulders relax.

“You probably don’t remember this,” I say, “but you taught me the word
agnostic
when I was in second grade.”

Aunt Kay smiles.

We sit in silence, except for the clicking of her knitting needles, while I smoke.

“Do you think your mom ever had any doubts about Christian Science?”

I shake my head no. It isn’t until I’ve replied that I remember what Mom said shortly after arriving at the hospital. “I should have come here a long time ago. I wanted to, and your father knows it.” I decide not to mention it.

“She wasn’t unhappy,” Aunt Kay says, looking into my eyes. “Don’t forget that.”

And suddenly, I picture my parents dancing alone to Tony Bennett in the common room at Tenacre, and I know it is true.

One of the
residents finds me in the waiting room.

“Your mom’s awake. She said she’d like to see you.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, sweetheart,” she says softly.

Mom closes her eyes. She seems content just to have me there. She is lying perfectly still, except for the barely perceptible flickering of her eyelids. Several minutes later, she opens her eyes again.

“Can you go find Gomer for me?” she asks.

“Huh?”

She shuts her eyes and drifts back to sleep. She must have been hallucinating.

After a few minutes, she opens them again. “Gomer and I,” she says with a look of anticipation, “we’re going to the Bermuda races.”

Hope is strange
. For a long time I thought—no, I think I really knew—that my mother would die. Yet when Dr. White said that the days following the second surgery would be critical, I nevertheless ended up in Manhattan, back at work. I believed there was more time.

My mother died at 2:15 in the morning on September 9, 1986, a Tuesday, three days after her second surgery. Olivia was by her side. At 2:00
A.M
., the ICU nurse said to Olivia that she might want to call Dad, that he should come quickly. Mom was already gone by the time he got there. My father said two things to Olivia: that he’d hit a deer in the road on his way to the hospital and “I can’t understand why—
why?
—your mom couldn’t have stayed at Tenacre and spared me this.”

At the time of Mom’s death, I was asleep in my apartment. I think I always knew I would be. There had been so many sleepless nights when I lay alone in my bed, waiting for it. But that night—or early that morning—somebody ringing the buzzer woke me up. I looked at my clock radio: 4:27. It was still dark outside.

At first, half asleep, I thought that the visitor downstairs was a drunk, so I tried to ignore the rings, but when they wouldn’t stop, I climbed out of bed and went to my window overlooking Third Avenue. “Hey you,” I thought I’d yell, “knock it off …”

But before I had even opened the window, I saw two people leaving the entry to my building, heading for the pay phone on the street corner.

Oh, no. No.

It was my father and Aunt Lucia. I opened the window and yelled.

“Come up!”

Mom is dead. Mom is dead. Mom is dead.

I was completely unprepared for the finality of death.
Mom is dead
.

Olivia had wanted to be with Mom when she died, and she was; she had wanted her lasting memory of Mom to be peaceful. Not having wanted to see her dead, I remember her at her living worst. Sometimes I have vivid dreams in which she is still horrifically sick, still angry with me. Occasionally, she won’t even talk to me.

But once I had a dream in which I found her, happy and healthy, living in a suburb of Pittsburgh, married to an orthopedic surgeon.

Because Christian Science asserts that what we experience as life on earth is an illusion (because matter is not real), Christian Science churches do not perform holy rites at life’s milestones of birth, marriage, and death. If Christian Scientists want to have a church wedding, they must go elsewhere and find a minister, since there are no Christian Science clergy. Likewise with funerals. So two days after my mother
didn’t die
, we held a service in Hopewell’s Baptist church, to “celebrate Life” (with a capital L), but not
her
life. There was no printed order of service. There were no eulogies. There was no reference to my mother’s personality, or to anything she had ever done or said. No mention of the wishbones that used to hang in her kitchen. No sharing of anecdotes—like the time my six-year-old cousin Teddy threw a snowball at her car and to his surprise she got out, chased him down, and stuffed a snowball down the back of his snowsuit, laughing mischievously. No mention of the unmanageable giggles that endeared her to her children, like the time we attended the Christmas Eve service at the Anglican church on Virgin Gorda, and, as the old British minister sermonized about the Virgin birth, the open-air nightclub next door blasted the disco song “Bad Girls.” Not a word about her interest in art, or even her commitment to her church. In fact, the service had nothing to do
with Joanne Ewing, except for the fact that she had been a Christian Scientist, and the readings were passages from the Bible and
Science and Health
.

That day, the Baptist church in Hopewell was filled with Christian Scientists and non–Christian Scientists, family and friends. Mimi contacted my closest friends from boarding school and college, and many of them attended. For the Christian Scientists in the sanctuary, the service was probably beautiful. For me, it was at moments pointless, at other moments enraging in its purposeful avoidance of acknowledging my mother’s life, her final agonizing months, and her death.

I remember sitting in the second pew between Sherman and Olivia. For some reason, we left the front pew empty. Maybe because we didn’t want to face the reality that we were at our own mother’s service. Dad was seated on the other side of Sherman. I couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind. It occurred to me that he might have been the only one of us who felt no guilt at all for what had happened: his church’s doctrine could explain everything. He had never compromised his beliefs, whereas I, at least, had never fully stood by mine. To his thinking, Mom’s death was the result of her inability to demonstrate her God-given perfection. And certainly, he could argue that there is no death, that his wife had simply gone on to another plane of existence.

I was ill at ease to see Mrs. Hannah—the Christian Science practitioner from Minnesota to whom my parents had turned for all of our childhood bumps and scrapes and charley horses—stand before the congregation and start reading the Scientific Statement of Being: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter …”

As I was leaving the church following the service, I overheard a Christian Scientist friend of my mother’s whisper to another Church member, “She should never have gone to the hospital.” I wanted to shake the woman, hard. I was baffled. Did she honestly believe that Mom would have lived had she stayed at Tenacre? Or
did the woman only view Mom’s transfer to the medical center as a betrayal, or even bad publicity?

I thank God that my mother did in fact go to the hospital; that I was given a month to be with her; that she died with a diagnosis, and with her family around her. Sometimes I wonder if she went to the hospital for
us
.

Afterward, people came back to our house. It was a beautiful fall day, sunny. Family and friends gathered inside and out, in the screened porch, in Mom’s Bird Room. It was surreal: never before had so many people been to the house. But I wanted everyone to leave. I snuck away for most of it and hid in the Nook, waiting for it to be over.

Once people began leaving, Mimi and her dad, my uncle Brad, arranged to take my friends and me to the Tap Room at the Nassau Inn in Princeton. There, we sat talking, oddly, more about workaday things than about Mom. It could have been a birthday outing or a girls’ night out, except that it was midafternoon, midweek. Our waiter asked us what the special occasion was, and one of my friends, without missing a beat, said it was a shower. I was so stunned, I laughed. Then we all did. I was profoundly grateful for the company of these friends, most of whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to for so many months.

Two days later, we buried Mom in Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, the same cemetery where her father was buried. It was a private ceremony, for family members only, except for Mrs. Warner, another Christian Science friend—the one with the big house, seven kids, and the annual Christmas sing-along. Dad had asked her to select a reading. Again, there was no mention of Jo, and the readings were from the Bible and
Science and Health
. Uncle Jack did not attend. He had chosen not to be at the service in Hopewell either. In fact, Olivia and Sherman and I didn’t see him again until a few months later, when we were all—minus Dad—back in Minneapolis for Grandma’s eightieth birthday. For a while I hated my uncle for not showing up. But eventually I came to feel that by staying away
he was, in his own way, keeping his promise to Mom not to cause trouble. Over time, I began to see my uncle’s anger and mine as not that far apart.

The last thing my mother ever said to me was “Gomer and I, we’re going to the Bermuda races.” I had hoped for something personal, maternal, loving. To Sherman she had said that whatever he chose to do in life, he should give it his very best. For a long time after her death, I felt robbed by the inconsequential nonsense of those parting words to me. In fact, her words were so random that I quickly forgot them, and would have lost them forever had I not scribbled them down in my journal.

Occasionally, I find comfort in believing that Gomer was, in Mom’s private, dying world, my father; and that she, with a look of happy anticipation, was going somewhere warm, and sunny, and healthy. With him.

I
n April 2001
, nearly fifteen years after my mother’s death, my father passed on. We never learned the cause of death. For a long time I assumed, because of his gradually debilitating symptoms, that he had developed ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease—an irony, I suppose—a disease for which there is no medical cure.

A couple of years ago, I had to go to Philadelphia for the day, and, before returning to New York, I made a detour through Princeton and Hopewell. I decided to go back to Tenacre. I got out of my car and walked down the footpath past the white clapboard administration building and toward South Hall Extension. The place looked smaller than I had remembered, and the buildings and landscaping were in need of attention. It reminded me not at all of a small liberal arts college, minus the students—the way I had perceived it when my mother was there. My heartbeat quickened as I neared the front entrance to South Hall Extension. I opened the door and walked in. There was nobody at the desk. I could hear a television blaring down the hall, and I saw the familiar portrait of Mary Baker Eddy. I closed my eyes and willed myself to stay a few moments longer. Then I left. I never encountered a single person, which was a blessing. I don’t know what I would have done or said.

Next I drove to Hopewell and turned in to my parents’ old driveway. I hadn’t been there in more than ten years. Rolling slowly down the bumpy road, I came face-to-face with half a dozen deer. I stopped
the car and watched them casually move on. Before reaching the bend in the road, I turned back. I decided I didn’t need to see the house.