Fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (38 page)

Colorado?

Sherman and Olivia got the same postcard.

In April 2001, Heather left a message on our machine saying that Dad had “passed on” peacefully in his sleep.

He was sixty-eight years old.

At the time of his death, I was very pregnant with our fourth child and could have used my condition as an easy way out of attending the memorial service. But I felt I should go. My obstetrician permitted me to fly.

David and I flew to Denver with Sherman. Olivia chose not to attend. The night before the service, there was a small dinner, during which Heather invited people to share their memories. I listened to my father’s siblings come up with funny anecdotes from their childhood, as though they had been glory days. David held my hand under the table. Toward the end of the meal, I read a brief statement I had prepared, and barely got through it. It was not a eulogy. It was neither poignant nor pretty. It thinly veiled my anger at the waste of it all. I recounted how, when I was a child, my father used to make French toast on Saturday mornings before riding with us on the ski bus. He had been a ski instructor. On family vacations when we were very small, he had always brought his camera with him and took beautiful photographs. He was fully engaged.
What had happened?
I was shaking. I half-expected Heather to stand up, like an attorney, and call out “Objection!” but she did not react.

I wasn’t sad about my father’s death. I didn’t miss him. But I
missed my mother terribly. And being eight months pregnant with our fourth child, I felt the enormity of her absence from my life, and her grandchildren’s lives.

The next day we congregated at a funeral home. There, I was surprised to see a man my parents had known in London whom I had met a few times. John Somebody. A church member and handyman at Hawthorne House, if I remembered correctly. He shook my hand heartily and spoke effusively of how much my father had meant to him, as a friend and a Scientist. He said something about how supportive Heff had been of “the center.” I thought it was an odd thing for him to say, but he spoke as though the center was a subject with which I was familiar. I filed the comment in the back of my mind. Another man I didn’t know handed out programs printed with the order of service. I bristled. My mind flooded with memories of that other service, at the Hopewell Baptist church, where there had been no programs.

I didn’t bring a program home from Denver as a keepsake, but I vaguely remember—or did I dream this?—that on one page of the folded, white, ribbon-bound program was an image of a Bible and
Science and Health
, overlaid with a white dove. On another page, there was a photograph of my father. During the brief service, people I didn’t know read passages from the Bible and
Science and Health
. They sang hymns from the Christian Science Hymnal, but I didn’t sing along. Halfway through one hymn, I sat down, holding my very pregnant belly as an excuse. The service included a Marine Corps honor guard, which made me wonder again about the unknown, unknowable legacy of my father’s tour of duty.

For someone who strove during his life to deny the reality of death, the program, the service, and the honor guard all felt incongruous and hypocritical, but no more so, I realized, than his reading glasses, or his stay at Albany Medical Center.

Six weeks after my father died, Charlie, our youngest, was born. Heather sent an engraved silver cup from Tiffany, with an enclosure that said:
WITH LOVE, DAD AND HEATHER
.

I wondered for years why it was that Dad and Heather had moved to Colorado at a time when my father was clearly bedridden. It could not have been an easy move, and had seemed utterly random and out of the blue. While I was surfing the Internet one night, I remembered what the man at the funeral home had said to me about Dad and his support of “the center.” On a whim, I Googled “Christian Science Center Denver.” What popped up shocked me.

End-time theorists were (and are) Christians who believed that, in accordance with prophecies in the biblical Book of Revelation, the Second Coming would occur at the time of the Millennium, and, in a Rapture, all Christian faithful would ascend, with Jesus, into heaven. As a student at Brown, I had written a paper about nuclear millennialists, who believed that this end-time would be brought on by a nuclear exchange. End-time theories had never been taught by my Sunday school teachers, but I did remember, vaguely, that some Christian Scientists believed that Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science were the fulfillment of a prophecy in Revelation. I was stunned. I hadn’t remembered my father espousing any millennialist notions. I called Sherman and told him to get online. Together we tried to remember when it was that Dad and Heather had moved to Colorado. We were both fairly certain that those change of address cards had arrived sometime in the spring or summer of 1999.

Another memory came back to me, but it too was fuzzy. During one of the last holiday seasons that my father was alive, he started calling me. It was very puzzling. After more than a year of no conversation whatsoever, he was now dialing my number every Sunday evening, just to chat for a few minutes. At the time, I had mulled over two possibilities: one, he was trying to rekindle a relationship with me; the other, that he was close to death and wanted to make amends. He had sounded very frail. But now a new theory surfaced,
and its merit hinged on the question of when those calls had come. Was it during the last month of 1999? Had he believed that Armageddon was imminent? I wished that I had still kept a journal back then. An entry might have provided a clue.

Over the years
Aunt Mary and Aunt Kay have stayed in touch with Sherman, Olivia, and me. Aunt Kay calls to chat from time to time, and Aunt Mary never misses a birthday. At Christmas, each of them sends a box of presents for us, and for their sister’s grandchildren, in an effort to fill in some small way the bottomless void left by our mother.

I have had very little contact with Uncle Jack. Until September 2010, we never spoke about what had happened in 1986. Our encounters were limited primarily to small talk at family weddings and funerals. For me, these meetings were exercises in anxiety. If I spotted my uncle across a room, my heart raced, but he always greeted me warmly with a bear hug. Frequently he said, with an extra squeeze, in a hearty, reassuring tone, “Blood is thicker than water.”

When Grandma died in November 2001, she was buried next to Bops’s grave in Lakewood cemetery, and in accordance with her wishes, Mom’s ashes were transferred from an obscure gravesite to one beside her parents; the plot belonged to Uncle Jack, and he gave his blessing for the reinterment. For Sherman, Olivia, and me—and, I suspect, for all of our mother’s siblings—this “relocation” was a comfort. (We were required to get permission from Heather to move Mom’s ashes, because unbeknownst to us, she and Olivia were legal co-owners of the plot. This felt terribly uncomfortable, and wrong. I called her, angst-ridden and offended that we should need her approval, but she was willing—eager, even—to help.)

Maintaining ties with my father’s family has been fraught with ambivalence. On the one hand, I have longed for some connectedness, and at times have thought to circumvent my father’s place on the family tree, to establish my own bonds with his siblings, because
they are good, decent people. I will always be grateful for Aunt Nan and Aunt Lucia’s calming presence during the final, tumultuous month of my mother’s life. On the other hand, sometimes I feel uneasy and resentful that their remembrances of my father don’t jibe with mine.

Through Facebook and with Christmas cards I keep in touch with several of my cousins on both sides of the family, and I get together with a few of them. Facebook allows me to peek in on their lives and see their children’s faces and recall the very happy times we had together as kids.

I spent more than two decades working on this memoir (with various drafts idling for long periods of time) and almost as many years grappling with the question of whether—and with whom—I could share it. Losing my mother was painful, and writing about it was difficult, but probably in part because my siblings and I were silenced for so long, the more time passed, the more strongly I felt that the story needed to be told. I recognized, however, that if a book were to be published, a spotlight might be cast not only on me, but on my aunts, uncles, Sherman, and Olivia as well. While I could determine my own readiness to tell the story, my family would be denied that choice. I worried that even though I endeavored to portray each member of my immediate and extended family fairly and honestly, some might take issue with their characterizations in the book—nobody more so than my uncle Jack. I also worried that both sides of the family might read the account as an indictment of them, which has never been my intention. Despite these fears, I went ahead. I found an agent, who found a publisher, and I signed a contract.

In September 2010, Sherman and I flew out to Minneapolis. When I called Aunt Mary and Aunt Kay to say that we were coming out and that I wanted to meet with them about the book (which I had told them about earlier in the summer), they responded with their usual warmth and enthusiasm, offering us a place to stay and planning a dinner. The calls were as comfortable and comforting as ever. But it took two days before I could dial Uncle Jack’s number.

I got his answering machine. On his outgoing message, I heard the familiar raspy voice.

“Hi, Uncle Jack, this is your niece Lucia. Greenhouse,” I said, searching for the right words. “Sherman and I are coming to Minneapolis and would love to see you.”

I left my cell phone number.

He called the following day, Wednesday, the day before we were flying out. He could not have been kinder, and sounded genuinely happy to hear from me. But his warmth made me feel worse, not better. We agreed to meet him at his house on Thursday afternoon. Sherman and I would call him when we landed.

I hung up the phone and took a deep breath. I felt sickened and scared. I knew that his portrayal in the book was not altogether flattering. But neither was mine.

I decided I would talk everything through with Sherman en route to Minneapolis, but as luck would have it, Delta misplaced the seating chart for the plane, and the flight was full, so we ended up eight rows apart. During the bumpy takeoff, I was reminded of another flight to Minneapolis twenty-four Septembers before, when we returned to bury our mother’s ashes. Sherman and I had sat on either side of the aisle, holding each other’s hand through much of the flight.

We entered Uncle Jack’s address into the rental car’s GPS, and fifteen minutes later stopped in front of a charming house with a manicured lawn. It was very different from the lakefront mansion in Highcroft where my uncle had lived with Aunt Helen and the four cousins. I tried to still my nerves with a deep breath.

The front door opened almost before I had lifted my finger from the buzzer, and there stood Uncle Jack, all six foot seven of him. He gave us each a bear hug, and a brief tour of the exquisitely appointed downstairs of his home. He told us, beaming, that Judy, his second wife, was an interior designer. There was a floral arrangement on the kitchen counter and a dish of roasted pecans on the coffee table in the sitting area. On every surface I noticed beautiful framed photographs of the cousins I hadn’t seen in years: Harry,
Sargent, Steven, and Annie, with their spouses and children. He identified each of them, his voice full of pride. He asked us if we would like something to drink, saying that Judy was on her way but was running a bit late. We took seats in the family room.

Uncle Jack asked Sherman about his dog-walking business and his music. He asked me about Ellie, Dwight, Truckie, and Charlie—their ages, current grades, and interests—and about David’s work. My head started to hurt. We talked a lot about sailing and a little about fishing, and as the time ticked away, my headache grew worse. Judy joined us, and I wondered how I would segue to the topic that brought Sherman and me to Minneapolis. I began to wonder if Uncle Jack already knew why Sherman and I were here. Was he avoiding the subject intentionally?

I looked over at Sherman, and I could tell he wondered how—or even if—I would ever broach the subject of the book. Then he said, “Did you know Lucia’s been writing?”

Uncle Jack must have thought Sherman said
riding
, because he started to tell us about our cousin Harry’s wife, who was an accomplished equestrian.

I glanced at my watch. It was five-thirty, and we were to meet Aunt Mary, Uncle Brad, Aunt Kay, and Uncle Bear at Woodhill Country Club at six-thirty. If I remembered my Minnesota geography, Woodhill was a good twenty minutes away.

“Uncle Jack” I said, “I actually came here with a specific purpose.” I glanced at Sherman. “I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, but I’ve been writing a memoir about growing up in Christian Science. And about what happened to Mom.”

There was a long pause, as I tried to choose my next words.

“When I got the call from your mom …”—Uncle Jack started, as though we were well into a conversation about her, instead of at the beginning of one that had been on hold for nearly a quarter century—“… I don’t know how she dialed me, but it was late one day—she asked me to come out to Princeton, to bring her back to Minnesota. I got on a plane the next morning. And when I saw her at that place—”

“Tenacre?” I asked.

“That’s right, Tenacre.”

“You saw Mom at Tenacre?” I asked, stunned. I looked at Sherman, who appeared to be equally shocked. That meant that Uncle Jack had known about Mom’s illness long before I called him from the Emergency Room, which made no sense.

“No, wait a minute,” he said, correcting himself. “She was at the end of a hallway, lying on … it wasn’t a gurney, and it wasn’t a hospital bed—”

“It was a daybed of sorts,” I interjected. “She was there, lying in the sunlight. That was at the hospital.”