8. Nurturance
My favorite book about dying is Intimate Death by Marie de Hennezel, a psychologist in Paris who tells stories about her patients in hospice care. For example, Christine. When we’re introduced to her, she’s shouting for help, because she’s hallucinating that serpents are attacking her. Marie says, “I take her into my arms. She is so light I have no trouble carrying her into the little sitting room nearby. There, I collapse on the settee, holding her tightly to me, and begin to rock her gently as I sing her name…While her cries continue, I just rock her against me, making a little song of her name, over and over again.”
Then there’s Bernard, who Marie says had become a close friend: “Yesterday…we bathed him. An hour’s well-being for this numbed body, stiff from lack of movement, all skin and bone. An hour’s gentle affection that I shared with Michèle, the nurse, and Simone, the auxiliary….Very gently, we surrounded this body as it abandoned itself trustingly to the warmth of the water. Three loving women busy with the most sacred task of tending to a dying man.”
Then Bernard rouses himself “to plant a tiny soft kiss on the back of my hand.” And he says, “You know, friendship is what matters most to me.”
Marie tells us, “They are Bernard’s first words in twenty-four hours, almost inaudible, struggling to emerge from his exhausted, breathless body. They are also, although I only realize this later, the last words he would ever utter.”
Patricia was told by her husband, Pierre, that she was being brought to a convalescent home, not a hospice. She demands the truth from the doctor. When he tells her that she’s dying, she falls apart: “Patricia has no shortcut through this pain. I go to her and she throws herself into my arms like a little girl, sobbing, ‘I don’t want to die.’ ”
When she comes out of the initial shock, she decides to lay claim to the time she has left. During the next few days, “Patricia is more radiantly beautiful than ever….Now she’s huddled in my arms, because she is completely simple and spontaneous in the way she makes contact with other people and comes in search of all the tenderness she needs so much….”
Reading these stories, I’m struck with how baby-like our needs become as we make our way into death. Yet this vulnerability is not the same thing as helplessness. Marie says that the person who can embrace their own death no longer feels like a victim but transforms into “the protagonist in his or her own dying.”
And what do these protagonists choose to do? They heal broken relationships. They grant forgiveness. They make amends. They reveal secrets they’ve never told anyone. They cry for themselves, some for the first time in their lives. They tell those they’re leaving behind that love is forever.
Then bodies beaten but souls scrappy, they go out valiant.
What about us as a species? We, too, are in our final days. We’re living in a giant global hospice. What do we need most? Tenderness, so we can take care of each other, and fight, so we can be protagonists and go out valiant.
But these two forces are not just useful for endings. Sometimes children call on tenderness and fight to do exceptional nurturing. Their stories inspire me. And why? Because children are beginners in life, still trying to figure out what it means to be a person. And we post-hope adults are beginners as well, trying to figure out what it means to be a human in this time when humans are coming to an end.
The stories we keep in our hearts, the fierce ones and tender ones, tell us so much about who we are. I’m remembering, for example, a Christmas when I was working in a psych hospital for children. That morning I walked onto the locked unit and found Daniel under the tree. He had been dropped off the night before by his fourth foster mother and would be going home to his fifth. He had just turned six. He was sitting there staring at nothing. I got him up and got him talking, and right away I could tell he was a kind, sincere child. Over the next days, Kathy, a nurse on the unit, and I became so attached to him that we cooked up a fantasy plan. We would adopt him together. He would stay with her for a week then me for a week. That way we could still have our lives but we could take care of this sweet boy.
Six months later, after I had transferred across the street to work in the outpatient day treatment center, in comes our social worker with Daniel in tow. He was being referred to us. I claimed him as my assignment and we fell into a comfortable routine. But one morning he arrived pissy and pushy, very unlike himself, so I took him over to a corner to talk to him. He descended into a full-blown tantrum, yelling, and threatening to kick. I started feeling pissy and pushy myself, then saw it: “Oh, this is direct transmission. He’s making me feel as bad as he feels.” And now he was really fighting me, and I thought, “This is how acting out goes wrong. This is how a kid gets himself punished instead of helped.” But I knew Daniel was not asking to be punished, so I scooped him up and hauled him into the classroom next door, which was dark and quiet.
I knelt down, holding him in my arms. His angry tantrum turned into a storm of crying. He squirmed around so he had me cradling him like a baby. I told him, “It’s okay. I’ll hold you till you’re ready to get down.” He cried and sobbed for ten more minutes. Which was a very long time because I wasn’t absolutely sure I was doing the right thing.
Then he slumped and slid to the floor where he lay quietly while I rubbed his back. I told him, “When you’re ready, you can get up and go join the other kids. They’re doing art.”
Another long ten minutes with no word from him. Then he lifted himself into a crouch, paused for a minute, and got to his feet, not quite steady, like Rip Van Winkle after his twenty-year sleep. Then he opened the door, walked into the day room, and found his place at the table. I brought him a piece of giant paper and a double box of crayons and sat next to him. He drew a house. He put the mother downstairs in the kitchen and a little boy with his own exact color of hair upstairs, asleep in bed. Then he drew a man at the front door of the house and was done. Keeping his eyes on the picture, he said, “The burglar breaks into the house, kills the mother, and the little boy is all alone.”
And there we sat, face to face with the core issue of his short life, losing mothers one after the other. And now Daniel, at least for this day, was done with acting out, and could enjoy being a kid.
It’s so common for an abandoned child to turn against himself and go down the path of self-destruction. But Daniel, only six years old, and without any conscious plan, engineered a journey deep into his pain then back out to a place of peace. I provided support, but he took the journey. He gave himself a bit of the mothering he needed. It’s now forty-five years since that morning but I still carry it with me in my heart.
Then there was Eula, a five-year-old girl who the doctors had diagnosed with childhood psychosis. They didn’t hold out much hope and we were making next to no progress with her. It was impossible to talk with her coherently because her sentences were tangled and tangential. Yet, we were very fond of her, and puzzled by how, without the ability to communicate, she was touching us as deeply as she did.
One Friday morning, six-year-old Jenny arrived from her foster home, clearly upset, eyes glistening. She sat down on the only chair facing away from the big table and fought to hold back her tears. Eula pulled her chair next to Jenny, boosted herself up, leaned her shoulder against Jenny’s shoulder and Jenny burst into sobs.
We staff kept quiet. We didn’t want to break the moment. Jenny cried herself out, hiccupped, gave what seemed like a thank-you push back against Eula’s shoulder, then ran across the room to join two kids who were making stuffed animals talk to each other.
Here was this crazy little girl with her crazy talk giving nurturance with exactly the right touch. We didn’t know what to do with Eula, but Eula knew what to do with Jenny. Fifteen minutes later, Eula climbed up into my lap, which she had never done with any of us before, and sat there quietly for just a few minutes. When she got down, she went over to Becky, one of the nurses, took her by the hand and walked her three times around the room in meandering circles, half skipping like they were best friends on their way to school. Then she let go and went back into solo play. By Monday, after the weekend at home, she was gone again inside her psychosis.
A decade later I was at a Catholic middle school doing a workshop for a sixth-grade class on bullying. I was talking with Mr. Cruz, the teacher, before the first bell, as kids started coming in, crowding around him, all wanting to talk to him at once, their eyes alight in his presence.
Just before class started, Mr. Cruz took me aside and nodded in the direction of one boy, Bryan, who he said was the class bully, and a neglected child whose mother was gone a lot, often all night.
The bell rang. The kids settled at their desks. My co-leader and I were introduced. Mr. Cruz went to the back of the room, stood behind Bryan and rested his hand on Bryan’s shoulder for a moment. It wasn’t like, “I’m watching you, so you’d better behave.” It was, “I’m here for you.” And I could tell because I could see Bryan soften.
Twenty minutes into our program, as we pivoted from the what of bullying to the why, Bryan put up his hand. I didn’t know what to expect but I made sure to call on him first. And what did he do? He taught his classmates how to stop bullies: “A bully is just trying to make you feel as bad as he feels. Don’t believe what he tells you. Don’t let him fool you. Don’t give up on yourself.” He was teaching the other kids how to stop him! And if his peers wouldn’t let him get away with bullying anymore maybe he could learn how to be friends with them and not be so lonely.
Vanessa’s father began assaulting her sexually when she was nine, but when she hit puberty, he suddenly stopped. She was so relieved. She had never said a word to anyone because he promised he would kill her if she did, but now her worries were over. That was until she noticed that her younger sister, Amy, a talkative, spunky girl, had suddenly gone silent and wouldn’t look her in the eye. That evening she listened at Amy’s door as her father went in to “say goodnight.” Oh, god! The next morning at school, Vanessa went first thing to find Paula, the school nurse. The following day her father was arrested and was not allowed to return home again. What she couldn’t do for herself, Vanessa did for her sister.
Eben, a fifth-grade boy who came in to Talk Time after a workshop on preventing abuse, sat with Karen in a quiet corner and told her, “I saw on Oprah that children who are beaten end up beating their own kids.” Then tears came to his eyes and he said, “Please help me, I don’t want to hurt my kids when I grow up.”
Sometimes the nurturing kids do is hidden behind a smoke screen of acting out. In her book Suffer the Children, Marilyn Wedge, a family therapist, tells about Laura, eleven years old, who kept getting into trouble at school. She was sent to a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with ADHD, depression, and anxiety, and prescribed serious medications. She was taking eight pills a day and the side effect of one of them was to kill her appetite, so she’d become severely underweight.
Her mother, Elise, brought her in for therapy. Marilyn met with the mom separately and found out she was using Laura as her confidant: “I don’t hide anything from her.” Elise was dumping her big adult problems on Laura, making her little girl carry her emotional burdens for her.
Marilyn writes: “I, like most family therapists, find it useful to think of a child’s problem or symptom as having a benevolent purpose in the family. I assume that a child’s problem is in some way helpful to or protective of a parent.”
She suspected that Laura was acting out to distract her mother from serious depression. Elise, no matter how down she might be feeling, had to pull herself together to get her daughter to therapy appointments and school meetings.
Marilyn then met with Laura and simply said to her, “I will be the helper now.”
I was suggesting to Laura that I would take the burden of benevolence off her shoulders. I was implicitly asking her to trust me to help her mother so that she would not have to. Laura nodded to show that she understood what I was saying. Then I asked Laura to pick out some books and puzzles and take them to the waiting room while I “helped” her mother…Laura agreed eagerly, picked up a set of colored pencils and paper from the shelf, and left the room.
Within weeks Laura’s behavior problems at school were gone, she started gaining weight, and within a few months she’d been weaned off all her medications.
Joey was four years old. Marilyn says he “caused trouble, first at home, then at school. Sometimes his “explosive episodes were so severe his parents had to use physical restraint to keep him in time-outs….When Joey started having violent outbursts at preschool, his teacher recommended medical evaluation. Then one day Joey grabbed a sharp knife and threatened to kill his parents and himself.”
Marilyn let Joey sit in at the beginning of her session with his parents. She made sure he was listening as she explained to them that she would be in charge of helping them work through the fights they were having so they could be happier together. She demonstrated to Joey that she was the helper now, a confident, effective helper. The burden was lifted from his shoulders. After the end of the session she talked with this little boy alone.
First Joey told me that “Daddy doesn’t like his job.” When I asked how he knew that, he said that his father yelled at his mother when he came home from work in the evening. He added, “Sometimes Daddy yells at me when he gets home.” I could see that what Joey was doing by misbehaving was to make his father angry at him, so that his father would yell at him instead of his mother. By drawing his father’s fire, Joey was protecting his mother.
Just two weeks after the first appointment, his mother reported that there was a “huge difference” in Joey’s behavior. There was no more explosive acting out at home or at school. Once his parents stopped fighting, Joey stopped his acting out.
Here were two children, representative of so many more, identified as troublemakers when they should have been celebrated as heroes. They did sacrificial nurturing. And it really was a sacrifice. They were getting in trouble and being punished. But their intent, which was mostly unconscious, was to help their parents by distracting them from marital problems and personal struggles. They got blamed for disrupting the family but they were actually doing their best to hold it together.
There are so many remarkable things children do that slip by unnoticed. I love how some fiction writers capture the detail, the nuance, the richness of nurturance at its best, especially when it takes courage, like when a child takes a moral stand on her own and does this against the rules of her family and her community.
“Miss Adela’s Garden” is a story by Margaret Meyers. It’s in her book, Swimming in the Congo, which the novelist John Casey describes as “Anne of Green Gablesmeets Heart of Darkness.” Seven-year-old Grace and her family live in a missionary community in a rural district in the middle of Africa. In this story, she returns home for Easter vacation from her first time away at a boarding school upcountry. She’s forgotten how she fits into her family so she finds herself sulky and at odds with her mother.
She goes to visit Miss Adela and Miss Judith where they live alone at the top of the hill apart from the rest of the settlement. They affectionately welcome her back and she settles in with them for the afternoon. She asks for stories of the old days. Miss Adela has been there for decades. Back then, she “gave people injections for yaws, a disease that caused hideous open sores. She pulled rotten teeth and set broken bones and ran an orphanage for abandoned children.” And now she’s famous for her miraculous ability to raise European vegetables in the red Congo dirt—zucchinis, tomatoes, lettuce, string beans—which she shares freely.
Grace helps cut out flannel-board characters that Miss Judith, the best storyteller Grace knows, will use the next day as she presents Bible stories to the Congolese children.
Before she leaves, Grace feels so welcomed and cared for that the world of her home seems familiar again, and she knows she will be okay with her family once more.
She leaves, but then doubles back. Miss Judith is about to wash her long hair. Grace has never seen it unpinned and down. She sneaks to the bedroom window and peers in, watching the scene through a slight opening between the curtains.
Miss Judith was not alone. Miss Adela sat close beside her on the bed, completely engrossed in unravelling Miss Judith’s blond braids. She touched the shining hair with her tough gardener’s hands, tenderly stroking and smoothing, gazing at Miss Judith like she was the finest, most beautiful rose in the world. Miss Judith tilted her head back with a tiny choked moan, and her loosened hair tumbled past her hips to the bedspread. The feathery tresses swirled like golden surf on a blue fabric sea, daytime silver threads erased by the soft yellow lamplight. Miss Judith looked as welcoming and lovely as Rapunzel in her tower, except it was Miss Adela, not the Prince, who buried her face in Miss Judith’s fairy-tale hair and kissed her.
Not what Grace expected: “I backed away from the windowsill, retreating until my wobbly legs met the coarse scratchy bark of the mango tree….I crept down the path toward home, clutching Miss Adela’s plastic bag of string beans to my chest, whispering prayers to the shadows behind the rustling breadfruit trees.”
And what does she pray? “Please, please—just leave them alone.”
She takes her stand with these two women, who if their secret were known would first be condemned and then cast out by the severe Christian community where they had served faithfully for so many years. Holding Miss Adela and Miss Judith in her heart, Grace lets her love for them transcend their transgression.
Movies give us stories of remarkable nurturance, too. I’m thinking now of a film called, The Magdalene Sisters.It’s beautifully made but the story is brutal. It’s based on the lives of four girls taken from their homes against their will and locked away for years in a Catholic institution outside Dublin. Margaret’s there because she was raped by her cousin. Her father, in consultation with the family priest, decided to send her away for the sake of the family’s honor. Rose and Crispina are there because they had babies out of wedlock. Bernadette’s there because the nuns at her orphanage decided she was too flirtatious.
This institution is one in a network of Magdalene Laundries, named after Mary Magdalene. In the New Testament there are only a few scant verses about her. She’s depicted as a devoted disciple, a witness to the Crucifixion, and the first to meet the risen Christ. In one verse she is placed among the women of means who supported the ministry of Jesus. There’s more about her in the Gnostic Gospels, which say that Jesus loved her best of all his followers.
The Catholic Church in Ireland, however, without justification apart from its negativity about the female body, labeled her a fallen woman, and from the eighteenth through the late twentieth centuries, in their enthusiastic spirit of condemnation, imprisoned perhaps thirty thousand girls and women in the laundries for being “fallen.”
In the film, the Magdalene girls are forced to do hard labor for long hours, hauling, washing, and ironing in stifling heat. They’re made to work in silence so they can’t develop friendships. They’re made to stand naked in a row while titillated Sisters inspect them and comment on their bodies to humiliate them. The Laundry, which takes in soiled items from hotels, restaurants, and colleges, pays the girls nothing, and so turns a handsome profit. While the girls subsist on Dickensian gruel, the Sisters feast.
One day Margaret happens to look in through a basement window where she sees Father Fitzroy sexually using one of the girls, but she can’t see the face, so she can’t tell who it is.
Cut to Margaret out in the yard as she gathers a handful of stinging nettles in her handkerchief.
Cut to inside where she throws the nettles into the dryer with Father’s freshly washed collars and underwear.
Cut to a meadow early the next morning where Father is officiating an open-air mass for the girls and the townspeople. As he finishes reading from the Gospel, he tugs at his collar, scratches, twists, groans, and with panicky gestures starts tearing himself out of his vestments. Then, howling, he breaks into an awkward run across the meadow as he rips the underclothing off his body, and finally stops at the edge of the woods, naked. We see that his skin is covered with a nasty, red nettle rash.
Cut to Crispina back at the gathering. She lifts her heavy brown skirt and everyone sees that her thighs are covered with the same rash. She pleads, “Help me, I can’t make it go away.” Father Fitzroy has used her just before mass. There’s a stunned silence as everyone adds up what they’re seeing.
Then Crispina, distraught, turns and shouts after Fitzroy, “You are not a man of God!” Then louder, “You are not a man of God!” Then with more force, “You are not a man of God!” Then with increasing conviction, almost feral, again and again, a full twenty-four times her shouts fly across the meadow, hit the wall of the woods and echo back: “You are not a man of God!”
Cut to late that night. Stone-faced men drag Crispina from her bed and drive her to an asylum for the insane.
Cut to sometime later. Her sister, who is raising Crispina’s child, comes to visit. She stands outside the door of the cinderblock cell, looks in through the small window in the heavy door, and we catch one last glimpse of Crispina’s face, haunted and desperate. The epilogue tells us that this asylum is where she died at age twenty-four. Hers was a tormented life, one of abuse and oppression—with the exception of that one precious moment when she took possession of herself and into the face of a deep and holy evil shouted her truth and made it ring.
And now let’s consider stories from our own childhoods, some of which, perhaps the most consequential ones, might be buried inside a memory that on the surface looks like a story of defeat. But turn that story inside out and you find submerged and silent triumph.
I’m thinking now about my first day of kindergarten. I was a painfully shy kid and suddenly I was being sent away to spend hours among strangers at a place I’d never been to before and I just wasn’t ready for that. It was a simple mismatch.
On that morning, Mom and I stood waiting silently out on our small concrete-slab front porch. Our modest red brick house was still new and it stuck up out of the ground like a cowlick, no bushes growing around it yet to soften the picture. A wood-paneled station wagon rolled down our hill and stopped. Three little faces stared at me through the side window. Mrs. Johnson got out, came up our walk, smiled, and reached out her hand. I took one obedient step forward, then burst into tears. A terrible thing in a family that didn’t have feelings in private let alone in public. I tried hard to stop my crying but it got away from me. My feet put on their brakes, my body twisted back toward my mom, and in the long tradition of little kids, I begged, “Please let me stay home today. I’ll go tomorrow, I promise.”
I looked up into my mom’s eyes, but she wasn’t looking at me. She stared off down the street, embarrassed. The thought went through my mind, not in words, but like an iceberg: “Won’t look at me…wants me gone.”
So I went. Mrs. Johnson put me next to her on the front seat and talked calmly to comfort me. It was dead quiet in the back. I knew the other kids were studying me earnestly like little scientists. I stopped crying before we were out of sight of my house.
When we got to Mrs. Johnson’s, she took us downstairs to her basement where the kindergarten was. I refused to take my jacket off, found a quiet spot against the wall, stood there at attention, watched the other kids play together in the sandbox, and held tight onto the paper bag my mom had packed with a banana and two peanut butter cookies for my snack. And that’s how I spent my morning.
On the way home, I made a decision, if an unconscious shift can be called a decision. I did not ever again want to be scared like that. And I did not ever again want to hurt my mom like that. So I became the best good boy I could possibly be, quiet, obedient, and Calvinist. Without thinking it through, I decided that if Mom and Dad were not at ease with kids then I would turn myself into an easy kid. I’d live as lightly as a ghost. I’d sustain myself on holiness instead of love.
That was the deal I made. Of course I didn’t make this deal just because of what happened that day. Being sent off to kindergarten was only the trigger for the change. The real story was the context. My church community could not abide messy unruliness like what you get with real kids.
Normally you had to wait until you were a teenager and passed the catechism class before you could take your first communion and officially join the church. But this day was my induction. There was no ceremony and no public acknowledgement. I just quietly got with the program. I traded in little-kid me for church me. I would have had to do that sooner or later and this happened to be the day, the day when I decided with generous intent to save my mom, my dad, and my church from the burden of me.
I was still a kid so I wasn’t perfect at being good but I was a lot less trouble than a lot of other kids my age because I did so much self-management. I think I shut down as hard as I did because I took the underlying Calvinism of my church to heart way more than many of my peers did. I can’t speak for them, but that’s my guess. And I’m guessing it because they seemed to be so much more at ease with each other than I ever was with anyone except my dog Cindy, and they seemed to get a whole lot more fun out of life. But maybe some of them were just really good at keeping the truth secret like I was.
I want to be clear that it’s not that my parents weren’t good parents. They were diligent. They took very, very good care of us in every way except one. They raised us kids under the same emotional austerity they were raised under.
As I got older, I got better and better at diminishing myself, which was only fitting and proper. After all, Christ died on the cross for us, so the least I could do was to die a little bit each day for him. One Sunday morning when I was in sixth grade, I was downstairs in the social room at church following the service when a woman with a bunch of frilly stuff at her throat, bent forward over me and said with delighted approval, “You’re such a good boy!” I replied, “Oh, no. I’m like a computer. I know what you want me to say before you do and then I say it.” Her eyes popped with surprise. I was so proud and wanted to tell her: “See the self-control I’ve achieved?” I wanted to talk shop, but she did the Calvinist thing. With infinite detachment she turned her back and was gone. She surprised the truth out of me then bailed.
How did I know about computers back then in the 1950s? I have a vague memory of hearing an excited guy on the radio talking about the giant UNIVAC in a giant room with all those glowing transistor tubes figuring and figuring and I guess his report captured my imagination because I spent so much of my time figuring.
For years whenever I thought of my first day at kindergarten, which I tried not to, I felt ashamed of my meltdown. I thought of that day as a disaster because I came home convinced I was unlovable. When I got to college and studied psychology I learned the term “acting-out.” Well, I knew what that was. My whole life was acting out. In my thirties I heard about codependence and realized that described me, too. I saw how right there on my first day of kindergarten I started enabling my parents and my church by disabling myself.
So that was my story. A sad defeat. Except that wasn’t the heart of the story. When I got into therapy, I saw something I hadn’t seen before. I came home from kindergarten that day with a plan. It was a hopeless strategy because earning approval will never satisfy the hunger for real love, but it was a plan and it was proactive, so it was one spit better than drowning in despair. This was an attempt to take care of myself, futile, but alive with the spirit of nurturance.
By the time I got to high school, my anger began to leak through my carefully composed facade. My teen years were vanilla boring. I went to school, did my paper route, and struggled with my homework. I never swore, never drank, never smoked. I went to church every Sunday except when I was in-bed sick. I gave God my obedience though I never gave him my heart.
But I guess I got tired of being submissive and protest began to stir. It was not open and honest but sneaky and undercover. In tenth grade, a month before Christmas, I told my family, “Christ does not want us to give presents to each other who have so much, but to the poor who are in need. This year I won’t be buying presents for you. Instead I’ll be donating to CARE in your names. And if you want to give something to me, you can donate to your favorite charity in my name.”
What could anyone say? I had cloaked myself in the Gospel. I call that episode “out-Christianing the Christians.” I was not allowed to be directly angry but I could get away with this. On Christmas morning, the most important day of the year for our family, as they handed presents around to each other, I sat in their midst, a cold, unimpeachable turd of righteousness.
Nowadays, on the rare occasions when I tell this story, people say, “How admirable for a tenth-grader to care about the poor like that.” I have to correct them, because while I did have some concern for the poor, that was not my point. I was just really, really angry.
That abstinent Christmas was too hard on me so the next year I went back to exchanging presents. But I wasn’t happy with surrender either, so in twelfth grade, I told my family, “I’m not buying any presents and I’m not donating any money either.” And that was the end of Christmas for me.
If I could rewind and go back and tell the truth, I would simply say to my family, “I want better for us. I want us to find a deeper kind of love than what’s in the Bible or in the minister’s sermons. Please, let’s admit how empty we’re feeling and how much we’re hurting so we can really be here for each other and look for answers together.”
That’s what I needed to say, but we weren’t allowed to talk like that, so instead I acted out my distress with a boycott. And none of us had the skills to break that code to get to my actual request.
One final story. On a Sunday afternoon when I was in eleventh grade and my grandmother was at our house for dinner, she took me up the half flight of stairs to the living room where we didn’t hang out except when company came. She had never taken me aside like this before. She sat me down on the grey couch, her face set, and without any warm-up, said, “Your friend John is going to hell and if you don’t stop being friends with him you’ll go to hell, too.”
John was indeed a friend, a good friend. Without thinking, I answered her back, “If God is sending John to hell, then he can send me there, too.”
And just for a breath, in that lightning strike of truth, my soul was blazing. Then it went dark again. Neither my grandmother nor I ever said a word to each other about this conversation through the rest of her life. I guess I couldn’t tolerate what I had seen, so I went back to being perfectly polite with her.
Why was my grandmother so dead set against John? I have no idea. He was a good and faithful Presbyterian. The only thing I can guess is that he was livelier than me and loved people a bit too much for her taste. Maybe that’s what triggered her alarm system, that his spirit of delight might rub off on me and then my family might not be enough for me anymore and I might leave them behind.
My grandmother shouldn’t have called the question of loyalty. I imagine it froze her marrow to hear me renounce eternal salvation and choose friendship over God.
I wish I could get a signed pass to go up and visit her for an afternoon in her severe heaven, a place which would certainly not be my idea of bliss. I’d sit across from her and say, “Grandmother, thank you for calling that question back then. I was such a lost kid, lost in pretense, but for that one moment of revelation, the two of us got to see down to the bottom of my soul. It could have been a turning point for us if only we could have seized it. We couldn’t and didn’t, but I want you to know that here in my old age, I’ve become the person we saw that night and I’m at peace. And I wish I had known what challenge to give you so you could have opened into a revelation of your own, and then, talk about a miracle, maybe we could have found each other.”
Stories of gutsy nurturance might seem like such a small thing to make such a big fuss about, but they’re my alpha and omega. They’re my guidance in this post-hope life. They’re my sanctuary in this bitter time. Taken together they’re my sacred text. They mean more to me, even one small handful of them, than all the words in all the holy books ever written.
Our tender hearts are no match for the terrible monster of despair. But they do make us dangerous to despair, maybe only in our own small way, but dangerous. And I like that, I like it a lot, for us to make ourselves dangerous to the very thing that’s killing us.
