Processing Death Amongst Toxic Christianity
My grandmother died recently — I’m struggling with my own grief at the same time I’m struggling with the ways I’ve seen my family respond to her passing
My grandma was a beautiful woman. She had curly black hair and piercing blue eyes. She smiled infrequently and subtly, yet she had a face of warmth and acceptance. She was quiet, kind, a voracious reader, and a lover of cats. I think I was like her, and yet, I found her to be a mystery — she always kept herself hidden away, forever quiet and introverted. Across two marriages, she had four children and I was the fifth of eleven grandchildren. Grandma lived to meet a growing number of great grandchildren.
She was always a petite woman, but she became disturbingly so in the last couple of years. She had cancer and dementia, and in the end, hospice workers were spoon-feeding her in an effort to get her to eat something, anything. In her final days, she slept seemingly peacefully in her bed and little noted her pain.
But while her final days may have seemed to be pain free, her final years were filled with misery, at least as far as her loved ones could discern. Her confusion had been devolving into paranoia.
A few months back, she woke up in her home of four decades, sure she had been kidnapped. No one could talk her out of her panic or her insistence that she be returned to her home. Family and caregivers begged her to return to reality, to understand that she was home, and that she had not been kidnapped. It wasn’t until my aunt discovered that Grandma had been reading a book about a woman who was kidnapped that we understood the source of the crisis. She carefully hid the book, and eventually Grandma forgot about both the crisis and the book.
These kinds of nightmares defined her last months — from her suddenly screaming “help!” when she needed pain medication to her trying to grapple with her father’s death, though he had died decades before.
I tell these stories in part because I am struggling to process them. But I also want to tell these stories so you understand that my last real conversations of mutual understanding with Grandma faded out years ago. Before she died she was, as they say, a shell of her former self, physically and also mentally. She could not make decisions about her finances or her health or whether she would stay in a home or in her home. Needless to say, in my opinion, she could not then make major decisions about her spiritual beliefs. My uncle, it turns out, disagrees.
Funeral
Being a preacher’s daughter, I’ve been to many funerals in my lifetime. They’ve had a similar cadence. They are almost always led by a religious figure, usually my dad — not surprisingly, since many of the funerals I’ve attended, particularly growing up, were members of my family’s aging church.
During the ceremony, there are lots of prayers and extolling of the deceased’s religious righteousness. Sometimes there is singing of hymns. There is almost always an open mic, and people representing all facets of the deceased’s life step up to share their memories and their admiration. Slideshows of some sort are not uncommon. Photographs and flowers are on display.
Grandma’s funeral was really no different than those I’d attended in childhood. My dad opened the service with a moving but brief overview of her life. He prayed and he read scripture. Though he did not say it, Grandma was not a religious woman, but she admired my dad for his religion and his passion. She was proud he was a religious leader and would have been proud to have him leading her memorial.
Deathbed conversion
My uncle was the first to speak after my dad, and his words were very different. While my dad meandered, my uncle had just one thing to say. He said that his best memory with Grandma was the day before she died. I knew he had visited her in the hospital that day.
That evening, Dad asked each of us in my family to give explicit consent to see a picture of her. We all did so. The picture is seared into my mind. My uncle is sitting by my grandma’s bed. He is holding her hand, tears in his eyes, a sad smile on his face. I’ve never seen a picture like that of my uncle — he’s always looking very serious, often making dry jokes. To see him filled with love and sadness…it was striking.
But Grandma, Grandma was why Dad needed to ask us permission. Her skin is almost clear, her eyes are closed and sunken, her mouth is open. It looks as if she has already passed. It is disturbing, and when I showed it to my mild mannered husband, he had a sharp intake of breath. But she is holding my uncle’s hand. At least, his hand looks to be resting in hers. It looks intentional. It looks like she’s focusing all her last bit of life into this connection with her son. It looks to be a painful, but important picture.
It was this day that my uncle referred to as the best memory of my grandma. How could that possibly be? How could such mourning produce a best memory?
Up at the pulpit, a rumbled paper in his hands, my uncle addressed my grandma, looking slightly up towards the vaulted ceiling of the church’s small auditorium. “Mom, when I visited you in the hospital, I asked you if you loved Jesus. I asked if you would accept him into your heart. You squeezed my hand. I knew that you had heard me. I know that you had accepted Jesus into your heart. Praise Jesus.” His eyes got red, looking much like he had in the photograph. He looked down at his small piece of paper he was clutching in his hand. And then he stepped down.
That’s all he had to say about his mother, one of the most important people in his life. Someone who had loved him and supported him and talked to him and kept up with him his whole life. Someone who had seldom lived more than 50 miles away from his home, who had raised him, who had been there for his marriage, who had seen the births of his four children.
Processing
People grieve in all sorts of ways. It can take days, weeks, months, even years just to face the death of a loved one. The things we do, say, and feel in moments of stress and chaos, like those forced on us immediately after the death of a loved one, they can be so misplaced, so opposed to who we are on a day void of such tragedy.
I’m not sure I always agree with the idea that one’s “true colors” show during such times. In fact, I think we often go a bit haywire and create regrets that follow us for years, even as the tragedy itself follows us.
Maybe my uncle could not grasp the enormity of losing his mother, this woman who had always been there, a foundation of love, support, and kindness. Maybe he was feeling shock or fear at the idea of living in a world with no parents. (Grandpa died a few years ago, although my uncle and my grandpa had long been estranged.) Maybe the nightmare that this wonderful woman could face an eternity of damnation and torture if she didn’t “accept Jesus into her heart” was simply unacceptable. Maybe he did it because he loves her so much he couldn’t bear the thought of not doing all he could to save her from an eternity of pain.
Whatever the reasons, it is clear to me that he violated her. Why would she convert in those final hours when, for her whole life, my dad and uncle, both deeply religious men in their own ways, had failed to convince her of the superiority of their beliefs? How could she convert when she was legally unable to make decisions about her life?
It is a matter of consent: she could not provide it. It is a matter of memory and legacy: this is not who she was. He declared her conversion because he was too myopic to see her beauty without his own altered view, lenses with mirrors pointing in.
Maybe she wouldn’t have perceived it as a violation. Maybe she did agree with the idea of accepting Jesus into her heart but had simply rejected the lifestyle that went along with outward declarations. Regardless, we cannot know and my uncle instead colored his idea of her to fit his own comfort. Perhaps she would have been happy to afford him that comfort. Or maybe she would have been outraged, in her own quiet interiority.
I don’t know. Neither does my uncle. Nor do any of us.
What I do know is that I have work to do to process Grandma’s passing, and I am hoping writing this essay will allow me to process my uncle’s reaction to her passing. Eventually, I plan to establish a will to document my rejection of bedside conversions. There’s probably not much point. But I think it will help me feel better.
