A Secret Diary (Cor Liber)

October 27, 2008: Mom has cuts and bruises all over her face. She says she slipped and fell late last night while walking in the dark from the master bedroom to the kitchen. Something in her eyes, however, and in her voice—a hint of sadness or fear—makes me think that she’s not telling the whole story.

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November 2, 2008: Mom hasn’t come out of the master bedroom in two days. She keeps the door closed and doesn’t make a sound. Dad tells me that she’s “dealing with a false claim,” which is the Christian Scientific way of saying that she’s sick, and that she’s trying to heal herself by praying to God and reading the Bible. Dad’s tone of voice lets me know that she doesn’t want to be interrupted, so for the rest of the day I keep my voice low and avoid coming near her door.

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November 8, 2008: Mom has finally come out of her room after staying in there for seven full days. Right now she’s sitting down on a lazy chair in the study, covered up to her neck in a blanket, reading the Bible and talking to Dad about how Man is the manifestation of God. When I enter the study, Mom greats me with a big smile. I ask her how she’s doing, and she replies, “Wonderful, much better.” Again, something in her eyes tells me that she is being less than forthcoming. I get the feeling that the only reason she has come out of her room is to make sure that I don’t worry too much about her.

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November 12, 2008: I now know why Mom covers herself in a blanket when she reads in the study. Last night I caught her getting a glass of water in the kitchen, and I saw her distended stomach: She looks as if she were nine-months pregnant.

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November 15, 2008: Dad is taking Mom to Peace Haven, a Christian Science facility where patients struggling against the most serious “false claims” can go to pray in safe seclusion from the “mesmeric atmosphere” of the “material world.”

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November 23, 2008: Mom and Dad came home today after spending a week at Peace Haven. When they walked through the door to the garage, Mom was pushing a walker, and her face was gaunt and wrinkled: She looked as if she were ninety years old instead of sixty. “Mom’s doing much better,” Dad said, with genuine happiness in his eyes. I replied, “That’s great,” and did my best to smile. Mom did her best, too, and whispered, “I feel wonderful”—though again her eyes betrayed her.

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November 26, 2008: Dad says he’s been trying to get a Christian Science “practitioner” to heal Mom with prayer, but so far not a single one has been willing to take her case. Each “spiritual healer” says the same thing: that her condition is too serious—the “claim” too powerful—for them to refute.

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December 1, 2008: Mom is no longer eating. Instead, she drinks about two Ensure nutrition milkshakes each day. I asked Dad, “Is she not hungry anymore?” And Dad responded, “She’s starving to death.”

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December 4, 2008: Mom calls me into her room, and asks me—in a whisper—to help Dad. She says that “he fell down the stairs last night and hurt an organ.” I ask her what I can do to help, and she answers, “Just be there for him. Do whatever you can.”

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December 11, 2008: I walk into the master bedroom to find Mom asleep on a hospital bed. (Dad must have brought the bed into the house today when I was at work.) Peeking into the master bathroom, I spot a large pack of adult diapers on the counter between the two sinks. I also notice that the toilet now has a raised seat.

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December 13, 2008: Dad comes into my room and says, “You need to take a look at Mom right now.” As I enter the master bedroom, I see Mom lying on the hospital bed with her lower legs exposed. Pea-sized beads of a slightly opaque liquid have formed all over her shins and calves. “Do you see that?” Dad asks. “It’s a really good sign: It’s called ‘weeping,’ and it means that Mom is getting better.”?

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December 14, 2008: Mom is lying on the hospital bed, and I am sitting in a chair next to her. Not knowing quite what to say, I tell her that I recently had a healing: My stomach attacked me again a few days ago at work (it has been attacking me about once a month for at least twenty years), but I removed the false claim through prayer as I lay curled up on the floor of a bathroom stall, surrounded by my own vomit. Mom—doing her best to smile, her bloodshot eyes looking at everything in the room but me—whispered, “That’s great, honey.”

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December 16, 2008: Mom has called Dad and I into the master bedroom. Sitting on the edge of her hospital bed, she whispers—with a desperate attempt at a smile—“I think I need an ambulance, you guys.” Without saying a word, Dad makes the call using the landline phone that sits atop the dresser. While he’s talking to a dispatcher, Mom tells me that she’s sorry for being so sick. “I’ll make it up to you,” she says. “I’ll make those sourdough pancakes that you love so much….” Within about 20 minutes, the ambulance arrives, and two EMT’s enter the master bedroom. After taking one look at Mom, the younger EMT asks Dad with a stern—almost indignant—voice, “Why haven’t you taken her to the hospital?” Without looking him in the eye, Dad replies, “We’re Christian Scientists, and we believe in healing illness through prayer.” Hearing this, the young EMT shakes his head, and in a slightly righteous tone, he states that very little can be done for Mom, since she has gone so long without medical treatment.

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December 17, 2008: Mom has a room in the hospice wing of the hospital. She’s conscious and able to talk—but only in a faint whisper. Dad is there, too, and he tells me that earlier in the day, before I had arrived at the hospital, Mom asked the doctor how serious her condition was. The doctor—without a trace of emotion—replied, “You’re a very sick woman.” Mom thought his matter-of-fact retort was funny: “He’s a man of few words,” she said to me and Dad, with a sardonic tone and a twisted smile.

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December 18, 2008: After visiting with Mom for several hours, Dad meets me at a steakhouse close to the hospital. As we scan through our menus, I ask Dad whether the doctor had anything new to say about Mom’s condition. “You know what, Joel?” Dad says—his bloodshot eyes fixed on the menu, his voice trembling with anger. “I don’t want to talk about Mom.”

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December 20, 2008: It’s 3 o’clock in the morning, and Dad and I are talking politics in the study. While I am in midsentence—going on and on about how the “masses are demonic”—the phone rings. Dad picks it up, and even though I am standing about six feet away from him, I can hear Mom wailing like a terrified little girl. I can even make out her words: “Help me, Jon! Help me!” Dad—in a broken, breathy voice—exclaims, “Oh, Glori!” And then he hangs up the phone, gets his coat, and leaves out the garage door. Fifty minutes from now, Dad will be walking from the sleet-smeared parking lot to the front doors of the hospital, his bones creaking in the sub-freezing air.

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December 22, 2008: Mom is awake, but her eyes are closed. I’m holding her hand as she struggles to speak: “Where’s Dad?” She asks. “I’m right here, Glori,” Dad says as he runs his hand softly over her head. “Joel, Joel,” she whispers, her head frantically twisting around as if her eyes were open and she were looking around the room for me. “I’m here, Mom,” I answer, as I put my other hand gently on the sharp bone of her shoulder. “Take care of Dad,” she admonishes me. “I will, Mom—I promise.”

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December 24, 2008: Mom wakes up suddenly, and the first words out of her mouth are “Where’s the sun?” I tell her it’s 11 o’clock at night, and like a disappointed child, she groans: “Oh! I missed the light!”

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December 26, 2008: Mom is sleeping, and I am sitting by the bed, reading Mary Baker Eddy’s “Scientific Statement of Being”: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all.”

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December 28, 2008: It’s half past midnight, and I am slowly falling asleep. Dad has just gotten home from the hospital. I can hear him taking off his coat and dropping his keys on the foyer table. A few minutes later, he drifts into my room and sits at the corner of my bed—not saying a word. “What’s going on?” I ask between yawns. After several seconds of silence, he replies—with a shrill, ghastly voice—“It’s over,” and then he starts to cry harder than I’ve ever seen anyone cry in my life. Putting my arms around him, I say the only thing that I can think to say: “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry.”

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December 31, 2008: I tell Dad, “I could have been a better son to Mom.” “You’re right,” he replies, “you could have.”

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January 20, 2009: Dad warns me: “You need to take it easy for a while. You don’t know what you’ve just been through.” Which only makes me wonder, What exactly have I been through?

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February 27, 2009: Dad’s stomach is distended—as much as Mom’s was. I ask him if he’s in any pain. He nods in the affirmative, and with a hollow, raspy voice, he says, “It feels like there’s a sharp stick lodged in my lung.”

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March 16, 2009: Dad is very drunk on tequila. He tells me that he cannot live without Mom, and he expresses his desire to shoot himself in the head. I ask him, “Why don’t you try doing some camping? You love camping.” “I can’t,” he responds. “I can’t have fun going out by myself if I don’t have your mom to come back to.” I tell him that I will gladly go with him—which is when he starts to sob like a beaten child. “I’ve seen some horrible things,” he says cryptically, and then he goes back to sobbing, his chest quaking and heaving, his face dripping with mucus and tears.

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May 4, 2009: Dad called an ambulance this morning after I talked him into going to the hospital. The EMT’s have just arrived, and unfortunately for Dad and I, they are the same ones who came to get Mom a few months ago. When they ask whether he has gone to see a doctor, Dad—with a sheepish smile—reminds them that he is a Christian Scientist whose only medicine is prayer. The younger EMT—the one who gently scolded Mom for abstaining from medical care until it was too late—does not say a word, but the expression on his face is the very quintessence of righteous indignation.

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May 5, 2009: I’m with Dad in his hospital room when a nurse comes in and tells him, “You’re a lot better than you look; you can go home tomorrow.” Dad—smiling with relief and surprise—exclaims, “Well, we really dodged a bullet there!”

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May 6, 2009: It’s nine o’clock at night. Dad is home, and we’re looking at the planets through my telescope. Dad’s favorite object is Saturn: the rings, he says, are “absolutely stunning.” At that moment, buttressed by the faith that Dad will eventually get better—and that I will therefore have him with me for at least another twenty years—I am the happiest I have ever been in my life.

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May 11, 2009: I don’t understand why the nurse said that Dad was okay. This morning a doctor came to our home and informed us that Dad’s cirrhosis and hepatitis C have nearly destroyed his liver. When I ask about a transplant, she tells me in so many words—so many euphemisms—that Dad does not qualify for such a procedure, since he has been drinking heavily in the last few months, and will almost definitely continue to drink.

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May 22, 2009: Dad has been put on hospice, which means the doctors are certain that he will die within several months. Although I have just been accepted into a Ph.D. program, I drop out so as to be there for Dad as much as possible. Mom’s last will—“Take care of Dad”—haunts my memory: All that matters to me now is my father; I will not forsake him.

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June 3, 2009: A hospice nurse has come by the house to give Dad his medication. Somehow already aware that Dad is a Christian Scientist, she urges him to take all of his pills on time every day, since “God gave us medicine to heal each other.” Fully expecting Dad to respond with a cocksure condemnation of materia medica, I am both shocked and relieved when instead he nods and smiles with approval.

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August 19, 2009: Dad calls me into the master bedroom: “We need to talk, Joel. When I … go—when I kick the bucket—I want you to be safe moneywise. So we need to have someone draw up a will.” “Don’t worry,” I reply. “I’ll find a good lawyer who will make everything happen exactly the way you want it to.” “Thank you, Joel…. You know my dad tried to have this same conversation with me, but I couldn’t do it—I couldn’t handle it.” “I just want to help you, Dad. I love you.” “I love you too, son”—and we hugged for the second-to-last time.

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September 9, 2009: Dad says, in almost a whisper, “You know Mom and I knew we were real sick way before we moved out here to Oklahoma. When I became a practitioner, I opened myself up to some very poisonous suggestions, and I exposed Mom to them, too. You know the farther you get in Christian Science, the more susceptible you are to the most serious mesmeric claims. The same thing happened to Mr. Demarco, your old Sunday School teacher: He and Mrs. Demarco both died less than a year after he became a practitioner.”

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September 28, 2009: Dad looks like Mom did in her final days: ninety years old instead of sixty. It’s hard to look at: all the fat and muscle in his face has been consumed by his starving organs, and the skin is paper-thin, wrinkled, and discolored, revealing nearly every contour of his skull.

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October 7, 2008: Dad’s in-home nurse is trying to get him to lay down on the hospital bed in the living room, but Dad—deep in the throes of terminal agitation—is having none of it. “You need to rest, hon; you’re very weak,” she pleads. “Now hold on a second!” Dad exclaims in that proud, dignified tone that he always has whenever he gets angry. “You should lay down, Dad,” I say softly and cautiously. Dad turns to me and barks, “Joel, we need to talk. Come on; let’s go in the bedroom.” Dad stomps off and I follow right behind him. Yet as soon as I pass through the doorframe, I break down crying: “I’m sorry, Dad! I’m sorry! I love you!” Then I throw my arms around him, and we hug for the last time. “It’s okay Joel,” he replies, now with that gentle, loving voice that he always has when he tries to comfort me. “I love you, too. And things will get better real soon. I promise.”

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October 20, 2009: It’s five in the morning, and the in-home nurse wakes me up with a soft, soothing smile: “It’s time, hon; he’s about to pass. If you want to say goodbye to him, you ought to do it now.” I get up, put a shirt on, and grab Mom and Dad’s wedding rings from my nightstand. Cupping the rings in my right hand, I stand over Dad, who’s barely breathing on the hospital bed. “If you’d like,” the nurse says, “you could say a prayer. I’m sure he would love to hear it.” The first prayer I think of is the Lord’s Prayer: it’s really the only prayer I know by heart, having recited it in church well over a thousand times. As I close my eyes, I begin: “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.” When I open my eyes, I see that Dad is no longer breathing. I put the wedding rings in his cold hand, and say—for the last time—“I love you.”