Dad has heart disease, mother has cancer!

SAVING GRACE


The autumn day Rory rejected the version of Christianity that he had grown up with had been the day that as the chosen sixteen-year-old youth pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church, he had preached the sermon “Come to Jesus and Be Saved.” He had been nervous his first time behind the pulpit, but as soon as he began to speak, the nervousness passed. He did his duty: poured forth the necessity to be saved from sin, offered Christ’s sacrifice to atone, and issued the steps to salvation. Somewhere in the middle of the sermon, he looked into the enraptured eyes of his audience, felt their hunger to believe, and knew that he no longer did. Despite that disbelief, after the sermon he stood at the doors of the church and shook the congratulatory, complimentary hands of the congregation.

His mother was especially proud of him and stood before him in a navy blue dress with white polka dots. For the first time he noticed that his mother was gaining weight. She had always been thin, but her stomach had rounded and was pushing against the limits of the dress. Was she going to give birth again?

“Oh, Rory, let me give you a hug.” He let her and she seemed as intense as he had ever seen her. When she pushed herself away, tears gleamed in her eyes.

His sister Chloe, half his age, hugged him, too. She said, “You’re better than Preacher Simms,” which made him laugh.

To celebrate the triumph, his portly father, a deacon of the church, took them to a restaurant for Sunday dinner. “Order anything you want,” said the father, who thought of food as God’s reward.

Rory’s steps away from the church had been occurring for months, and he had come to see God more as a temporal adversary than as an all-knowing, all-directing, everywhere-present force.

First, God had impeded his plan to become a jet fighter pilot by diminishing his ocular clarity: he discovered that when more than a year ago he had applied for a driver’s permit. It was a blow to his vision of the world. Since God was all-directing, he asked the question: Why did You do this, God? Now I must wear glasses and am ineligible for fighter-pilot training. I’ll have to come up with a different life plan.

Second, his pious father had had his first heart attack. The doctors said he might have only a year left: he had eaten too much fatty food and not enough fiber: beef, pork, dairy products, ice cream, refined flour, refined sugar and fried chicken. Rory’s question was, God, if You’re all-knowing, why didn’t You tell this very good man who believes in You about the dangers of a high-fat, low-fiber diet? Rory received no answer, but he gave up eating large quantities of such foods as his father had loved and consumed all his life.

However, one prayer was answered: his father didn’t die. He cut back eating the dangerous foods and took the medicine prescribed for him for high blood pressure and high cholesterol and began walking every evening after supper. In six months, he had lost twenty pounds.

Then Candy dumped Rory because he was trying to follow God’s commandments. Lately, the couple had been discussing “plans,” a natural course of conversation for two who had been sweethearts for two years. Her plan was marriage and nesting. His plan was college and an uncertain future thereafter. She said, “Yet. . . .” He said , “Not yet.” Of course, they had sat next to each other on the bus, held hands, kissed, embraced, necked and made out. What was next?

Next came one night as they kissed and caressed each other lying on the long front seat inside his father’s car. Rory dared more that night than he had before. He opened her blouse, unsnapped her bra, felt the soft roundness of her breasts and the hard roundness of the nipples. The two sweethearts breathed heavily, almost in unison.

“Take your shirt off.”

He tore it off and they pressed their soft, fragrant flesh against each other.

Rory reached down and unfastened her jeans and when she didn’t stop him, he pulled them down, so she could wiggle her feet free of them, so she lay before him in the flesh except for her white panties with pink hearts printed on them.

He pressed himself on her again and reached his left hand down and cupped the mound inside her panties. She gasped but didn’t object. He rubbed the mound, softly. She moved as if in involuntary undulations beneath his hand. She moaned, softly. He slipped his hand inside the panties and rubbed the mound, soft and moist. Her moan grew louder, her breaths deeper. He drew the panties off, sat up and looked at her lovely body and saw the damp crevice and felt his penis grow and harden. In his mind he saw something else: a swollen belly, a crying child, a drunken brute, the towers of Ilium burning, sperm-like meteors crashing into the earth as the dinosaurs gaped and shivered.

She said in a voice heavy with desire. “Let’s do it.”

He leaped into the back seat, almost breathless. “I can’t. I’m not ready.”

She sat up and looked across the back of the seat at him as if he had taken all the chocolates she had been about to eat.

In November, since she was ready and he was not, she dropped him for an older boy who was as ready as she was. His mother said, “Don’t worry. In college you’ll meet many more interesting young ladies than Candy.”

He felt guilty, as if he had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and could be chased from paradise at any moment. He asked God, Why did You make the most inviting act a sin? After the night he had spurned sex with Candy, whenever he looked at this mother, a shiver of guilt ruffled his spine, because he knew what his mother and father had done to bring him into the world. He also knew they wouldn’t approve of his growing skepticism about their religion.

In the winter of his sixteenth year in his advanced placement history class, the students were required to choose a book from a reading list. He chose a book about spiritual leaders Socrates, Confucius, Buddha and Jesus. Socrates and Confucius, polytheists, spoke of being true to one’s individual ethical self, rules of morality and the community. Buddha and Jesus, monotheists, spoke of being true to one path and separating oneself from the community of sinners and sufferers who didn’t believe exactly the same way. The first two brought everyone into a joint reality; the latter two separated society into opposing groups.

One day as he sat at the family dining table and read the book, his mother walked by and casually said, “What’re you reading?”

“A book about philosophers and religious leaders.”

“Oh?”

“Did you know Buddha had similar ideas to Jesus’?”

Her eyes widened. “Don’t say that! Don’t ever let your father hear you say things like that!”

He wouldn’t say anything about his ideas to them ever again, but his appetite for more knowledge and understanding had been whetted. Nevertheless, the doubting cat was out of the religious bag, so his mother knew he doubted, although she would not tell the father, who she knew would be chagrined by their son’s diverging awareness.

Rory wrote his report about the four religious-philosophical leaders and teachers, and asked his teacher what he could read that was more modern. His teacher said, “There’s always Spinoza.”

A few days before his seventeenth birthday, his mother had asked him what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday. As usual he said chocolate. In a voice that seemed part reassurance and part warning, she said, “You’re almost a man now.”

On his birthday, he came home to an empty house, devoid of sounds of the family moving about, of the smells of supper cooking, of any activity. Curious, he put his school gear in his room and went into the kitchen. On the kitchen counter were a stack of three nude cake levels, without frosting. They appeared obscenely unclothed. Mother hadn’t finished his birthday cake.

She had seemed tired recently. Had she fallen asleep? He looked into his parents’ bedroom: clean and neat as usual, but no mother.

He looked around for a note. Perhaps his father had been delayed at work. Something unusual was going on, but he didn’t know what. He turned on the television, but he had little interest in the programs.

An hour later, he began to worry. Why hasn’t anyone called to tell him they were doing this or that and would be late?

Hungry, he made himself a baloney sandwich and a glass of tea and sat at the dining room table. Had an emergency occurred? He remembered how as a rambunctious boy, he had often injured himself and had to be taken to the emergency room to be stitched up or his bones set. Had his sister Chloe done something like that?

Then he remembered his father’s fragile condition. Had he had another heart attack? Was he back in the hospital?

Rory had no answers, so he fetched his school books and did his math homework. Math had a calming effect on him because numbers were straightforward and he found the shapes and proportions of geometry beautiful and the formulae of algebra challenging like solving a puzzle. Once he was working, he became absorbed in the numbers and equations until he realized that darkness was falling and squeezing his vision.

He reached back to turn on the dining room light, and, that very instant, the phone began clamoring as if God Himself were calling.

Rory ran to the phone and lifted the receiver. “Hello.”

His father’s shaky voice said, “Rory, I’m sorry I didn’t call before now. Did you get something to eat?”

“I made a baloney sandwich. What’s going on?”

“We’re at the hospital. Your mother had an emergency. We’ll be home in an hour or so.”

“Is she ok?”

His father sobbed, unable to talk.

“Dad, don’t worry about me. I’ll be here. Have you and Chloe eaten? Should I fix something here?”

“No, we ate. See you in a while.”

Rory tried unsuccessfully not to worry, but gave up doing homework. He doodled and wondered what could have happened to his mother until his father and sister finally clattered home. His eight-year-old sister ran up to him and whispered the word that she had heard for the first time that afternoon. “Cancer. Mommy has cancer.” But he could see that Chloe had no comprehension of the implications, no dread.

To his father, whose eyes were red from crying and whose shoulders slumped wearily, he asked, “What kind of cancer?”

“Breast.”

“Just like her mother died from.”

“Yes. Let’s sit down, hold hands and pray.”

The father, the son and the daughter held hands and sat on the couch as the father quietly prayed to the God that he had believed in for many years. Rory thought, He’s praying to the God that directed this, that let the cancer attack my mother and his wife, according to his beliefs. Rory’s thoughts blocked him from the prayer, but he held on tightly to his father’s hand because he loved his father and his mother.

After the prayer, his father retrieved and handed to Rory a $20 gift certificate that his mother had bought for him for his birthday. It was to a bookstore in the nearest mall, so Rory went there the next day and bought a book about Spinoza and his ideas.

A few days later when he visited his mother in the hospital, she seemed thin and pale. Holding his hand, she told him, “Rory, they cut away my breasts to save my life.” Then she began to cry.

“Don’t cry, Mother. We’ll take good care of you.”

“Oh, Rory. I’m crying because you had an awful birthday.”

“It’s just a birthday – another day in a year of days. But thanks for the gift certificate.”

“But this memory will be part of all your birthdays.”

He knew she was right. How could he ever forget his seventeenth birthday, when he had changed from a child into a man and had begun to put away childish thoughts?

“Are you helping your father around the house?”

“Doing the laundry, sweeping, washing dishes. Dad’s doing the cooking.”

“How’s he doing? He’s never cooked before.”

“Not so good. He only knows two spices: salt and pepper. And he knows only one method: pour it on. I’m trying to figure out some way of taking over the cooking without insulting him.”

She covered her mouth to disguise her laughter, but her eyes twinkled with mirth; Rory, seeing her momentarily happy, began laughing, too. They laughed because they shared the knowledge of the father’s ineptness in the kitchen. Rory thought, as inept as Father-God is in the world.

“You get home before he does. Just get supper going. You know where my cookbooks are. Just follow the directions. Let him finish it.”

“I can do that.”

“You have to do so much now.”

His mother came home for a week and directed his cooking, so the food was tastier. Worried about her health and her family, she forgot to ask what he had bought with his gift certificate, and he read Spinoza in his room where he could keep his study private (Caute! Sub rosa).

Then she was flown to Houston, Texas, for radiation treatments and chemotherapy. While she was gone, their entire church congregation held a prayer vigil for her recovery. Rory thought, sort of like calling a house where the phones lines had been pulled out of the walls. No one’s home. Moved. Service discontinued.

When she came back, she was tattooed with blue and red marks where the radiation gun had shot her. And she seemed thinner.

She was weaker and could barely sit in a chair. She was in pain, so Rory would see her as she walked from one room to another suddenly gasp, stiffen and lean against a wall for a minute. But if he tried to help her, she waved him off. “No . . . just give me a minute . . . to catch my breath.”

His father prayed every night for a miracle. His father told him what the doctor had said, “Mother waited too long. She knew something was wrong, but was afraid to tell anyone. She’s not going to live.”

She went out again to Houston in a cycle of every few weeks. Each time she came back thinner and weaker as if some vampiric demon in Houston was sucking the life out of her. Rory and his father moved a cot into the living room, so she could be with them. Wearily she told Rory, “You are a difficult, but rare, person. I worry about you, but I see the good in you.”

Finally, she was a skeletal figure who could barely speak. Rory was reminded of the pictures he had seen of holocaust victims in Nazi death camps.

Only her eyes remained their normal size and when she was awake they seemed, accusingly, to follow Rory around the room as he went about doing the chores that formerly she had done for the family all her life. One day, as she lay on a cot that had been pulled into the living room, her bony hand reached up and grabbed Rory’s arm as he was passing wearing her ruffled apron. She pulled him toward her and warned in a rasping, breathless voice, “Your father is a good man. He loves you children dearly. Don’t disappoint him.”

“I. . . .” He wanted to say I have to be who I am, but instead, he said, “I won’t.”

But her tracking watery eyes said she didn’t believe him and that she knew he was moving away from them in some way.

During her next trip to Houston, the demon finished her off. God just stood by, twiddling his thumbs and whistling, evidently, was Rory’s ridiculing thought, and he was surprised at how easily he discounted the patriarchal God’s force in the world as if He were a silly, weak old man with a squeaky voice.

At the funeral Rory saw his mother’s body, no longer thin or pale, in the coffin. It resembled once again the woman who had raised him for seventeen years. His sister Chloe came up to him beside the coffin. She spoke softly, “Mommy’s going to heaven. That’s why they have her so pretty looking.” He kissed his sister on the top of her childish head.

The next week his father – unshaven for several days and wearing the stale, wrinkled pajamas he had worn for those same days – sobbed, “I . . . hate . . . God!” Rory said nothing, but he halted supper preparations, walked to his father’s shaking figure, put his arms around his father and held him while his father sobbed. For Rory, the paternal God had become irrelevant; only a believer could hate Him.

END
 
This story is based on my family.  Mother did die of breast cancer. In 1963 the treatments and diagnostic methodolgy were not as advanced as in the 21st century.  Back then breast cancer was practically a death sentence.  Now the recovery rate has improved astoundingly, and women are much more aware of the danger signs and can be screened regularly.
 
We also know the connection between diets high in red meat fat and heart disease and colon cancer, so we can protect ourselves from that.  And sugar and diabetes.  We have advanced thus far through the application of medical science.
 
Also, if I were young today, I could be a fighter pilot since the main focus of the modern pilot is the electronic display in front of him.  One no longer needs eagle eyes to be effective.
 
Teenagers today are much more open about sexuality.  That must be liberating, although sometimes I wonder what such casual acceptance might cost us in other ways.
 
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