A prayer of thanks

I learned tonight that a friend of mine—a fellow student in my graduate program—has been offered, and has accepted, a faculty position at an institution in another state. In a terrible job market, it's very, very good news for her. She's going to make a fine scholar and teacher.

I express gratitude for this opportunity for her, and I pray that all will go well as she finishes her dissertation, prepares to move, and settles into her new career. I'm thankful for the friendship we've had during our time together in the program, and I'm going to miss her when she's gone, though I hope we'll be able to collaborate in ways as colleagues in the same field.

Protests in the Arab world

So much could still go wrong, and yet it's so hopeful to see the democratic protests that have been springing up across the Arab world. God of justice, Liberator of the oppressed, be with them.

That law of the land which is constitutional, supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges, belongs to all mankind and is justifiable before me. (D&C 98:5)

Laws and [a] constitution of the people . . . should be maintained for the rights and protection of all fliesh, according to just and holy principles. (D&C 101:77)

Post-mortem for a funeral

Live together in such love
that you weep for the loss of those who die.
(D&C 42:45)

I'm nearly 40 years old, and I have no experience with funerals. Until attending my mother's funeral this last weekend, I can remember attending one other funeral—that of a teenaged peer from one of my wards. I didn't attend the funerals for any of the three grandparents I've lost so far. I've been to a handful of memorial services, but never a viewing or a graveside service.

I found the viewing disconcerting. I had gone in wanting to touch the body. But then when I saw her, she looked like a wax doll—like something you'd see in Madame Tussauds. I presume that the viewing is supposed to help reconcile us to her death by giving us an image of her in peaceful repose, but I found the artificiality of it alienating. I couldn't touch her. All I could keep thinking was: This is a wax shell pumped full of formaldehyde.

On the other hand, I suppose I would rather have had that last sight of her than a closed casked without a viewing.

Once they closed the casket, she was gone for me psychologically. The casket became a sign standing in for her; I wasn't thinking of it as a container with her inside. When it came time for me to help carry the casket to the hearse, I just thought of it as carrying the casket. It didn't dawn on me until the next day, as we were revisiting the burial site, that I was actually carrying her body. And it didn't dawn on me until even later that night that as I was carrying the casket, I was positioned right by her head. Again, I find this all alienating. I was inches away from her face, but I had no consciousness of her being there.

The funeral was... I don't know what adjective to use. Nice? People spoke well. It was good to hear takes on her life that are less tragic than mine. I'd been gloomily anticipating the "prettification" of her life—the same process that turns church history into hagiography. But I respect the representation- and meaning-making that was done there.

A theological reflection that rolled around my head during the weekend: If we take seriously the statement that "the spirit and the body are the soul" (D&C 88:15), then my mother's disembodied spirit (assuming it exists, which is my operating assumption) is no more fully and truly her than her inanimate body is. We use the idea of the immortal spirit to tell ourselves that the dead continue as we knew them. But it seems to me that our doctrine actually works against that idea. The same sense of false or incomplete identity I had when I looked at her body—this isn't really her—I should also have if I were able to see her spirit. Her spirit isn't really her, because it's missing the body, just as her body isn't really her because it's missing the spirit. What reason do I have to think that I would even recognize her spirit if I encountered it? Why would it look like her body? Why would it have her personality? It doesn't have her genes. It doesn't have her brain.

More alienation.

Alma 40 tells me that my mother has gone home to the God who gave her life. I want that to be true. I want her to be in a state of rest, as that passage says. But D&C 88 and 138 tell me that she's in a profound dissociative state. Her soul has been broken in two. And now she waits to be fixed—restored. "For the dead had looked upon the long absence of their spirits from their bodies as a bondage" (D&C 138:50).

I believe that ensoulment is embodiment—I'm firmly decided on that point. Which I guess means that I also have to hope for a physical resurrection if I want to hope for the immortality of my mother's soul. I'm not really thrilled about that: physical resurrection is so problematic, philosophically. I'd prefer to be much more agnostic and noncomittal about the afterlife—just trust that we're in God's hands. But that's not going to be enough to let me maintain my beliefs and hopes consistently. Bodily resurrection it is, I guess. Not the most enthusiastic profession of faith.

I'm tired. And I'm not in the right emotional state to be getting philosophical about these subjects.

Music

I fly out to Utah tomorrow for my mother's funeral.

Music has long been an important part of my spirituality: the song of the heart really has been a major form of prayer for me, as the scripture says. Ever since I was young, I've been composing—really amateur stuff, since I'm mostly self-taught as a musician. Mostly religious songs. Won an Honorable Mention or two in the New Era music contest, actually, in my young teens. Between 1997 and 2004, I did quite a bit of composing for the guitar, which was important to me as a way to keep engaging with texts from LDS scripture after coming out.

I've composed hardly anything since I've been in graduate school, until just recently. I'm posting here two things I've composed in the past couple of months, as a way to cope with my mother's decline and death. Just sheet music, I'm afraid (PDF files), no recordings—I don't know how to do that. The songs are inspired by the Taize style of music: a simple verse, often taken from scripture, sung over and over as a kind of meditation.

Take her home (Alma 40:11-12) - PDF
We shall declare (D&C 133:52-53) - PDF

In remembrance

A book of remembrance was written before the Lord
for those who thought on his name.
They will be mine, says the Lord,
in the day that I make up my jewels.
(3 Nephi 24:16-17)

This is my mother’s story, based on my memories of her experiences as I heard her recount them and based on my own observations. This is the “truth wherein [I] know [it]” (D&C 123:13).

Her father was physically abusive and was periodically in jail. I’ll skip those stories: it’s enough to say that she cut him out of her life as an adult. I'm told that I and my next youngest brother met him, but I have no memories of those visits, and they ended within a few years. We phoned my maternal grandmother regularly on holidays, but not my grandfather. I know him only from photos and a tape recording of a visit to him when I was an infant.

My mother joined the LDS Church as a teenager. She hoped that the rest of her family would follow and that they would become the happy family portrayed in church literature. Instead there were fights with pans being thrown around. My impression is that her ward wasn’t very welcoming—a girl from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, so to speak—but she stuck with it.

At a youth fireside, she heard the speaker say that those born in the church were special spirits whom God had sent into LDS families so they would be equipped to build the kingdom. My mother carried from that talk the idea that she was a lesser spirit, a conviction that I imagine her marginalization within her church community must have a reinforced—on top of the abuse she suffered at home, of course. She told me once that she thought she might be the spirit child of one of God’s polygamous wives, not the first, favored wife.

She went to BYU. At one point her mother cut off her funds, and she went a month without eating. She ended up in the hospital and spent time living with a local LDS family while she recovered. She met my father, who was also a teenaged convert. He courted her before and after his mission. She intended to turn him down, but after fasting about it at my father’s request, she heard an audible voice instruct her to marry him, so she did.

She threw herself into raising the privileged spirits God had entrusted to her. She had read the manual Gospel Principles with me by the time I was baptized at age eight, and by the time I was ordained a deacon at age 12, she had worked with me to memorize all the seminary mastery scriptures. We held family home evening regularly, family scripture study, family prayer. For family prayer, we knelt in a circle holding hands and repeated together the words of the person saying the prayer; she wanted us to feel at home when we finally reached the temple. (Her own first temple experience had been very alienating.) We held sunrise services in cemeteries for Easter. We observed the four weeks of Advent. Christmas was the occasion for amazing outputs of creativity on the part of my parents. My continued attachment to Mormonism has much to do with the positive memories—and spiritual experiences—created for me at home.

My mother's aspirations to a model Mormon family unravelled as her sons got older. In different ways we all deviated from the path she had mapped for us, though in the end most of her sons remained active in the church and gave her grandchildren. When I was in high school, one betrayal caused her to break down into a debilitating depression. (Bitter irony: When no one would tell me what was going on, I concluded she must have cancer.) She clawed her way back out, fragile but iron-willed, determined to put her household back in order. She reacted similarly when she discovered I was gay, telling me to leave graduate school and move back home so she could “fix this problem.” I had to put a lot of distance between us in order to have the room to let my life grow in the way I wanted it to. I formally cut off contact in 2001—a big dramatic production—aware of the irony that I was doing to her what she had done to her father, though I don’t know if she ever recognized that irony.

Her cancer prompted a slow, cautious reconciliation, the unspoken terms of which were that big parts of my life remained un-talked about while I expressed more sympathetic interest than I really felt in the church activities that were at the center of her life. This meant that our relationship was constantly feeding an element of dishonesty—like the body feeding a tumor, I suppose—but I consented as a gift to her. And I recognize the concessions she was making to me. On my last visit to her, this past November, we sat on the couch, embracing, and she said that she hoped she hadn’t said anything to make me uncomfortable while I was there. She asked my forgiveness. A decade earlier that would probably have made me feel vindicated, but by that point my thought was simply, “You don’t need to do this.”

Earlier in the visit, as we did the five-kernels-of-corn tradition before Thanksgiving dinner (you say five things you’re grateful for), I had said that while there were things about the church that made me very angry—I could feel the ice cracking under my feet as I said that—I was grateful for the ways it had supported my parents and for the positive influences it had on my upbringing. Even that wasn’t the full truth, though. I don’t know if I could ever have articulated my relationship with Mormonism to my mother in a language she would understand, given her basically fundamentalist way of seeing the world. I don’t intend that to sound pejorative; it’s just the reality of how she was raised as someone who passed through a succession of evangelically oriented Protestant churches growing up.

She approached cancer the same dogged way she approached “fixing” her wayward family. It was not the life she had hoped for; it was not the life she had trusted God to give her; and she hoped at first she would be able to wrestle it back onto the track she wanted it to run on. In the end, she had to reconcile herself to being carried whither she would not.

I hope she was met by her Heavenly Parents, and I hope they made her know she was acceptable and had been all along.

************

I assume the guilt driving this narrative screams loud and clear.

My mother's death

My mother died last night—I got the call around 11:30 p.m., and I knew as soon as the phone rang, "This is it." It was the end of a long fight (but I detest that metaphor) with cancer that first began several years ago when I was still living in Salt Lake City.

I feel an impulse to talk about this, but I don't know what to say. I'll say at least this for now: It was a shitty way to die. She was peaceful at the end, I'm told—spiritually as well as physically. But it's been a terrible, terrible process of her body going haywire and devouring itself. I've spent months wishing she would just let go already so she wouldn't suffer anymore. She was on hospice for a year. I hope she accomplished or obtained whatever she wanted with that time. And I hope that I provided what she wanted from me during that time.

As usual with me, I'm more angry than sad, though I'm both.

************

Now the time of liberation has come;
and my redeemed will declare
the loving-kindness of their Lord,
and all that he has bestowed upon them
according to his everlasting goodness.

In all their afflictions, he was afflicted.
The angel of his presence intervened for them.
And in his love, he bore them
and carried them all their days.

(Adapted from D&C 133:52-53)

************

The gaping chasm between those words and the lived reality of my mother's horrible decline is faith.

It is finished

It has been made known to me by an angel
that the spirits of all people
as soon as they have departed from this mortal body
are taken home to that God who gave them life

a state of rest
a state of peace
where they shall rest
from all their troubles
and from all care
and sorrow

all things shall be restored
to their proper and perfect frame