Body and mind felt discordant, separate islands of feeling, sharp with pain, interspersed with patches where feeling had numbed, wholly blocked. To screen out the screeching of the train wheels, I’d pull out my CD player and plug in earphones, to listen to the only music that I could tolerate during those years: Beethoven’s late quartets. Since my arteries felt tangled and separate, in danger of disintegrating, I felt that only the strands of that music could help weave them together again, perhaps could bring, for moments, a semblance of integration and order. Focusing on our topics of discussion for the precept seemed impossible before arriving at Princeton Junction. But when I walked into the familiar seminar room, which smelled of old wood and chalk, and met the students, the class would set a boundary to those waves of choppy, deep waters. During those hours, the questions our students raised about the sources we were reading about interactions between Jews and Christians, their intense response to disagreements and bursts of laughter, felt like respite, recalling me to work that I loved.
Heinz always maintained more emotional balance than I did. Devoted to Mark, he now turned his devotion to Sarah and me, and I was moved to see him open up new depths of feeling for other people and for their children. When a member of his staff at the New York Academy of Sciences, which he now served as president, told him about his own child’s difficult diagnosis, Heinz talked with him at length, helped him find the best medical care, and wept that he could not do more.
One cold winter afternoon, when we went to a Valentine’s Day party at the loft that our close friends Lizzie and Emily shared, I heard him talking, loud, too loud, dominating a conversation. That hadn’t happened for years; something was wrong. Later, upset and irritated by his behavior, I sensed that he was smoldering inside. After waiting for several hours, I finally told him how I’d seen him that afternoon, guessing that it was about Mark, that he was grieving unbearably, without acknowledging it. I’d expected that he might be angry; but at first he said nothing, and then, to my surprise, he said quietly, “Thank you for telling me that.”
About a year later, as the turmoil slightly lessened, I turned back to what I’d been writing. Once again, raw experience poured into the work: grief laced with guilt cut especially deep. Before Mark’s death, I’d begun to investigate how Jews and Christians deployed the story of Adam and Eve to sanction—and to censor—sexual practices. But now I was driven toward the primary questions that story addresses: Why do we suffer, and why do we die?
At the same time, a more intimate question pressed into the foreground: Why do we feel guilty, even when we’ve done nothing to bring on illness or death—even when we’ve done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that’s one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way. Claiming that “in the beginning” God created a perfect world, the story suggests that human choice—the choice to sin—brought death into the world, along with everything we suffer, from drought and famine to miscarriage, fever, insanity, paralysis, and cancer.
This, of course, is an ancient folktale that rationalists dismiss, like the African tale that claims to tell how death began: the snake whom the gods sent to bring immortality to humans got lost on the way and failed to deliver the gift. Since our everyday experience shows that we’re a fragile, mortal species like any other, why do people still keep telling and retelling stories that blatantly contradict that experience? Or do stories like that emerge from our stubborn instinct of denial, as with Mark Twain, who joked that “I know that everyone dies, but I always thought an exception would be made in my case”?
But it’s not only traditionally minded Christians who interpret suffering and death as punishment. Over two and a half thousand years ago, Israel’s greatest prophets—Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah—interpreted their peoples’ disastrous defeats in war as divine punishment for failing to worship God and obey his commands. Biblical stories often suggest that those who die in an earthquake or flood, volcanic eruption, or through catastrophic illness—even children mauled to death by wild bears, for making fun of the prophet Elisha’s baldness!—are suffering exactly what they deserve.
Or is guilt simply a reflexive response to loss that groups throughout the world interpret in ways that reinforce their cultural norms? I wondered that when I saw an inscription in a Greek temple built thousands of years ago to honor Asclepius, the god of healing. Set up by two brothers mourning their father, who had been attacked and killed by a wild animal, this inscription shows that they were convinced that the gods had sent his death to punish his—and their—secret sins. They ordered this inscription to publicly confess that they, and perhaps their father, had neglected the gods; and they placed it in the temple to show that now they were seeking to appease the gods by offering sacrifices, and to warn others to do the same. Even now, people in various cultures often seek to deal with illness by repenting of sins that they fear may have caused it. One Hopi story, for example, tells how a child bitten by a poisonous spider hovers between life and death while his father desperately consults a tribal healer. Told that he’s brought this danger on his son by failing to prepare ritual ornaments for Spider Woman, the tribe’s protector, the father immediately seeks to remedy his fault, so that his son might recover.
Was the guilt that weighed like a stone on my grief a legacy of Western culture, a hangover from ancient folktales? Do such stories articulate unconsciously held attitudes that may affect us long after we’ve rationally dismissed them? What startled me more than anything else was how my own emotions could pour into scenarios told in stories I didn’t believe in. Yet guilt also seems to shadow people who have no use for religion: the very word we use for disease, “illness,” derives from the Old English term “evilness.” And even though blaming the victim—or the victim’s parents—may be absurd, rationally speaking, how often, in emergency rooms, do we hear the question, whether unspoken or spoken out loud, “How could this happen? What has he done, she done, what have we done, to deserve this?”
Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random. During those dark, interminable days of Mark’s illness, I couldn’t help imagining that somehow I’d caused it. If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.
Realizing this, Freud declared that humans created the gods out of fear—repeating what the Roman poet Lucretius said thousands of years earlier. When popularizing the teaching of his mentor, the philosopher Epicurus, Lucretius wrote, “Poor humankind, to have invented the gods, and thrown in a bad temper as well!” Like Lucretius, Freud suggested that if we believe that gods inflict earthquakes, floods, and lightning strikes, we may imagine that we can do something about what’s beyond our control; at least we can seek to pacify the gods with offerings and prayer. Like Freud, Lucretius hoped to liberate people from religion, which he saw simply as a web of illusion, invented by children afraid of the dark.
But whatever the rationalists say, and whatever the doctors could tell us about how cells break down, nothing they said could satisfy the need to find meaning. After Mark’s death, someone reaching for something “nice” to say assured me that surely his death would teach us some “spiritual lesson,” so that we could “find meaning” denied to more fortunate parents like herself. I was furious, speechless with anger. Schadenfreude, I thought; she’s congratulating herself on her own good luck at our expense, and she doesn’t even realize it. Doesn’t she know that suffering can shrivel hope, break hearts? Even if she hadn’t just spouted a sentimental cliché, how dare she suggest that any benefit to us could possibly be worth a child’s life? Find meanin
g?
What is clear is that meaning may not be something we find. We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning. I was moved by what another bereaved mother, Maria of Paris, a Russian Christian whom Orthodox Christians revere as a saint, wrote after her six-year-old daughter died; she felt her “whole natural life . . . shaken . . . disintegrated; desires have gone . . . meaning has lost its meaning.” But instead of sinking into passivity, she risked her life to save the lives of other people’s children during the Nazi occupation. When German soldiers forced Jews into a central square of Paris before shoving them into trains hurtling toward the death camps, Maria slipped into the square to join them. There, whispering hastily, she persuaded several parents to allow her to hide their children in garbage bins, and so to save their lives, which she did, finding families to care for each one of them. Later, when she and her own son were arrested by Nazi soldiers and sent to the death camps, she exchanged places with someone targeted for the gas chambers, serene in the conviction that she’d done what her faith required, choosing to enable others to live. Many other parents whose children have been killed by gun violence, war, drunk drivers, or disease also choose to create meaning by working to spare other people unfathomable losses like their own.
Recently I read an article in the New York Times by a writer speaking of his young son’s death, in which he characterized a decision he made with his wife to have another child as a “wild and daring act of courage.” Certainly loving anyone as much as we love our children, then consciously choosing to risk another such loss, does take courage. But, I thought, doesn’t he realize how fortunate he is to have such a possibility—one that so many bereaved parents don’t have? Heinz and I felt intensely grateful that we were still young enough to hope for another child, or, better, more children, in our lives. Meanwhile, the work I’d chosen also felt like a kind of yoga, a practice of focus and discovery that can show how countless people throughout the ages contend with questions of meaning—perhaps even a way of spinning straw into gold, like Rumpelstiltskin.
But what mattered more than anything else was loving Mark. Then, after a miscarriage, we strongly felt that loving him so passionately required us to care for children, any child who needed parents—especially Sarah, whom we needed as much as she needed us. Now that she was one and a half years old, exploring her own young life, Heinz often carried her on his shoulders when we walked to the playground near us in Central Park. On weekdays, when he was at work at Rockefeller University or the New York Academy of Sciences, I’d take her in the stroller to the park, where I’d help her onto the swings and down the slides. On the walk home, she would stop at every staircase we passed, to climb up and down; then, laughing with surprise when pigeons scattered before her stroller, she greeted every squirrel and dog.
One year after Mark died, I felt that I could ask Heinz the question I’d waited to ask him for months: Shall we call the adoption agency to ask whether they’d include us again on their list of prospective parents? When we did, they said, “We thought you’d be calling,” and one year later, to our delight, Sarah’s younger brother, David, arrived to join our family in the spring.
Chapter 5
Unimaginable
Heinz Pagels in Castle Creek, Colorado, one week before his death on July 23, 1988.
After the plane touched down in Aspen in light rain, sunlight glancing off the mountains, we gathered Sarah, hugging her indispensable bear, along with blankets, bottles, and David, and carried the children onto the tarmac. Heading first for the Center for Physics to pick up the information packet for summer events, we saw friends from Chicago in the parking lot. Heinz stopped the car and ran out to greet David Schramm, saying, “We have a little David now, too!”
This would be the first summer that we would live in the simple frame house we’d built in the mountains, at an altitude that could have put Mark at risk, over nine thousand feet, among the aspen and pine forests of Castle Creek valley. After packing the car with bags of groceries, we drove up to the house, listening to the rushing waters of the creek. The afternoon had turned gloriously clear.
When we went to picnics at the Center for Physics with other families, our friends, relieved to see us back, would come to admire our new baby, now six weeks old, as we set out fresh bread, salad, and chicken for our picnic and scrambled after Sarah, who would join other children, jumping over the tiny creek that ran through the grounds, then pull off her shoes to wade barefoot.
In June, before we’d left New York, Heinz’s friends from the International League for Human Rights had given us a joint book party, made more joyous by the presence of a Soviet dissident newly freed from prison, who celebrated with us and spoke movingly of his gratitude. Each of us had just finished a book that we’d been working on for years. Heinz wrote about the potential for artificial intelligence in the book he called The Dreams of Reason—his kind of joke, since he’d borrowed the title from what sounds like an optimistic phrase from the Spanish painter Goya, who’d famously said that “the dreams of reason bring forth monsters.” My book, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, which began as an exploration of sexual attitudes and politics, had ended with a strong critique of Augustine’s bizarre claim that “original sin” infected the whole human race and caused death—the final chapters “written with blood,” Heinz said when he read them, and that’s how they felt, shaped through Mark’s illness and death. Both of us dedicated our books to Mark.
As we settled into our mountain home with Sarah and David, the pressures we’d lived with for so long began to ease. Every morning, Heinz rode his bike down the valley to the Center for Physics, and when he came home in the late afternoon, we’d drive up the road to the old mining town of Ashcroft to walk by the creek, where we often played hide-and-seek. Astonished to have lived through what we could not have imagined surviving, we occupied our days and nights with our children, with friends, and, when the children were asleep, talking close together by the fireside. On clear nights, when emotions poured through me, I’d go outside to sit on the deck as before, to allow grief to flow, and to meditate under the stars. The previous year, when Heinz went hiking on mountain trails—only for hiking had I ever seen him get up at five A.M.—I was worried about his safety, sensing how he was devastated with grief. This year, though, I breathed with relief, seeing his face sometimes light up again with flashes of humor and delight.
In early June, Heinz flew back to New York to speak at the graduation of Seth Lloyd, his doctoral student who’d just completed his PhD in physics at Rockefeller University. When he returned, I mentioned that I’d made a dinner reservation for us at our favorite restaurant in town. Startled, somewhat abashed, he asked, “Is this our anniversary?” I laughed. “That was last week, when you were in New York, but we can celebrate now.”
A friend who’d seen us the week before, walking on the boarded path at Ashcroft, sent a photo she’d taken—Sarah riding on Heinz’s shoulders, while I carried David—adding, in her note, “What a lovely family!” Glad to be back in our home again, we savored the clear summer days, often punctuated with rainstorms in late afternoon, before the sun would return in brilliantly clear air. One afternoon in mid-July, when Heinz came back from a bike ride with friends up the road for lunch, his knees were bruised and bleeding. He explained that he’d taken a fall on a hillside covered with gravel and rocks; it was, he insisted, nothing important.
Driving back home on Castle Creek Road to make dinner the next Friday, I was listening on the radio to news of a hang glider who’d fallen into a tangle of trees above the meadow where I was driving. Was he going to survive? So far, we didn’t know; later we were glad to hear that he did. As I drove up to the house, listening to news reporting the difficulties of dating in a time of AIDS, I breathed a sigh of gratitude that I’d never have to think about anything like that. After what we’d been through this year, and as we are now, I knew we’d always
be together.
Friends came to join us that night for dinner, the table piled with artichokes, grilled salmon, and fresh garlic bread for eight, besides the children. Heinz’s former graduate student Seth was there, excited to be starting at the Center for Physics as one of the newest members of the tribe, and looking forward to hiking with Heinz in the morning. After dinner, when I was about to put Sarah to bed, Heinz offered to simplify our bedtime ritual by taking our friends out to walk up the road in the moonlight. So he said, “I’ll take the kid,” and carried David with him as they went to look at the stars. Then, Sarah and I piled into her bed next to her small mountain of stuffed animals while I told her stories and sang our song about the foxes, bears, bugs, and other creatures going to sleep—as long as it took, as I did every night, before she’d fall asleep.
When the alarm clock rang at five the next morning, I hugged Heinz as he got up to hike, then went back to sleep until David, sleeping in a crib in the bedroom’s walk-in closet, woke me a couple of hours later. Hearing us stir, Sarah carried Bear upstairs to join us. On that sunny July morning, anticipating that Heinz would be hungry when he got back, I decided to make lasagna for dinner. Sarah sat near me on the kitchen counter to watch as I grated parmesan cheese and built up layers of pasta, meat sauce, and mozzarella.
Usually the hikers were back by early afternoon. Instead, the phone rang, and Sarah remembers feeling confused and upset at what followed. I called our neighbor Alice, asking her to come to stay with the children, and immediately left the house. He’d fallen—what could that mean? Seth made it back to Maroon Lake, told the rangers that the rocky path on which they were descending from Pyramid Peak suddenly gave way when Heinz, walking ahead of him, stepped on it, and fell down the mountain. No other information. About half an hour later, we heard overhead the ominous buzz of helicopters heading from town toward the Maroon Bells, signaling that members of the mountain rescue team were looking for a lost or fallen hiker. Were they looking for him? If he were badly hurt, I might have to spend the night at the hospital, so I called Alice to ask, “If that’s what happened, would you look after the children?” She would.
Why Religion? Page 10