Why Religion?

by Elaine Pagels

  When Geoff West, Heinz’s close friend since the time they studied physics together in graduate school, heard of his death, he’d called from Santa Fe, terribly shaken, saying that he would drive up to Colorado for the funeral. But since the house was packed, and knowing how many people would be there at that time, I asked him instead to come later, when others had left, so that we’d have time to spend together and to talk. When he did drive to Aspen, a couple of weeks after Heinz’s death, he told me that when he’d first heard of it, he’d searched for a prayer shawl that he’d kept at the bottom of a drawer ever since his bar mitzvah. For although raised in an intensely orthodox family, decades earlier he’d left his family behind, along with their pieties, in London. On that day, however, he took the prayer shawl and kippot, drove alone out of town to climb to the top of a mesa, and began to chant the ancient tones of Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. He told me that when he began, the sky had been perfectly clear, but as he chanted, his voice hoarse and breaking, a dark gray rain cloud formed overhead; then sudden winds, drenched with rain, swept over the mesa. When he finished, the rain stopped, and the sky cleared. As he descended the mesa, he gathered a few small branches from a sage bush, which he brought to me.

  Without such friends, I cannot imagine surviving that summer. For, I realized, if anything could destroy me, especially after Mark’s death, it would be this. The long and loving relationship with Heinz had kept me balanced, as a parent, as a person. Going on without him felt impossible. He was so much the better parent, I felt; why weren’t the children left with him instead? More than once, driving alone up the mountain road back to the house, I suddenly felt startled out of reverie, shocked: I was driving far too fast, and heedlessly; one absent moment could send the car careening over the cliff. It’s not that I wanted to die, but desperately wanted to stop the pain, and that could drive an impulse toward suicide.

  Although I dreaded going on, suicide was not an option. It’s no honor to Heinz to fall apart now, I kept repeating to myself. He would not have quit, certainly not with children depending on us. Now I would have to go on, to “stand on the side of life,” as he often said of people he respected. During those sleepless nights in August, around three or four in the morning, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s words often echoed through my head:

  No, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feed on thee;

  Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man

  In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

  Can something, hope, wish day come,

  not choose not to be.

  When longing for sleep, or for oblivion, I realized that if I hadn’t stopped drinking alcohol before Mark died, I’d probably be trying to drink myself to sleep.

  But there was a lot to do. Groceries, baths for the children, packing boxes to return to New York, others to leave in the storage room. What to do with his rugby shirt, his worn sneakers? Carefully I packed the belt he always wore, with the inlaid Zuni buckle that I’d given him years before on his birthday, and his watch, the leather strap stained with his sweat, which the mountain rescue team had recovered from the hike. I kept in the closet two of his shirts and his favorite sweater, which, when I buried my face in them, still breathed with his scent, and the black satin jacket with his name sewn onto it, a twin to mine, each with REALITY CLUB inscribed on the back.

  Stopping at the local airport to check on tickets for return to New York—his ticket now blank, to be unused—I saw a young woman trying to quiet the baby strapped to her breast while a two-year-old, loudly protesting, grabbed her hand and pulled on it hard. That’s just like me, I thought, that’s what it looks like to have an infant and a two-year-old, about to board the plane. But right then her husband rushed to her side, holding tickets and baggage, and the similarity stopped. For us, there would be no husband. No longer married, suddenly I was widowed. From Latin, the name means “emptied.” Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives. Shattered, the word kept recurring; the whole pattern shattered, just as the mountain rocks had shattered his body.

  Much of what happened after that remains a blur. I do not remember traveling back to New York. The president of Princeton called to ask, “What can we do to help?” “Thank you,” I said, thinking, Nothing. There’s nothing you can do to help, You can’t bring him back. Later, though, I called him to say that perhaps a stipend from the university’s emergency fund could help me afford to see a psychiatrist. I knew that I could not possibly teach; the energy and clarity that teaching requires, which I’d always taken for granted, were gone. The department chairman arranged for others to give lectures, assigning me only the task of leading small discussion groups in classes taught by our colleagues. That much I could manage. Without that fragment of normal life to cling to, as well as the income it provided, I felt that I might go insane.

  At first I was relieved to be back in New York, in our brownstone walk-up apartment with high ceilings, the flowered Persian carpet he’d bought at auction, which we called “our garden,” and in our own bedroom—him so strangely absent—that looked out onto trees below. But what to do with the heavy mahogany box containing his ashes that arrived from Farnum Funeral Home in Glenwood Springs, along with three copies of a death certificate? Finally I placed it on top of the highest bookshelf, where no one would notice and no one else would know what it was. I wanted to keep anything of him that remained, however meager, near us.

  Although I hoped to cling to some continuity, new concerns suddenly intruded. The lawyer who’d skillfully navigated our purchase and renovation of the rent-controlled apartment we’d moved into when we married more than twenty years earlier now told me that we could no longer afford to live there. The mortgage, our finances, the expenses, depended on both our salaries, now dropped to less than half when his salary ended; only mine remained. Even apart from expenses, I’d begun to realize that we could no longer go on living in New York. I could not leave our children in New York, even for a day, without a parent close by, although our beloved Jean was still caring for them in our home. Before, on the two or three days a week I went to Princeton, Heinz had stayed home until around noon, returning home early from his office, since I could arrive in time for family dinner. Now I dreaded the thought of having to sell our apartment, leave everything familiar, our neighborhood and our friends, and find a place to live in a town we didn’t know—another change that would further fracture the life we’d once shared.

  Next, our lawyer called me into her office for more bad news, her desk and part of the floor covered with old tax returns and piles of financial records she’d found in Heinz’s office. Twenty-four years earlier, before we married, when Heinz first moved to New York to take the position at Rockefeller University, he’d identified his mother, then his next of kin, as the sole beneficiary of his accumulated pension account and his life insurance policy. So even though we’d been married for over twenty years, and had written our joint will as soon as Mark was born, he’d never thought to change it to include us as his beneficiaries.

  That fall, Heinz’s colleagues at the New York Academy called me to say that Andrei Sakharov, the Russian physicist once honored in the Soviet Union for pioneering that country’s nuclear research, whom the Soviet secret police later forcibly consigned to a mental hospital because he was publicly advocating for human rights, had been released, partly in response to support that Heinz and other scientists had initiated through the International League for Human Rights. Now Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, were about to arrive in New York, and were planning to come to the New York Academy of Sciences, having intended to thank Heinz in person.

  Nearly fifteen years earlier, the Soviet Academy of Science had invited Heinz to come for a scientific exchange with physicists in Russia. Out of courtesy to our hosts, we flew on Aeroflot, the Russian airline. When we arrived in Moscow, the airport police, poker faced and suspicious, harshly
interrogated me about the sheaf of Coptic texts they discovered in my suitcase. What kind of code was this, anyway? Since Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language, looks rather like Greek and Russian, but deviates from both, they apparently assumed that I was working for the CIA. I told them that if they could read it better than I could, I’d love to have their translation. They were not amused, and harassed us for nearly four hours; but when they gave up, a Russian physicist drove us to our apartment in a cement building in the small city two hours from Moscow, where French physicists, collaborating with Russians, had built an atom smasher. “Don’t worry; they won’t bug our apartment,” Heinz had assured me. “Everyone likes to say they’ve been bugged, to make themselves sound important, but we’re not important enough for them to bother with.” But when agents of the secret police confronted us in Moscow and demanded that we hand over books we’d brought to give to a famous Jewish physicist who had asked us for them, we realized that they’d overheard us talking in the apartment that the government assigned to us. Then Heinz said, “I get it—it’s not about being important, it’s about employment. The government has to employ everyone, so they do bug everyone!”

  As Americans on a scientific exchange, often we were treated as highly privileged guests, immune from official threats, but soon we discovered what no one there would tell us. In the town where we lived, we saw a crew of Mongolians and other Asian men splitting railroad ties and building new tracks, as overseers with whips and guns stood over them and watched. When I asked the secret service agent assigned to me who those people were, she casually explained that they were part of an army—a “slave army,” she said—conscripted and forced into hard labor. Although the scientists we knew were far more protected, since government officials regarded them as essential for military research, we quickly learned that Jewish scientists, often even the most prominent among them, constantly suffered from virulent—and institutionalized—anti-Semitism.

  When Heinz was invited to speak at two different physics institutes in Moscow, we stumbled onto another secret. No one had ever told us that these institutes were segregated—one only for non-Jews, the other for Jews. Since Heinz wasn’t Jewish, he was invited to both. When we went to the second, we were looking forward to seeing a famous physicist whom he knew. But when that physicist arrived to hear Heinz’s talk, he came in late and left early, shaking his head and hurrying out to signal that we weren’t to speak with him, since talking with us would be dangerous for him. Saddened to see him humiliated, we wondered what kind of threat could terrify a man who was one of Russia’s most respected scientists. When Heinz confidentially inquired, a Russian colleague explained that Jewish physicists who displeased the secret police risked losing their apartments and having their children banned from attending any university. Others told us that some of the Jewish scientists had not been able to attend his talk, since they’d been denied visas to travel to Israel, or anywhere outside Russia, and had protested by starting a hunger strike. Shaken and troubled, Heinz resolved to do whatever he could to advocate for human rights, especially for his colleagues. “There’s not much we can do,” he said, “but we have to do whatever we can.”

  So after we returned to New York, he became actively involved in the International League for Human Rights, and later became its president. After gathering support from physicists in the American Academy of Sciences to publicize and protest the harsh discrimination that Jewish scientists experienced in the Soviet Union, he’d also initiated protests against the internment of Andrei Sakharov, intended to silence his influential voice. Now that Sakharov and his wife were soon to arrive in New York, having planned to meet Heinz, his colleagues at the academy asked me to meet with them instead. I took two-year-old Sarah with me, who was delighted to walk up and down the magnificent staircase with Heinz’s secretary during the ceremony. When it was done, I walked into the hall and unexpectedly stood face-to-face with Heinz’s portrait. Immediately I turned, blinded by tears, picked up Sarah, and left—the only time I ever went back there after he died.

  The next challenge felt even worse, terrifying. Heinz’s colleagues at Rockefeller had arranged a memorial service at the university, to be held toward the end of September—now coming up the next week. Since his death I had never gone back there either. The prospect of walking into his office, where I’d gone countless times to meet him, knowing that he would not be there, felt overwhelming—more inescapable evidence that he was not coming back. So I never went there; colleagues and friends packed his belongings and sent them to me. But I would have to go to the memorial service, and greet many people who had known and loved him, their simple presence reconfirming his death. Of course I could not deny what had happened, but I could hardly imagine walking into a public space filled with people who had come to acknowledge it.

  The night before the service, deeply distraught, I answered the phone. Thomas Keating, Trappist monk and spiritual father of the Colorado monastery, called to say that he was in New York visiting his sister. “Might I stop by for a visit?” Surprised and relieved to hear his voice, I said, “Yes, of course, Thomas; I didn’t know that monks made house calls!” When he arrived that evening after the children were asleep, he suggested that we meditate. When we did, his presence, like Theophane’s in the monastery chapel, felt like a deep anchor into the unknown. After we sat together in silence for more than an hour, I asked about something strange that happened during the meditation. “Thomas, I felt as though waves of energy were coming toward me from various directions, like waves and ripples in an ocean, as though people were sending me energy; but I have no idea from whom they came. What—if anything—do you make of this?” Before that time, when someone said to me “I’m praying for you,” I’d assumed that this was a vague gesture, a nod to good intentions, the pious equivalent of saying “Let’s have lunch sometime.” So that evening I was surprised, not having imagined that actual transactions might occur, as, in that extraordinarily susceptible state, I felt that they had. Thomas simply nodded and said, “Yes, that is what sometimes happens.” Having spent over fifty years in contemplative practice, he seemed to inhabit such states of being, and find them familiar.

  The next day, Heinz’s mother arrived, somber and sad; she, too, held grief close with a stoic reserve. She had not been able to travel to Aspen for the funeral, after the sudden shock of his death, so we agreed to go together to the memorial service. As a young woman, daughter of a long line of Lutheran pastors, she’d left religion behind and turned instead to Goethe and Wagner, often quoting a saying she attributed to Nietzsche: “Whatever does not kill me, makes me stronger.”

  My own parents, living in California, had not come for the funeral, as they hadn’t come for Mark’s, and were not coming for the memorial service either. In moments of anguish I’d longed for them to come, despite having learned over and over, as a child, that looking to my mother for comfort was usually futile. She had not come to visit when Mark was born, or when he had open-heart surgery, or when he died, each time having murmured some forgettable excuse. This time, during those moments when I sank into devastation, I tried to buoy myself up by saying, “Just as well—if they were here, I’d have to take care of them.” Only decades later, when our daughter, in her midtwenties, had twin babies born prematurely, did I realize how strange that was—and how shockingly painful. I could not imagine staying away from my own daughter at such a crucial time; how could any mother do that? But the pattern of oblivion was so deeply entrenched in our family that I allowed myself to be oblivious of that, too, until raw emotion burst out decades later.

  So I was doubly grateful that Heinz’s mother was coming. Ever since Heinz and I had become engaged, she’d welcomed me into her family, and I’d felt closer to her than to my own mother. Devastated as we both were now, we needed each other more than ever. I felt somewhat consoled to think that when we moved to Princeton, as we’d have to do now, we’d see her much more often; Sarah, too, was deeply attached to her “omma.” But w
hen we did, she could hardly bear to see us, and seldom did. To a considerable extent, she, too, sought to cope with Heinz’s death by blocking it out; and apparently our presence recalled too intensely the son—and grandson—she’d lost.

  From her reserve, holding herself away from close embraces, and from comments other family members made later, I finally realized that, perhaps obscurely, she partly blamed me. How had I allowed her son to engage in such dangerous sport? Why hadn’t I stopped him? I’d asked myself the same questions and blamed myself as well. No matter that long before the time we met, Heinz loved to hike in the mountains, or that none of all our friends with whom he hiked for over twenty-two years had ever been seriously injured, much less killed. Despite the guilt that I now recognized as the underbelly of grief, I knew that no one who loved him could have changed that. Although his mother adored Heinz, her closest friend told me later that after he died she never mentioned his name again. Not long afterward, she herself became ill and died. And although her other son discouraged us from coming to see her, I went on my own when she was alone, in a coma, and sat with her for hours, holding her hand, sometimes speaking gently, with no perceptible response.

  But on that clear September morning, I walked with her, holding her arm, through the iron gates of the university where we’d all danced together to celebrate our wedding. Entering the auditorium for the memorial service, which felt enormous, cavernous, on that day, I held my breath, fervently hoping to be able to greet people without starting to weep uncontrollably. Much of the service I don’t remember, except that Heinz would have been surprised and moved to see that, along with so many other friends and colleagues, his thesis adviser from Stanford had flown across the country to speak so warmly of him for a few minutes. What especially opened my heart was hearing Robert Mann and the musicians he’d generously brought with him playing an exquisite movement of a Schubert string quartet, with passion that allowed our feelings to pour into the music.