A month or two later, our close friends Lizzie, Emily, Sharon, and David asked me to join them for dinner. As the children’s godparents, they said, they’d been discussing our situation. Since the adoption agency finalized adoptions only after a child was a year old, they knew that we’d completed the legal process with Sarah but hadn’t had time before Heinz died to complete it with David. They had met before our dinner and agreed to a difficult task: to tell me that I was in no condition to do so. Raising one child was hard enough, they said, but doing so alone, as a widow, now solely responsible for supporting this child emotionally and financially, was clearly overwhelming. Certainly I must not take on sole responsibility for two.
Shocked into silence, I finally spoke. “What are you saying? Do you have any idea how it feels to have lost Mark, then Heinz? You imagine I would—voluntarily—lose another of our children? That’s insane!” They were trying to help, of course, but what they advised was impossible. Yet hearing their concern, I worried about how the social workers from the agency, soon to arrive in New York to evaluate the adoption, would see our situation. A few weeks later they came to New York and stayed for several days, spending many hours with each of the children, then sitting in our home observing Sarah and David with me and Jean, while interviewing us at length. To our enormous relief, they agreed to proceed.
Christmas lights, again, piercing like knives. The spirit of that season was never more remote than during those dark December days. Fortunately, Sarah, at two, and David, eight months old, did not notice the lapses. The date that loomed for me was New Year’s Eve. From the start of our marriage, Heinz and I had always given a party with lots of dancing; after we had children, we’d meet with those two other couples, close friends, for a celebratory dinner, the six of us—now five. This time we met at a crowded New York restaurant. After nearly two hours pressed into a booth, forks and glasses clattering, and noisy, shouting talk all around us, I was relieved to have gotten through it and go home.
Waking alone in the dark early the next morning, New Year’s Day, the coming year stretched out like a bleak and endless highway, leading nowhere. I kept walking back and forth, holding David to ease his pain from colic, while Sarah cried and screamed, clamoring for attention. Having held on for months, thinking that that if only we can get through to the new year, now I felt plunged into black ice, in danger of drowning. As the day wore on, in the solitude of our apartment, I felt flashes of horror: Is it possible that I couldn’t—shouldn’t—be trusted with our own children? Suddenly I understood our friends’ concern. Could this be what precedes some kind of breakdown—a sudden shift to feel oblivion as temptation, even as seduction? Shaking, I called a friend and told her that I’d come close to a breaking point. “It’s no honor to Heinz to fall apart now,” I kept repeating. If he’d been left instead of me, he would have grieved and wept, then stopped crying, taken care of the children, and gone on, would have married again. I must honor our marriage, and our commitments to our children.
When my friend called back, she said, “Stay right there; I’ve arranged for someone to get there soon to help you.”
“Where will she stay?”
“With you, of course.”
The next day, Sarah Duben-Vaughn arrived on our doorstep, suitcase in hand, having just flown in from California. Plain, practical, and energetic, she sized us up and moved in. Sarah, startled to discover that there could be another Sarah, immediately named her “Other Sarah,” responding to her generous warmth, as we all did. As tension began to drain from my body, I began to make sandwiches, with lemonade and chamomile tea, and to pack a bag for an afternoon at the park. That night, after the children had splashed and played in the bathtub, heard stories and songs, and finally slept, we talked until morning. A practicing psychologist, Sarah came from a family of nine, and had raised four children. Now, having gone through a divorce from a difficult marriage, she was willing to stay with us, to help. Before she arrived, I’d felt almost immobilized. Now we went out together, to the grocery store, to the cleaners, to the pediatrician’s office. “People are going to think you’re my nanny,” I joked, “but I feel that you’ve saved my life!”
After about ten days, fortified by her presence, I began to clear the closets of some of Heinz’s clothes. Carefully keeping the sweater he often wore, his rugby shirt, and the wedding clothes that smelled like him, I packed others to give to the Church of the Heavenly Rest, so that people who needed them could wear them. What about the heavy mahogany box on top of the bookcase? I could not imagine what to do, where it should go; yet after six months I felt its presence in our apartment weighing us down. When I finally confided in “Other Sarah” during one of our long evening talks, I realized that Heinz’s physical remains belonged where together we’d placed those of Mark, in the columbarium—the “dovecote”—in the lower level of the church.
How to make this transition? When I called the priest at the church, he agreed to meet us on a Friday morning in January to receive the box, and to arrange for an interment ceremony. That day, after Jean came to take the children out for the morning, “Other Sarah” offered to ritually cleanse and bless the house. Having brought sage from California, she burned it to create incense, then chanted prayers and blessings in every part of the home we had shared. We placed the heavy mahogany box in the center of the living room, and she incensed it as an orthodox priest would incense a coffin. Then we slowly carried it downstairs and out into falling snow, and turned toward Central Park. I’d refused to take a taxi, feeling that this mission required us to walk, and to carry the box ourselves.
Steadily falling at first, the snow softened all sound; we could hear the wind in the trees and see only our own footsteps in fresh snow. As we walked, increasingly braced against the wind, the storm intensified into a magnificent blizzard, which nearly emptied the park, turning it back into wilderness. Suddenly I recalled the day, over twenty years earlier, when Heinz had asked me to marry him—how then we’d walked out of his East Side apartment into snow falling in Central Park, toward the Museum of Natural History, arms around each other, filled with emotion, anticipating that we would marry. Now, on another Friday, also during the first week of January, Sarah and I were walking back the opposite way. Among waves of grief, I felt a surge of gratitude, thinking, We kept our vows; we kept faith with each other. After depositing the box with the priest to wait for the interment ceremony, we stopped to buy red tulips on the way back to the apartment. Now that was done.
Chapter 6
Life after Death
David Pagels’s second birthday, with Elaine, Sarah, and Emily Raboteau and her family, in Princeton, New Jersey.
Do you believe in life after death?”
“Yes, of course—but not my life after my death.”
Recalling Heinz’s answer when someone had asked him that question, I thought, So that’s what we’re living now—life after death.
But how to go on? Questions kept recurring: Where do they go? How can someone so intensely alive suddenly be gone? What happens? Where are they? Somewhere, or nowhere? Flashes of insight would vanish, like water falling through my fingers, leaving only hints, guesses—and hopes. On the day Mark died, I’d been astonished to have the clear impression that after he initially departed from his failing body, he’d been invisibly present with us in a room down the hall, then had returned to his body when his heart started beating again, only to stop when his heart and lungs failed to circulate oxygen. Moments later, back in the room where his lifeless body lay, I felt that somehow I’d seen precisely where he had ascended to the ceiling in a swirl of silver energy and departed. And what had happened three days after Heinz died, when he’d seemed to answer my unspoken question? Both experiences were completely contrary to what I expected, yet both felt vividly real—neither, as I’d been taught to believe, simply illusions, or instinctive denial of death’s finality.
More than six months after Heinz died, another surprise. I opened the top drawer
of my bureau, looking for the comic picture of Superman emblazoned on a cover of Time magazine, titled “Superman at Fifty!,” which I’d hidden there a year earlier to use on the invitations for the party I’d secretly planned for his fiftieth birthday. He never made it to fifty, though; that would have happened this February. Next to that picture, I’d placed the watch and belt that mountain rescue volunteers recovered from his body in July. Turning over his watch, I was astonished—not that it had stopped, but that it hadn’t stopped soon after he died. Instead, the watch’s timer showed that it had stopped one day before I was looking at it, on February 19—on the day that would have been his fiftieth birthday.
Could this be coincidence? Of course it could; I cannot draw any clear inferences from such incidents, although they’d shaken what once I’d taken for granted: the rationalism of those who insist that death is nothing but disintegration. As one anthropologist observes, when we confront the unknown, any interpretation is provisional, necessarily incomplete. Still, those experiences left with me the sense that when I come near death, I’ll likely be hoping to see the two of them, as the song says, welcoming me to join them “across the shining river.” At other times, though, I expect nothing more than a blank sky.
Meanwhile, there was work to do: raising our children, wading through a mass of legal papers, finances, and taxes, and recovering the professional life that was now our sole support, while, at a subterranean level, feeling adrift in dark, unknown waters. And although I’d flared with anger when the priest at Heinz’s funeral had warned not to be “angry at God” because of his sudden and violent death, I struggled not to sink under currents of fear, anger, and confusion that roiled an ocean of grief.
At times I turned that anger on myself, especially when certain relatives would demand, “Why didn’t you stop him from climbing?” implying that if I’d only done something different, he’d still be alive. At other times my anger turned toward him, when people raised accusing questions I’d suppressed: Why weren’t you more careful? Why didn’t you realize what your death could do to our family? After he died, one of his longtime hiking companions would cross the street whenever he saw me, to avoid speaking, apparently choosing to believe that the fall was Heinz’s fault, as if no careful climber, like himself, ever risked such an accident. Or perhaps he simply refused to acknowledge the vulnerability that underlies everyday life, as I longed to do myself. Every time that vision of his fall recurred, it opened an abyss, revealing how fragile our lives are. When Seth and I talked late at night, he told me what he’d seen in those last moments: How Heinz had stepped onto a path he knew well, having hiked it many times. This time, apparently, ice had frozen into fissures in the rock, so that it suddenly fractured and gave way under his weight—from one point of view, a matter of simple physics. Yes, Heinz, I thought, you were working on chaos theory, and your death persuaded me of it, and of the randomness of events in the universe, of which you often spoke.
Weeks later, Jeremy Bernstein, the physicist with whom Heinz shared an office, as well as countless hikes and jokes, came to talk about something we’d both noticed: how his ankles bowed out as he walked. When Jeremy reminded me that Heinz had taken a surprising fall only weeks before his death, we began to piece that together with what Jeremy hadn’t known: that he might have been losing strength from postpolio syndrome. For when Heinz was five years old, he lost sensation in his ankles and legs, and was diagnosed with polio; the doctors told his parents that he’d never walk again. He’d told me about the constant pain he’d endured as he lay in a hospital bed for over a year, dreading the agonizing spinal taps, immobilized on a ward with children trapped in iron lungs, terrified that he’d never get out. Every day his mother came to care for her son, encouraging him as he struggled to stand while grasping the iron bars of the hospital bed, teeth clenched with pain, until finally, with crutches and braces, he began to take steps.
By the time Heinz was in college, he’d become a strong, quick athlete who delighted in movement, and loved to hike, ski, and aim tennis balls across the court. In his forties, he brushed off what we’d heard of postpolio syndrome, which often occurs decades later to those who’d recovered from polio as children. If that’s what happened, it could account for the bowed-out ankles and loss of balance. Yet even if so, knowing him, I realized that he would have ignored any twinges of pain, any slight imbalances, having overcome his vulnerability as a child through fierce determination to walk again.
We don’t know for sure, of course, and even if we did, we’d still be left with emotional turmoil, like Sarah, who was racked with confusion, grief, and guilt, sometimes crying, sometimes furiously beating with her fists. No matter how much I held and rocked her, saying that he loved her, sometimes she’d blame herself, crying out, “Make Daddy come home—I’ll be good!” More often, she’d go into closets to hide, ducking out for a moment to shout, “Daddy, come find me!” At times like that, I was amazed and moved, guessing that instead of being afraid that he’d left because she was bad, she’d apparently decided that he was playing our game of hide-and-seek, and needed more clues, since she was hiding so well that he couldn’t find her. One afternoon in Colorado I drove out with her to the fields of tall grasses and wildflowers at Ashcroft, near Castle Creek, taking a picnic, as we’d often done as a family. When she initiated our game, hiding behind a tree and shouting, “Daddy, come find me!” I did the same. After we were both tired from running and shouting, hearing only the wind in the trees and the rushing creek, I gathered her into my arms, stroking her hair, and said, “Sarah, he would come to you if he could; but he can’t come now.”
But as Father Joseph had said during the mass at the St. Benedict’s Monastery, we adults often feel just as children do. For although being “angry at God”—or at myself, or him, or anyone else—made no sense to me, I was often overwhelmed by sudden, intense bursts of anger that had no outlet, no appropriate target. The anguish brought by Mark’s death, still fresh, now cut far deeper than ever. As long as Heinz was alive, we’d weathered and tempered each other’s wild storms of emotion as we saw our child moving closer to death, experiencing grief primarily as sadness—unspeakable, unimaginable sorrow.
But this second loss, striking like lightning, ignited shock and anger beyond anything I’d ever imagined, and I fiercely resisted both. It wasn’t just that my parents routinely stifled such feelings; much of our culture worked to shut them down. For as the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo notes in his powerful essay “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage”:
Although grief therapists routinely encourage awareness of anger among the bereaved, upper-middle-class Anglo-American culture tends to ignore the rage devastating losses can bring. . . . This culture’s conventional wisdom usually denies the anger in grief.
In his essay Rosaldo tells how he’d shared such denial until a devastating loss shattered it. Before that, he says, when talking with men of the Ilongot tribe in the northern Philippines, he was at a loss to understand what motivated their tribal practice of headhunting. When asked, the men simply told him that grief—especially the sudden rupture of intimate relationships—impelled them to kill. Their culture encouraged the bereaved man to prepare by engaging in ritual, first swearing a sacred oath, then chanting to the spirit of his future victim. After that, he was sworn to ambush and kill the first person he met, cut off the head, and throw it away. Only this, his informants explained, could “carry his anger.”
Dismissing what they told him, Rosaldo kept looking for more complicated, intellectually satisfying reasons to account for this ritual—until his young wife, the mother of their two children, accidently fell to her death. Finding her body, he says, the shock enraged and overwhelmed him with “powerful visceral emotional states . . . the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of realizing the finality of death . . . the mournful keening that started without my willing, and frequent tearful sobbing.” At the time he wrote in his journal that, despairing and raging,
he sometimes wished “for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So I need a place to carry my anger—can we say that a solution of the imagination is better than theirs?”
His question challenged me: Are the elusive experiences noted above, which I dared hope hinted at something beyond death, nothing but denial—what Rosaldo derisively calls “a solution of the imagination”? Noting that some Ilongot men converted to Christianity after headhunting was outlawed, Rosaldo initially suggested that such converts were simply turning to fantasies of heaven to deny death’s reality. What he wrote of anger, though, helped me acknowledge my own. Much later, for me as for him, raw experience poured into what I was writing, as I sought to untangle my own responses, while sensing how powerfully our culture shapes them.
More than a year after Heinz died, often overcome by emotional storms and bouts of pneumonia, I was asked to speak at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Some of its members, intrigued by what I’d written in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent about sexuality and politics, invited me to speak at their annual meeting. But the topic they chose for their next meeting was “rage, power, and aggression.” Startled, at first I refused; how could I speak to that? But on reflection, I realized that Heinz’s death compelled me to contend with the ways that our culture interprets—and represses—rage and aggression. Realizing, ruefully, that I was, indeed, qualified, I felt that speaking about rage might help gain some sorely needed perspective, and so I dived in.
Now, as I began to reread familiar biblical stories, I became much more aware that while Ilongot culture celebrates anger, even intentional murder, done “for cause,” our culture vilifies it. I was startled to see that the first story in Genesis that mentions human anger, for example, tells how the Lord himself warns Cain, violently jealous of his brother, Abel, to master rage, lest it overpower him. When Cain’s anger boils over and he murders his brother, he barely escapes being killed himself, and, stigmatized, suffers punishment for the rest of his life. Biblical stories show that those who grieve the dead—bereaved mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters—are expected to respond not with anger but with sadness, putting ashes on their heads, tearing their own clothes—in effect, inflicting pain on themselves, in practices that anthropologists call self-mortification (literally, “killing oneself”). For from the start—the biblical story of Adam and Eve—the Bible interprets death, especially death through illness, war, or accident, as punishment for sin.
Why Religion? Page 13