my theological dogma wrong. “Protestants don’t believe in that.”
There’s a soul, and there’s a body. Unless you’re Mary, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ, or Christ the Savior himself, your body sticks around and gets stuffed full of embalming fluid so little kids can stare at you and wonder why you smell funny. I didn’t cry, because I wasn’t sad that my Uncle Loren had died. I was too angry at him. It was one more reminder that every positive comes with a negative, and every life demands death as its price. Uncle Loren was the one person I could count on to take my side. So God killed him, as if to say, “Defend yourself, already! What, you think being a little kid earns you a pass? A century ago, you’d be working full time in a factory and dead of dysentery by age six. So whine all you want. Boo hoo!” My dad had lived through two great tragedies, the Korean War and the car accident that destroyed his legs, which turned his life into Madame Butterfly meets The Sun Also Rises. I just had stupid allergies and an annoying older brother, whose very existence seemed to be God’s way of letting me know, “Yes, Little Egg, there is a Hell!” And then He cracks me on the head.
“He’s in Heaven,” my father repeated solemnly. “He was a good man.”
My Auntie Ima blew her nose loudly, and resumed blubbering.
The problem isn’t death. It’s the horrible feeling that something has been taken away. It’s Lucy van Pelt convincing Charlie Brown to kick the football, then—“AAUGH!”—she whisks it away. “You shouldn’t have trusted me, Charlie Brown,” she tells him smugly as he lands with a hard thump on the ground, mentally kicking himself for being such a chump. The joke is that he never learns. Again and again she persuades him with a sweet smile, “Kick the football, Charlie Brown!” and he keeps hoping that this time it will be different, and the ball will soar through the unseen goalposts, earning him cheers from the crowd and kisses from the Little Red-Haired Girl. He falls for the line no less than forty-two times. “You shouldn’t have trusted me,” Lucy reminds us. We know the outcome and yet, a teeny part of us still hopes that maybe, just maybe, forty-three is the charm . . .
AAUGH!
Sometimes I wonder how I would have turned out if my parents had raised me in Nebraska, a state that grimly warns you: “Equality before the Law.” This doesn’t mean equality in the eyes of Ms. Law, because she’s blind and therefore handicapped. Nope. It’s all about Procrustean justice, Tarantino-style, and if you don’t like it—go ahead, make my day: I’ll blow the head right off your oversized corn dog. Because my dad is a saint, his response to war was to pray for men’s souls. Me, if I was on a battlefield and my friends were being killed, I’d figure out an attack strategy, grab the best sharpshooters, and save my troops. I’d also be court-martialed for breaking chain of command and having my period, but, like, whatever. A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.
My father says I focus on the flesh because I already know what happens to the soul after death, and so, it bores me. But he also thinks that in a previous life, I was General George Patton. Even at age four, I thought Heaven seemed suspiciously like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz series. Now that I’m sprouting gray hairs on my head, I still don’t believe in reports of “Heaven” because I’ve yet to read one of these “I’ve been to Heaven!”-type books that isn’t describing a Renaissance painting full of white people riding unicorns. Logically, Heaven ought to be a place where humanoids are conspicuously absent, not flitting around on butterfly wings as their golden hair flutters in the wind. I don’t believe in reports of alien abductions for the same reason, because the aliens from Planet Enema always look like Steven Tyler with a shaved head. An omnipotent, omnipresent, infallible God ought to be able to do better than cough up the judging panel for American Idol to populate the infinite Universe.
If Hell, as philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared, “is other people,” then all those authors who died on the table, went to Heaven, ran into grandma and grandpa, and got shoved out so they could return to Earth and tell us lesser mortals about it, are profoundly delusional. Hint: it’s not Heaven they visited.
After the funeral, I ran outside and lost myself in the woods while my parents tended to the mourners. I wasn’t some kind of feral child communing with the beetles. The basic point was to get away from humans. This would have suited my Uncle Loren just fine. He would have run away from all those soggy people too. Since he believed in Heaven, they should be glad, because his soul has achieved the perfect Eternal. Which means that all those weepers, sitting around snotting up their handkerchiefs, are mostly feeling sorry for themselves. Why? The guy in the coffin’s the one who got himself dead. You should be happy it’s not you.
Or maybe not.
We can’t talk about that. Let’s change the subject!
So I fled.
Here is the thing about my Uncle Loren that I wasn’t supposed to know: he’d been one of the loudest voices in the faction that got all riled up about the changes to the, ahem, liturgy. Deeply offended by the prospect of excessive hymn singing, he came to services because Auntie Ima made him. He sat, arms crossed and pouting in the pews. He stalked out after the services. He hated going to church when he could be comfortably napping. He scowled as he volunteered to shovel the church sidewalks. He frowned as he handed out programs to the new members at Sunday services. He glowered as he stood at the pulpit and read the extra scriptures he insisted upon choosing from Leviticus, the Old Testament book that fundamentalist Christians love, because it commands humans not to lie, spread malicious gossip, or wear cotton-polyester blends. More and more people started joining my dad’s congregation, and my Uncle Loren complained about that too, grumbling that maybe we needed to build a bigger church to hold all the new families, and what could he do to help?
In the end, he practically adopted us because he was, indeed, a good man, and Leviticus also commands: “The stranger that dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” Yes, this verse is from Leviticus. It’s also from the New Testament Book of Matthew the Nice, because the Bible plagiarizes itself.
This is why my dad believes the Lord works in mysterious ways. It is also why my mother knew that the Devil does too.
Then we moved.
The Methodist Church moves its pastors around every few years. We ended up living all over the state, from the southernmost border to the northernmost expanses where the U.S. blurs into Canada. So when I say I’m from Maine, that’s about as specific as I can get. It’s also because I’m very bad at geography. Dyslexics can’t distinguish hither from yon. My other deficiencies include no sense of direction—a sense that, I will soapbox here, needs to be added to the other six (sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and ESP), then inspected and PASSED at the body factory before the manufacturer can make shipment. On top of everything else, I’m a statistical rarity: a female with color blindness. Color gives me real problems. For a long time, I had no idea I couldn’t see them, and neither did the grownups. They just thought I liked wearing mismatched socks. Eventually, I learned that the rest of the world didn’t see things like I do, and thought it normal to sort things according to their hue. What was wrong with me? The answer was simple. Frankenstein stuck Abby Normal’s rotten brain in my head. So I said: “Ixnay on the ottenray! Normal is overrated.” Atchoo!
Maine is full of interesting towns, such as Rome, Mexico, Oxford, Poland, Norway, Moscow—and, of course, Paris. It’s the globe in a nutshell, and it’s full of snow too! But our moves always took us to dying little towns with dreary names like “Brownville Junction,” not to be confused with “Brownville,” even though they’re two sides of the same town on the wrong side of the tracks. The state of Maine has a Greenville, but it’s brown too. Which makes it Maine’s version of Greenland: it’s not really green, but somebody insisted that it was, and the name stuck.
