Alas that one should go astray

Third potential chapter in my book. And the hardest to reveal.

I’m mid-final edits on my book. About halfway through, I fiddled with the sentence strokes, so edits are taking more time than I want.

Each chapter is titled by a lyric that informed my grief and work towards forgiveness.

I’m giving you, my dear readers, previews. Not without fear. I don’t always make the right choices. I hope my faults stand out, not varnished or excused, but rather they stand in the kind of nakedness they deserve. I’ll leave you all to weigh them.

That said, I attended Lilith Fair in 1994, with a friend from church, and first heard Emmylou Harris outside of my Grandma Mae’s kitchen. Emmylou sang this, and I stopped in my spot. Everything changed that day. I hope you’ll listen before or as you dive in to read.
Thank you for reading. I’m terrified for you to see this, but it’s best to be out with the worst of our missing the mark.

I want to make it clear. On the night my Grandma Mae died, I asked David if he wanted to go to Drag Bingo. I wanted to be sedated. I might have had the Ramones song tripping in my head because my head runs a constant soundtrack of music, usually playing subconsciously in the background. Or maybe it was the Violent Femmes mucking about in my brain or Band of Horses yomping between my eardrums. Some mashed-up line like I’m sedated, blistered on a sidewalk, and trying to be ready for the funeral.

Sometimes you want to say screw it — a line from one of my husband’s songs — and just have some innocent fun, which David and I thought the bar would be when we walked past it for the fifth time that week. I asked if we wanted to go for a drink there after dinner.

We were walking back from Neat Neat Neat Records, past storefronts being revived, the pub advertising happy hour appetizers and four-dollar craft beers, past the bar, a brick building with blacked-out windows, which we’d passed several nights in a row. A bright purple neon sign blinkered After Dark. We had speculated on what type of establishment it was for several nights.

David said he’d pop up the steps and check what the place was.

Drag bingo tonight, he said.

Wanna do it? I asked him. It wasn’t something we’d usually do, but a year before we’d popped into a brewery in Virginia and found families enjoying bingo, deejayed by a pair of drag queens who salsaed around the room to eighties hits between rounds. While the kids colored and parents sipped craft beer at the Richmond brewery, I made an account before God and people in church and to family.

Of course, this would scandalize Grandma Mae — and likely our congregation, I’d said to David. The question wasn’t their immodesty. The drag queens, one in a fabulous red gown and another in lycra and lace, wore as many layers as I’d had in high school. Nylons, undergarments, our garments, as much as the vaudeville dancer in one of our family’s favorite musicals, "Calamity Jane."

The problem wasn’t men acting in women’s clothes—in Shakespeare’s day, women were prohibited from acting, so younger men played the female characters. Nor was the problem cross-dressing. Our church tradition had made saints of women who dressed up as monks and lived ascetical lives alongside their brothers, undetected until death. The issue was that the men thrilled in beautifying themselves, like Pelagia, the actress—or dancer, depending on the account. When Bishop Nonnus saw her in her finery—or lack of it, in the accounts where she is said to be a dancer—he did not turn his eye to ostracize her. Rather than looking away as if to shame her, he repented publicly, saying he should put as much effort into his soul for God as she put into her appearance for her patrons.

After we left the brewery, I chattered my way through my complicated thoughts. David listened with the same tact he’d always had. Focus on God, love others, and be available to minister when asked. Don’t worry about the orthodoxy sniffers. Don’t be so conscious-stricken that you’re divided within yourself.

So when I suggested we go ahead and spend the rest of the evening at After Dark, he said, Sure, but it doesn’t start till eight. Enough time for us to walk back to our Airbnb, a one-room suite with a private bathroom in front of the historic house in a less-than-fancy neighborhood. We dumped our computer bags, scarfed down takeout stored in the mini fridge, and walked back. The sun was still high in the sky.

When I was a kid, this neighborhood was the projects; now it was being renewed. Papered windows announced a brewery opening blocks away. We’d just strolled back from the riverfront park, watching kayakers launch for an afternoon row. After we peeked into the Tincaps field and meandered the botanical gardens I’d loved to visit as a kid, we stopped for a pint. David’s head wasn’t up for another half-mile stroll back downtown. He’d been slowed down by the concussion he’d sustained the same day Grandma went brain-dead.

That whole week, starting with Mother’s Day, had snowballed to this moment. Now that Grandma Mae was gone, not just on life support, but gone-gone, as we’d say, David and I had nothing left but to hunker down until the funeral. Right after the accident, I’d asked David if we could be nearby while she was on life support. For a day, we waited for tests of her brain function. Two days later, Dad and his brothers made the decision. With no brain function, they’d wait for the rest of the family to come in from out west.

I’d thought maybe I’d want to be in the room when they extubated Grandma. But really, I think I wanted to be far away from life — grief brain, I figured — and the church conflict that had roiled our congregation since the pandemic shutdown. David wanted to be away from those stresses. He’d just started his sabbatical and considered it best to be away, in spite of the accident and his concussion. The past five years had been — I had to take a breath to find a word — a lot.

We showed up at eight p.m. A blond boy in ripped skinny jeans perched on a stool, collecting the cover—ten bucks—a vape in his fist. He sported a Nineties skater cut, the kind David had when I met him, shaved underneath, Kurt Cobain long on top. The music thumping over the system mirrored all the rock stations in town, a playlist comically stuck on Tom Petty, Mellencamp, and Gin Blossoms mixed with GnR, Roxette, and Nelson — and it brought out my saucy snark — part music snobbery, part nauseated triggering of high school memories.

I ordered wine. The bartender, in his cutoff jean shorts, unscrewed the cap off a cheap wine brand, sure to give me a headachy morning. David ordered a local craft brew. We were almost ready to order a second drink when Drag Bingo started. Realizing we didn’t have tip money, David jumped up to shake down the cash machine in the foyer. I watched him from my barstool, still overthinking the idea of being there and worried he’d miss marking his card. David looked furtively at the ATM machine, as if it were a snack dispenser that hadn’t quite dispensed a bag of Doritos he’d just paid for. It took too long, but he had a fistful of greenbacks when he took his stool next to me. He’d need to break the twenties with a second round of drinks before bingo, he said. So we’d have singles.

Listen, this is great, but what if anyone ever found out?

I’m done worrying about it, M.L. I opened for a drag artist, remember?

Oh yeah. He’d played a fundraiser of mixed acts at the historic old Masonic Lodge building in our hometown that no longer housed the Masons. And he’d not sought a blessing for the fundraiser. It was a good cause. He was doing the best he could with what he knew when he played. And before seminary, he asked the archbishop at the time for a blessing to play pubs and bars. The archbishop asked back how else he would find the unchurched. It’s not like sinners stumble into church hoping to find welcome.

Do you suppose we are intruding on someone else’s safe space? I asked. David had looked up After Dark on our walk back. It was the city’s oldest gay bar. Just a few years after the Pulse Nightclub shooting, my queer friends still felt rattled. It wasn’t long ago. It happened the year Ruthie’s cancer came back. She’d been alive, with enough energy left to be outraged. That year, our queer friends reckoned with Pulse Nightclub, David buried the first death in our congregation, and then we laid out Ruthie’s body.

I’d prepared for the death, but when the time came, I wasn’t ready. Andrew had to show me how to pull Ruthie’s catheter, trach tube, and ostomy bag. I redeemed myself by teaching him and one of my middle sisters, Anya, how to use antibacterial wipes and frankincense oil to clean the openings: her mouth, her nostrils, her privates. We shampooed her hair multiple times, trying to wash away weeks of grease. It remained thick and oily, so I rubbed in dry shampoo and flat-ironed it into a bob. When I lifted her to pull on her favorite bright dress, I saw the blood already pooling like bruises on her backside.

I’m so sorry, honey. I hope we shifted your body enough. I hope you died as comfortably as possible. Tears dripped on the snarky mismatched socks as I tugged them on. Then, Andrew suggested we tie her favorite scarf around her neck to hide the black, cancer-eaten hole and the black tumors growing through the skin of her neck. When we lifted her into the plain wood box David and I had driven from Indiana, I showed Anya how to use dry ice around her body for the two-day wake. I tried to shake the cold fury on Michaela’s face when she opened the door and saw the three of us preparing Ruthie for burial.

I’d asked Michaela if she wanted to help at least twice. She never answered that question directly. She and Matt wanted nothing to do with Ruthie’s memorial service. They’d buried a dear friend in their church. It had been too much to grieve and minister simultaneously. I think we should be sitting in the pews, being ministered to. Even as I clocked Michaela’s grief, I failed to anticipate how it informed her. A few hours later, she’d find me alone in the empty kitchen. She spun around, close enough she might have jabbed me in the face.

I will never forgive you.

If a chest was a car, this one thundered. One foot braked me in place, one urged me to race away. She must be certain she’s right, I thought. I’d never have this courage. How to diffuse her? Was this grief? What had I done? Which thing was unforgivable? David doing the service? Me preparing her body? What had I missed?

Sorry, sorry, sorry spewed out. I was just doing what Ruthie wanted, fulfilling her wishes.

After a person is dead, we don’t have to fulfill their wishes, ML. They’re dead.

We didn’t? I’d promised Ruthie. I was a person of my word. Yes, she was dead, but she’d made these arrangements to lighten Andrew’s load. Five years of her cancer was enough for him. She’d said I should shift course if he said so, but other than that, she owed no one else, me included, anything. Her husband and her children first. Andrew had indicated to follow her wishes.

As you wish, I imagined him saying to Ruthie. We all overquoted The Princess Bride.

What about Andrew’s wishes? He wanted this. I didn’t add “too” because he might not have. He’d avoided funeral planning until the final weeks of her life. Ruthie warned me he had the right to change whatever we’d talked about, but he’d followed her wishes. I think he respected her strong will.

Michaela’s anger, like a shaft of hatred, left me defenseless, by my own choice. I’d decided long ago to fight my impulse to anger. I failed in the silly stuff—toes stubbed, teens who mouthed off—but in crises, I defaulted to apology, sorrow, and sometimes, a calm awareness of how to get through.

I wasn’t calm, though. I’d never seen this coming.

Over five years on, the contempt unleashed in that moment remained like shrapnel in my soul. Sorrow and threat surrounded me and seemed to loom in the oldest gay bar in town. The queens had only to drag a bit of joy out of the handful of us. But they had their work cut out for them with David and me.

In my head, I held Ruthie’s death. Grandma’s final waking moments at a table in a Denny's on Mother’s Day, and the two women across the room, trusting they were in a safe space. They pressed close to each other. I thought of the Pulse Nightclub victims, a slice of everyone, all the labels lost and the names and faces remembered. Contempt, not hate, is what pulsed in me. I grieved it. I feared it.

A priest we know once explained the trauma-shrapnel metaphor. When it sinks, the body closes around it. Trying to extract it surgically may do more damage. The body learns to work around it, sometimes pushing it up and out, but that could take a lifetime. One learns to live with it. Contempt was the improvised emotional device meant to kill souls, if not on detonation, over time, if leaded. But it doesn’t always kill. The body can push it out, but time, patience, and awareness may work it to the surface. Or one learns to live with it.

What are you thinking?

I was thinking about Ruthie and me driving to church a few months after her diagnosis. Junie and Devon clamored for our attention in the backseat, but I asked the hard question. How do you feel about going to church alone? Answer? Not easy, but he was a good man.

I agreed. What made him lose his faith? Is it like what happened to Christy?

The night Christy returned from four months on a mission trip, the ten burrito dishes on the local restaurant’s menu undid her. Too many choices. We ran out of the extra food we brought for the kids within a few weeks. Even hungry, they came. One sibling came in the morning, ran home at lunch, and gave her dress to her sister, or a boy changed into his brother’s trousers for the afternoon. They never came unless in their Sunday best. Two weeks later, the earth shattered the island’s capital city, and a deep crack split her heart. They put their faith in God. What Christy didn’t say was the question that destroyed her faith: Where was God?

Not the same, Ruthie said of Andrew’s disavowal of God. Maybe she thought I’d heard more. He was fired. I knew he’d finally found a position as a youth pastor sometime in the last year.

Why?

Church leadership wanted him to deal with a gay kid in his youth group.

Deal with?

Tell her she couldn’t be gay and Christian. Or they wanted him to tell her how God would fix her.

So he wouldn’t let the kid be the collateral damage of their hard lines and narrow doorways. Andrew filled in the story for me over the next few visits. He hadn’t let his shadow cross a church door in over a year. If the Church condemned the girl, then it could condemn him too, for all he cared. He respected Ruthie, her churchgoing, her coaching the Bible quizzers, and hauling their toddlers with her every Wednesday and Sunday. After Ruthie too lost her faith, she honored mine and the rest of the family’s.

While Tears for Fears warned that everybody wanted to rule the world, David asked, What are you thinking about? I said, Can’t quite put words to it yet. I was trying to grasp a God like Ruthie believed in then: I don’t believe in a god who’d condemn Andrew and Christy. My faith in God was my bulwark, but its intersection with others was where it all became complicated — the collateral damage of cancer and cruelty from fellow believers, the God that Grandma Mae and Grandpa Dale reflected, a God of love and endless hope. I let my brain flick to the understanding of God that Grandpa Curtis and Grandma Louise honored: strict, disciplined, a God who tolerated no mistakes or failures of character.

I palmed a greenback to one of the drag queens while Cyndi Lauper cheered girls to have fun. Grandma Mae, my last grandparent, had breathed her last assisted breath a day ago; her last unassisted one mere hours after. In her youth, she galumphed up and down stairs with a careless joy. She read the Bible at dawn with old-timey music on AM radio in the background. I remembered her telling me about how their denomination ruled cards sinful. She and Grandpa raised my dad and his brothers, but they just drew the curtains closed and played Dutch Blitz, Hand and Foot, Rook, and Hearts together. Cards were sinful in her youth. Movies, TV, non-Christian music, and alcohol when I was a kid.

After a total eclipse of the heart, I asked myself, How do I embrace joy like this? The smile from Cinnamon, the slight warmth through the lace glove, the crack of light in my dissonance flashed. Especially in the face of those who’d rather I just disappear. I swirled my cheap wine. Like Raphael and Ally, Aaron— people who’d tried to divide the church and pressure David to resign or the bishop to punish him. They’d long campaigned against anyone who failed to align with them on social issues. David didn’t, a flaw in his character if not his soul.

They felt justified, then, in their campaign against him, first with months of long meetings over numerous issues; parish council objections; their letter to the bishop; when that failed to gain traction, their emails to church members; finally, pulling their support and moving on to another parish. The final goodbye, a message that wounded. A shame he, we, didn’t leave.

I couldn’t help but braid the threads in front of me into a narrative.

We left after a Whitney Houston number, a little before ten. Grandma was dead. My sister dead. Millions dead in the pandemic. I tried not to spiral on all the hurt in the world. I was catastrophizing in the story I told myself.

A skinny white man in cut-off jeans walked back and forth, a lonely wolf on the other side of the bar, as we walked out. I said a small prayer for him.