Why Religion? Page 9

  When I came to, I was in another room down the hall, as a doctor revived me with smelling salts, and opened my eyes to see Heinz arriving in great haste. When he cried out, “Oh, it’s over, it’s over . . .” I said, “It’s not over until it’s over—let’s ask him to come back and go to California with us.” At that moment I somehow felt that Mark could hear us; I felt his presence near the ceiling of the room. Heinz and I sat together, clasped tightly, and spoke to him. Moments later, his cardiologist came in, saying, “I don’t want to get your hopes up, but his heart had stopped, and now it’s beating again.” Immediately we went to the room where he was and held him; but he did not regain consciousness; shortly after that, the heartbeats stopped.

  We don’t know, of course, what happened. I had the clear impression that he’d heard us and had gone back into his body, but found that it couldn’t sustain his life, since oxygen could not circulate through his spent lungs. Strangely, I also sensed that he’d felt a burst of joy and relief to leave his exhausted body. Before that moment, I’d taken for granted what I’d learned, that death was the end, any thought of surviving death only fantasy. Although that may be true, what I experienced that day challenged that assumption. I was astonished, seeming to sense that Mark was all right, wherever he was, and that he was somewhere. But that didn’t change what we felt: utter desolation.

  We stayed in the same room long after his life departed. During those six or seven hours, his body and features changed, as death took them over. Finally we could see that he was completely gone, his body deserted. After midnight, Heinz gently put his arms around me and said, “It’s time to go home,” and I realized that there was nothing more to do. He was right, and we walked out of the room, down the corridor, and out the back door of the hospital. Mark’s godparents had joined us at the hospital, and Sharon came back to the apartment, where Jean had stayed with Sarah. Later Sharon told me that around four A.M., when Sarah woke, she’d gotten up to care for her, but saw that, having heard the baby cry, I already was up, holding and feeding her in a rocking chair. Of this I remember nothing.

  At the service for Mark, friends came from all parts of our lives, close friends and those we hadn’t seen for years. I was amazed and grateful to see them, although I felt strange, as though we were walking naked in public, utterly defenseless, the bereaved parents touching the small plain wooden coffin, covered with a beautifully embroidered altar cloth. Close friends offered to play music, especially welcome, since words were impossible to absorb. Finally, “Amazing Grace,” a song Mark loved, as Heinz and I walked out behind his coffin. We stood at the back of the church, weeping and hugging our friends, grateful to see godmother Sharon holding Sarah, now nine months old. Standing there, I seemed to see the whole scene embraced by a huge net made of ropes, with enormous spaces between the knots, through which we could be swept away at any moment, out of the world. I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world. The only words I remember from those moments was someone saying, “It’s as though you were a channel”—words that startled me, recalling words from the ritual in which I’d participated before Mark was conceived. Much later, back at the apartment after the service, I heard Heinz say to Lizzie, “I would’ve given my life for him, but no one would take it.”

  Later, when we returned to the hospital to pick up Mark’s blanket and clothes, his cardiologist stopped us, put her arms around us, and said, “I’m so sorry. If I’d seen him that day, I would have immediately put him into intensive care.” She knew, of course, that he could not survive, and she wanted to let us down slowly—but at what cost of unimaginable suffering to Mark? Without a moment’s hesitation, I turned to look into her eyes, and said, “Then thank God you didn’t see him.”

  Times of mourning displace us from ordinary life. Sometime later, Rebekah, Mark’s “best grown-up friend,” told us that although she hadn’t known of his death at the time, of course, on the day that Mark died, she’d been walking down the street in San Francisco when she suddenly felt that he was walking with her, holding her hand, for just a few moments. Then, too, the physician who was the mother of Mark’s “best child friend,” and who, like the other parents at his school, knew nothing of Mark’s lung disease, told us that on that same afternoon, her son Bram, also six years old, suddenly had a collapsed lung, and had been rushed to the hospital. Fortunately, that emergency was quickly resolved. Years later, I met Bram on a street in New York, walking with his mother, his wife, and their beautiful son, nearly two years old, in a stroller. Bram told me that he’s now an emergency room physician, and his wife a pediatric oncologist.

  Although we’d heard that many couples separate after the death of a child, Heinz and I drew even closer, and closer with Sarah. Heartbreak had opened up his heart to an enormous empathy. We were surprised, too, to admit to each other that in our devastation, we also felt some relief from the tension that had held us for years; the sword we’d felt hanging over our lives had fallen; what we’d most dreaded had happened.

  Only years later did I realize that we’d barely escaped what I can only call a vision of hell. Had we ignored the risks when Mark was two and taken him to the mountains instead of to California, the doctors would have blamed us for putting his life in danger when they discovered pulmonary hypertension, saying—or thinking—“You should never have done it; we warned you!” Far worse, we would have blamed ourselves, and, likely, each other as well. In that case, our marriage, which sustained us, likely would not have survived. As it was, we were together and present, to support him and each other. Now we still had each other, our daughter, and the astonishing grace of the life that Mark had shared with us.

  Recalling this now, I can tell only the husk of the story—a story known inwardly only by those who have experienced such a loss, which we’d wish for no one else to suffer. Those who have not often say, “I can’t imagine how you felt, what that was like.” I can hardly imagine it either, even having lived through it. Recently, when someone said that, I found myself answering, “Like being burned alive.”

  Chapter 4

  Going On

  Mark Pagels at kindergarten, the Town School, New York.

  Two months after Mark died, friends of Heinz invited us to a festive dinner dance to celebrate their wedding anniversary. I was startled: “Dance? Now? Do they know what just happened?” They did, of course. After talking, we finally agreed. “Why not? We love to dance.” So on the appointed evening, after hesitating about what to wear, I chose a flared blue silk dress, and clung to Heinz’s hand as we entered the ballroom. Our hosts had seated us at their table, along with several other couples whom we didn’t know. When the music started, we immediately stood up to dance; we hadn’t danced in far too long. As tension began to release, we leaned into the music, weaving into movement and touch. No one spoke to us of what had happened, but I was surprised and moved to sense that some of them surely knew. On the dance floor, they surrounded us with unspoken care, acting on some protective instinct, like elephants who nudge the wounded into the center of the herd so that instead of falling behind, they keep moving along with the others.

  Earlier that week, when Lizzie asked Heinz how he was doing, he deflected the question, saying, “Oh, I was just feeling sorry for myself.” She was impressed with what she saw as his lack of self-pity, but I was concerned about the way he held his feelings close. The grief cut so deeply that he sometimes seemed distant, in shock. I began to see how chasms could open up between parents after a child’s death, as so often they do: we longed to escape the river of grief we could see reflected in each other’s eyes. Since we could barely talk about what happened—still too raw—we drew each other close by making love, stoking fires that, for moments at least, seemed to shut out death.

  Until that spring, we’d expecte
d to take Mark and Sarah, now nine months old, to California for the summer, but now everything had changed. Instead of California, where we’d gone to protect Mark from high altitude, we’d go back to the Colorado mountains. First, though, we flew to California. Since no one in my family had come to Mark’s funeral, my parents having excused themselves by saying that the trip was too stressful, I’d had a videotape made so that they could share it, too. When we visited months later, my mother was horrified when I suggested that she watch that video with me. Surprised and disappointed, I never dared mention it to my father or my brother. The atmosphere in their house felt stifling, surreal; no one mentioned Mark; apparently, he’d simply vanished. How had I managed to forget that our family’s only response to death was stark and silent denial?

  Now I recalled what had happened long ago when one of my high school friends came to live with our family for several weeks during our senior year, while her mother was hospitalized during surgery for breast cancer. I’d never imagined that her mother would die, since no one in my family had even hinted at that possibility. When she succumbed to that disease in her early forties, I went to her funeral, weeping as if inconsolable. I was shocked when her family invited me to join them afterward for a gathering where everyone ate, drank, talked, and hugged. I fled, confused and angry at what felt like their callousness: Shouldn’t they all have gone home feeling desolate, to cry alone in a closet, as I did?

  My father had fashioned his own escape from the turmoil of his family by putting aside emotion—and, with it, religion, so much driven by emotion. When he spoke of his parents, as he almost never did, he scowled, suggesting that they waged religious war in the household, wielding Calvinist dogma like hatchets, threatening fires of eternal damnation. While I was glad that he’d bushwhacked his way out of whatever dark wilderness they inhabited, his choices had left us a meager emotional stew. Since our parents treated anger, grief, and death as if they were insoluble, we could do nothing but ignore them. Only decades later, when I heard the anthropologist Clifford Geertz speak about what looked like wildly bizarre practices—cremation rituals in Bali—did I hear him speak of a path toward consolation: that “the work of culture is to make suffering sufferable.” So when my friend’s relatives gathered for a wake after her mother’s funeral to eat, drink, and talk, they understood far more than I’d ever imagined.

  So besides the simple and powerful ritual we’d shared, heartbroken, at the Church of the Heavenly Rest, I needed to create another ritual of our own. After we left my parents’ house to drive back to the cabin in California where we had spent summers with Mark, I drove to the seaside town of Santa Cruz, to the bead store that Mark called the “jewel store,” where he loved to pick out rubies, sapphires, emeralds, pearls, and diamonds, all made of glass or plastic. We’d often used them for games we invented, like “jewel thief”; now I brought back a small brown paper bag full. Joined by my brother and sister-in-law, and Rebekah, Heinz and I walked together through the fields, by the paddock where the horses came to the fence to greet us, to the fallen log that served as our airplane, the apple tree, the tree house, and the creek. Each of us took a handful of jewels and left them in the places that held our memories, acknowledging what we’d shared there with Mark every summer during the six years of his life.

  We were exhausted with grief, and devastated, of course, but grateful for what Rebekah’s mother, a psychology professor at the local university, told us. “Whenever I’ve known of the death of a child, the parents either tried to ignore what happened, and it ruined their lives—or else they turned it into the centerpiece, and it ruined their lives. But,” she said, “you haven’t done either; you’ll be able to go on living, even though you’re torn apart with grief.” Having lived with Mark’s impending death over us for years, we did feel some reassurance: nothing worse could happen.

  We could not go back to our summer home in the mountains, having rented it out before Mark died; so when we flew back to Colorado we found a small apartment in town, where Heinz could easily ride his bicycle to the Center for Physics. We joined in picnics on Friday afternoons with the gathered tribe of physicists, and shared the Fourth of July parade and then the fireworks at parties with them, as well as with friends among the musicians who played at the music festival, and with those who lived in town. Heinz dived into conversations about physics, relieved to be back in the mountains, where he hiked with friends every Wednesday and Saturday. I spent days with Sarah, who by now, at thirteen months, was walking and running, eager—and fearless—to greet every dog we met. When we visited our friends in town, she would crawl under the bureau, intent on pursuing the cat who’d escaped there to hide. We spent hours by the creek, wading, and playing hide-and-seek outdoors in the meadows. After dinner, we’d walk to the park, Sarah riding on Heinz’s shoulders, where there were swings, jungle gyms to climb, and a fountain where children ran, shrieking when the water suddenly shot up and splashed them. To anyone passing on the street, those summer days may have looked nearly normal.

  When well-meaning friends tried to soften what happened, speaking of “the loss of your son,” I inwardly froze, then flashed with anger. I didn’t lose my child, like a mother distracted while shopping: he died! Yet beneath the anger ran an electric current of guilt. Wasn’t protecting Mark’s life our primary responsibility? Since we couldn’t save his life, hadn’t we failed as parents? What Heinz had said kept echoing in my mind: “I would have given my life for him—but no one would take it.” Although he clearly meant it, he worked hard to bear his grief with the stoic reserve conventionally expected of men, which he also demanded of himself. I knew, of course, that he was grieving, brokenhearted, although not depressed; but I often felt overwhelmed. Every night after dinner I’d go outside the house to sit on the deck, wrapped in a blanket, listening to the rush of the creek and the wind in the forests, under a clear sky brilliant with stars, to meditate as the monks had taught me to do. Twenty-five years earlier, our friends Robert and Lucy Mann had introduced us to the Cistercian monks of St. Benedict’s Monastery, often called Trappists, who live in the Colorado mountains in Snowmass, not far from Aspen. Bobby liked to joke that they’d invited him to become their first Jewish monk! But after he’d repeatedly invited the monks to come to his concerts at the Aspen Music Festival, he asked why they never came, and discovered that a monastic vow of stability bound them to stay at the monastery. So he offered to bring the music to them, playing in the monastery refectory, and we felt lucky to be invited with a few other friends to join them. At that first recital, Bobby played solo violin, while, at intervals, Lucy read Bible passages that they had chosen. After that, I often returned for evening mass to that place of deep peace among the mountains, and I came to know many of them as friends. Thomas Keating, formerly the abbot, asked me to come and meet with the brothers to speak about the Gospel of Thomas. But I said, “Instead of talking about it, I’ll give each of you a copy,” opening an intense discussion, since they immediately recognized it as a work of contemplative devotion—one that Christian monks in Egypt had read in their evening devotions thousands of years before. Sensing the depth of the Cistercians’ devotional practice, I learned from Father Thomas what he taught of meditation and contemplative prayer, which helped calm emotional turbulence. The monks offered silent, unspoken support, never speaking to fill an awkward silence or saying things meant to sound hopeful, as many others did, like, “Your faith surely must have sustained you.” What did they mean—a set of beliefs? Whatever most people mean by faith was never more remote than during times of mourning, when professions of faith in God sounded only like unintelligible noise, heard from the bottom of the sea.

  That summer, when Emily and Lizzie came to visit us in the mountains, we took them to the Pine Creek Cookhouse for dinner, taking turns holding Sarah as we ate and talked. While I was at home with Sarah, Heinz took them to our favorite places, to the wildflower meadows below Cathedral Lake; to Woody Creek Tavern for enchiladas and beer; to M
aroon Lake, mirroring mountain peaks still covered with snow. Later we hiked together, with Sarah in a child’s backpack, through aspen forests and boulder fields to Crater Lake, and went to the music tent to hear Midori, a prodigy violinist, then eleven years old, play a Brahms violin concerto with passionate concentration and fervor.

  Shortly after we flew back to New York, turning onto crowded highways to drive from the airport into the city, I prepared to start the new semester’s teaching. Since I had accepted a position at Princeton, but didn’t then have energy to teach, the department chairman asked me instead to lead discussion groups for a colleague’s class. Waking to an alarm at five A.M., I would dress in the dark, quietly, to avoid waking Heinz and Sarah, walk downstairs, and into the wet, gray New York streets toward Penn Station. There I’d join the crowds pressing toward the tracks, and step across the platform onto the New Jersey Transit train that swayed, lurched, and clattered suddenly from the black tunnel underneath the river into light, as the car hurtled through fields of reeds and marshes near New York, sometimes offering a glimpse of a white heron, then through backyards, empty factories with broken windows, lots dense with weeds and paper, cans, tricycles left in the rain, plastic wading pools, garbage cans, swing sets, some with ropes dangling loosely, the seats down. When I was lucky enough to find a seat, I’d turn my face to the window to hide the tears, struggling with questions that seemed to arise instinctively: Why did this happen? Why to this child? Why to any child, any person?