Do You Believe in Life After Death? A Caregiver's story

This is the first part of a mini-series. The other parts will be posted at a future date.

Disclaimer:

My parents made the average, garden-variety mistakes: interfering with my privacy and insulting my self-esteem; but they generally meant well.

My nuclear family was intact. My parents stayed married until my father died at age 74 in 1988; I am the eldest of their three children.

By accidents of timing and geography, I have not had to overcome the resentment bred by child abuse, poverty, ignorance, nor divorce (even though divorce is a very good idea sometimes; I’ve had two of my own), not even harsh discipline.

I can’t address how those conditions would affect the persistence it takes to follow through sometimes required of a caregiver for an elderly parent. I suspect that a memory of having been beaten by one’s parent with a coat hanger may mitigate the will to persevere. My role as a caregiver is also affected by geography because my sister, daughter and I live within a few miles of our parent. I know when distance is an issue, it changes the strategy.

This is my experience as a woman skeptic who is in a caregiver role with a widowed mother who lives nearby. I can compare the experience I had when my father died over twenty years ago with the experience I am having during my mother’s decline that is taking place now. They are very different.

Do you believe in Life After Death?

Part One

When Daddy died….
My father was only 74 when he died of congestive heart failure. In 1988 a lot less was known about how to treat the condition, and there was a years-long process of treatment and recovery and then gradual relapse, repeated in shorter and shorter intervals, that was hard on the patient and on the family. It was during this time that I got religion, and after my father finally died, I reasserted myself as an atheist and skeptic. I didn’t need a god to see me through my father’s mortality; what I’d needed was a community, and I had not realized that there are communities of skeptics. I have that now, and fortunately the community of skeptics who are my friends have come through for me, during crises and for the long haul, sometimes just listening, offering their own experiences for me to consider, and assuring me that I am not too weird when I need to hear it.

In the mid 1980s
My sister in law suggested that I join a synagogue of Jewish mystics that held Friday evening services every other week, and Torah study on Saturday mornings, a hop, skip and a jump from my house. As a lone atheist, I had no support system, no network of friends to tell me what to do in the stressful, prolonged pain of my dad’s illness. She promised she would attend the first time with me, and have a cup of tea… how much could go wrong? It was wonderful! The candlelight, the familiar music! The language, unintelligible, but also familiar… the people, so glad to see a new face of a youngish woman, welcoming me, not to mention that it was geographically desirable, was all very seductive.

A friend once told me that church is not just for worship. Churchgoing, synagogue, mosque attendance is also for networking, socializing, experiencing life’s milestones such as weddings, births, holidays and deaths. This is what many atheists miss. The attempt to replace it is often by attendance at low-observance churches such as the Unitarians or Secular Humanist Jewish congregations. ** I knew about the UU congregations, but I thought of them as political organizations, and didn’t think that I would find the comfort I needed for this particular crisis.

I not only began to attend services, in exchange for typesetting a little newsletter for the congregation, but I also began to take Jewish Studies classes at the local community college. I had been taking anthropology, communications, and sociology classes in night school, too, so adding Jewish studies that semester was my way of learning how to be Jewish. I wanted to rush this process of figuring out how to get comfort out of my ethnic identity.

I was embarrassed that I didn’t know anything about how to be Jewish. The rabbi’s wife taught me how to say the Friday night blessings over the Sabbath candles and the challah (bread). She explained that it was not unusual for American Jews not to know these things – and I learned the history of the Reform Jewish movement and assimilation. I knew that my grandfather had belonged to two congregations, an old Conservative one, and a newer Reform one that had a nicer cemetery — and it was a good thing, because he had died young.

Every Saturday, the Rabbi asked if there was anyone who had a friend or relative for whom they would like to have a prayer for health. I always raised my hand. I asked for prayers for my dad. Now, I would think of it as intercessory prayer. But at the time, it just seemed like a loving, sweet musical thing, and if it wasn’t going from our lips to God’s ear, at least these nice people were one with me in their concern for my dad.

One day, Mr. Goldstein, one of the members of the congregation, was walking the same way I was toward our cars, and asked me if I thought I was losing my mind. I said yes, as a matter of fact, and why do you ask? He said it was because of congestive heart failure. His uncle had just died of the same disease, and his family had just been going through the same thing: his uncle seeming almost to die, then miraculous recovery, and slowly dying again; treatment that restored him to health, ever shorter intervals… and the family repeatedly on the brink of grief and bouncing back and forth between joy and sorrow and guilt. Nobody else, not the cardiologist, not any nurse, no one at all, had offered anyone in our family this explanation. The relief I felt was like cool water on a redhot sunburn.

The book review
It was during this time, though, that I happened to read a book review of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. The review was extremely well written; if that was true, I thought, then how could THIS be true? The things I discuss and argue every Saturday for a couple of years, with these people, a few of whom are Holocaust survivors, and who love and accept me, and who have been seeing me through this educational process, this transition, how can I ask them about whether there is a supernatural being who answers prayers and runs things? So I folded up the review, and tucked it into the back of my Tenach, a modern translation of the Old Testament, a gift from Mr. Goldstein and his wife, and decided to think about it later. I have met Dr. Dawkins a few times, and I forgot to tell him this story.

What a rabbi is good for
Before my father died, the hospital Social Worker told us that even though we were in a great deal of pain, that when he finally died, the pain would increase. When my father died at the hospital, I happened to be there alone, and I called the rabbi on the pay phone. I said I don’t feel anything, what’s wrong with me? He explained: “Wendy, you are in shock. This is giving you time to take care of the business you have to take care of, to help your mom. Grief comes in waves. If all the pain came at once, you wouldn’t be able to handle it. It will finally reach a crescendo, and begin to recede. Then you will be able to remember the pain, but it won’t hurt anymore.” That’s what rabbis are good for.

I had learned enough to know that when I accompanied my mother to the Jewish mortuary, I think it was the next day, I could tell her that Jewish custom required only a simple wooden casket, no matter what the salesman was showing us.

The difference now, over 20 years later, with my mom
After my father’s death, I realized I had made it through without any guilt. My daughter had married one of the men in the congregation, and I think they barely noticed when I slipped away. I didn’t need the network to deal with my father’s mortality any longer, and I was free to resume my identity as an atheist.

The network of friends is still important, but the ritual of talking to God or intercessory prayer certainly isn’t part of the picture. Instead, when I was Instant Messaging with a friend about preparing to come to TAM8 in Spring of 2010, I was mentioning my mother’s declining health, and cognitive impairment. He immediately emailed me a link to a memorial brochure about his grandmother, and wrote about her decline and how difficult it had been for him and his family. He urged me to get a diagnosis for my mother, to go to a specialist and not to dawdle around. He said it was important for her safety and for my peace of mind.

Also, not to single out a specific source, because there are many, but I rely on Quackwatch. Science Based Medicine is another source for information about what works and what is questionable. Of course these didn’t exist in 1988, but as a skeptic, in the 21st Century, I take advantage of resources that don’t have a profit motive. The path of least resistance is to subscribe and get a weekly email.

When I feel as though I can’t go out at night to Drinking Skeptically or my former favorite, the CFI-LA Book Club for Skeptics, because I am away from home just too many nights a week, sometimes I want to break free. I want to be young again with no responsibilities to anyone but myself, and shrug off the reins of too much to do. So there is a paradox; the very thing that gives me stimulation and respite, the fun thing to do, is also a little frustrating because I don’t have enough time right now to go enjoy it.

Meanwhile, I did know not to rely on gingko biloba to restore her memory. When the internist was going to prescribe a prescription for a strong medication over the phone, because he knew my mother didn’t like to go to doctor’s appointments, both my daughter and a skeptic friend suggested that was probably not a good idea. I called the internist back and asked for a referral to a specialist.

The internist offered us a referral to a clinic in my mother’s neighborhood that specializes in diagnosis and treatment of geriatric patients. The first time I ever heard anyone talking about that as a possible specialty was in the early 1970s. My neighbor at the time was studying gerontology because he understood that the baby boom generation was going to be a giant cohort requiring specialized care forty or so years in the future. He was quite a visionary.

My mom’s memory lapses are sometimes funny, sometimes alarming. She is trusting and sweet, and I know that is better than the nightmare stories I’ve heard of the parents of others who are paranoid and combative. Comparing what I learned from the experience of my father’s illness and death, and this experience with my mom so far, on balance, this is easier.

How much of that is because I have found an evidence-based community on which to rely for companionship, instead of a faith-based one, in my case, is a little hard to quantify, because of the specific examples I cited. I’ve remembered the hits, and forgotten the misses. I had a lot of relief from the information about congestive heart failure, and about the process of grief that came from that particular congregation. But knowing that I have a community at all is incredibly important, and participating in one, whether it is volunteering, chatting on a bulletin board, or instant messages, I’ve learned a lot. I can’t separate my skeptic/atheist/Jewish self from my caregiver self. So one evening, I asked her, “Mom, do you believe in Life After Death?”

** A recent article in the LA Times Health section quotes an analysis by researchers at Brigham Young University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, compiled data from 148 studies indicating that people live longer who are involved in communities — an effect comparable to that of quitting smoking.
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-friends-health-20100913,0,5533677.story

Science Based Medicine: http://networkedblogs.com/7ACwW
Quackwatch: http://www.quackwatch.org