Yesterday, Kathy spoke of how her husband’s murder brought her back to her faith, how she found solace in the church and felt a debt to it afterwards. While I suppose this is a common sentiment—my understanding of the appeal of religion is that it allows people to confront the scarier elements of the world—I’ve always felt the exact opposite.
I’ve questioned religion for as long as I can remember, and I’ve considered myself an atheist since I was old enough to make up my mind. While my questioning nature contributes to my belief in science over what I perceive as superstition, a moment of skepticism from my mother at our old temple, where she remains active, influenced me greatly.
When I was 11 or 12 years old, I attended Yom Kippur services beside my mother. It was my first time at the actual service, but I was familiar with it to a degree from Sunday school, so I knew what was coming when we reached the central portion of the service.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur bookend the High Holy Days, which both start and shape the Jewish year. On Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year’s, God creates fresh copies of two books: The Book of Life, and the Book of Death. Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, marks the day when God finalizes and seals those two books. Anyone who properly atones for their sins in the past year by the end of Yom Kippur will have their name written in the Book of Life, and they will live through the next year. Anyone who doesn’t properly atone will have their name inscribed in the Book of Death, and they will die in the year to come.
In other words, anyone who dies deserves it.
So the story goes.
As a preteen, I sat beside my mother, and when the congregation reached the portion of the service that tells this tale, my mother turned to me and whispered, “This is the one part of this I don’t like.”
I interpreted her comment like this: She objected to the idea that my father had done something horrible enough to deserve to die. When I think about it, the whole idea seems ridiculous: Did God somehow put 259 horrible people (and no good ones) in a single airplane, then crash it into the homes of 11 similarly horrible people on the ground1?
While I believe anyone could understand her discomfort in that moment, still, my mom expressed reluctance about the central belief of the holiest day of the Jewish year—the rough equivalent of a Christian celebrating Easter Mass while questioning whether Jesus really did come back to life. At best, I’d had a tenuous relationship with religion before her aside. That basically ended it.
I can’t say whether I would believe any differently had my father not died, but while I lost my faith, others had theirs reinforced. Years ago, at a memorial in Washington, D.C., I heard a story told by Father Pat Keegan, who led Lockerbie’s parish on December 21, 1988.
Father Pat told his story from that night, how he had plans to attend a holiday dinner with a family across the street at 7pm, but he was running behind. He was never late, he insisted, but that night—that one night—he did, and as he scrambled to get ready, he heard a loud boom. Father Pat assumed he had heard an accident on the nearby freeway, so he ignored the sound and went back to his business.
Minutes later, when he opened his front door to cross the street, the house where he’d had dinner plans was replaced by a flaming crater.
The bomb had gone off at 7:02pm. Father Pat lived in Sherwood Crescent. The sound he mistook for a car crash was the plane’s fuel tanks detonating, vaporizing eleven of his neighbors.
Father Pat lived because he was ten minutes late for dinner. He believes his life was spared by the same Judeo-Christian God that I refused to believe took my father.
Last night, I had an exchange via Facebook with a step-cousin named Shelby who lives in the D.C. area, suggesting that we grab drinks tonight or tomorrow afternoon. She replied that she was busy both nights with Seder, the ritual dinner that begins Passover, the celebration of the Jews’ escape from Egypt.
While we won’t be able to catch up, I mention Shelby because she and her older sister Lindsay cause a certain amount of confusion to my friends when I mention them.
The pair of them came into my extended family in the early ’90s, and my father’s death may have contributed to this in some way, but not in the way one might expect when one hears the term step-cousins.
After my father died, my mom’s older sister, Leslie, flew to New Jersey to help however she could. Her husband, Steve, didn’t take this well, which she now cites as the breaking point in their long-strained marriage. Soon after she returned home, Steve left her and their three children and returned to his home country of Guatemala, and that was basically the end of things.
A few years later, Leslie began dating a man named Glenn, who himself had gone through a divorce that concluded with joint custody of Lindsay and Shelby. His ex-wife got them for the school year, while Glenn got them for the summer. Lindsay and Shelby were usually at Leslie and Glenn’s house when we visited, and Shelby was young enough when Glenn and Leslie got together that she’s said she doesn’t remember a time when my family wasn’t in her life.
More than once, when I’ve referred to my step-cousins, people have interpreted them as the nieces of a step-father I never had, leading to confusion. My mother never remarried. In twenty years, she’s barely even dated.
As far as I know.
I only remember two men my mom ever dated. The first, around 1990, was a single father named Jim who had a son, Jason, who happened to be my age. Jason and I got along well, thanks in no small part to our shared obsession over Nintendo games, but for whatever reason things didn’t work out between Jim and my mom. They didn’t date long, and I have almost no memory of this relationship, except that it happened, and I got Jason’s spare copy of the first issue of Nintendo Power magazine out of the deal, marked up with a guide to the second quest of the original The Legend of Zelda.
The second, more notable suitor was a man named Ron, who my mom started dating about a year later. The details of their relationship are fairly fuzzy in my mind: I remember the distinct end-point2—the New Jersey portion of our second month-long trip in June 1993—but not when it began. A few years ago, my mom said she broke up with Ron because “I already had two kids, I couldn’t deal with a third,” which is possibly the most savage burn my mom has ever uttered. The breaking point, as I remember it, was that he complained more than my sister and I combined during a tour of the mansion in Morristown where George Washington camped the Continental Army during the winter of 1779-1780.
My sister and I liked Ron, but we made things difficult. My sister had no recollection of our father or what it was like to live in a two-parent household, and at some point, I joked to her that our mom had already married Ron. This became a running gag, the idea of the two of them being married, of Ron being our new father, and I’ve wondered for years whether this contributed in some way to the breakup and my mom’s successive non-dating.
During the relationship, my feelings about Ron broke down pretty neatly:
Pro:
- Ron always had real Crystal Pepsi for us at his house, unlike my mom, who only bought Diet Crystal Pepsi for our house.
- Ron had a swimming pool.
Con:
- Ron told me he would take me to see Jurassic Park, but, after I had already read the book and all my friends had seen the movie, changed his mind, claiming he thought it would be too scary for me3.
After Ron, years passed before my mom dated anyone again, or at least until she dated someone seriously enough that I would be aware of it. She dated one man very briefly when I was in high school, and she may or may not have dated someone last summer—my sister says yes, my mom says no—but that, as far as I’m aware, is it. A few years ago, she told me that some of her friends suggested that she sign up for a Jewish dating site called JDate, but I’m not sure if she ever did.
I can’t say for certain whether or not my mom remarrying would have changed the family dynamic for the better, and given how much I needled my mom about her relationship with Ron, I can only imagine how I might have behaved had things evolved to the point of cohabitation or beyond.
Regardless, as a single parent, my mom was blatantly and woefully overmatched, as many single parents are. I didn’t realize back then how manipulative my sister and I were, nor how easily we redirected our mother’s anger, but hindsight revealed all our unintentional machinations.
Case in point: One night, when I was in third grade, a friend from our carpool named called the house to ask me for help with his homework. My room and my sister’s were separated by a balcony the length of our living room, and my mom and sister were embroiled in some sort of fight when my mom answered the phone. When she heard my friend ask to speak with me, she screamed that I had a phone call, and once I opened my bedroom door, she threw the cordless phone—a late-’80s AT&T model, which had a good heft to it. It bounced off the floor a few feet in front of me and ricocheted into my right shin, where I sported a small dent until my next growth spurt.
One morning months later, when construction commenced on one of our attics into a playroom, that friend saw a pile of debris in our driveway and asked “What happened? Did your mom have a temper tantrum?”
Over the years, my mom’s authority eroded, which I now attribute to exhaustion more than anything. By the time I was in eighth grade, and my sister in fourth, the three of us acted out against each other constantly, in admittedly middle-class ways.
At the end of my seventh grade year, my mom took us to the doctor for our annual check-ups, and I attempted to stage a minor rebellion instead of getting my shots4. As I fought off the nurses, my mom threw down an ultimatum: I could behave and get my shots, or else I’d be grounded from the TV and computer for the entire summer. I chose the latter, but two nurses held me down while a third drove a needle into my thigh anyway. I spent the summer sneaking as much TV and AOL as I could after my mom went to bed, but AOL’s pay-by-the-hour rates betrayed me, and my mom extended my punishment another month.
Some time the following Fall, after the discipline ended, my mom attempted to ground my sister from the TV for some now-forgotten infraction. In that moment, a minor epiphany struck my sister: Our mom could only be in one place at a time, and we owned multiple TVs.
Therefore, our mom couldn’t enforce the punishment.
We were immune from grounding.
Some time in the next few months, my mom and I got into an argument, the climax of which featured her hitting me. As I remember, she only struck me once and not particularly hard, but she definitely hit me.
The next day at school, I had art class, which was regularly the most miserable hour of my week—a high bar to clear, considering how much people picked on me at that school. For whatever reason, I struggled even more than normal that day, and grew frustrated enough to scream aloud in class, to which the teacher reacted by sending me to the principal’s office. When the principal asked if I had any explanation for my behavior, I mentioned that my mom had hit me the night before.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know if the previous night’s incident had sincerely driven me to that point, or if I knew that it was a get-out-of-trouble-free card. Given the chain of events, one could argue that I had been disturbed by being hit, but it’s equally possible that I chose that moment to vent some of my immense anger and frustration at the state of my life in general (and the school in specific), and used the altercation with my mom to rationalize it afterward.
Regardless of my motivation or intentions, the principal called Child Protective Services, who sent someone to interview me at school the next day. I remember being summoned to an assistant principal’s office, where the assistant principal left me with a man who asked a series of questions about the incident and the state of my well-being in general. Yes, she hit me; no, it hadn’t happened before, but she had spanked me when I was younger; she had grounded me at times, but never sent me to bed without dinner; and so on. Apparently, after my interview concluded, the man went to our house and got my mom’s side of things, because when I arrived home that afternoon, she was thoroughly, and rightfully, pissed off at me.
More than a decade later, I think that none of that was justified—it’s ridiculous that my mom, who tried as hard as she possibly could under horrible circumstances to be a good parent, had a Child Protective Services file when others certainly did far worse. It was a function of the discord in our house, a result of the fact that all three of us felt varying degrees of helpless.
As fractured as my relationship with my mom may have been at times, I still generally went along and did what I was told for the most part5. But as my sister entered her preteen years, her relationship with our mom grew increasingly acrimonious. By the time she was in fifth grade—my freshman year of high school—the two of them yelled at each other for hours most nights. Their relationship ultimately mended, but suffice to say my sister had a few unproud moments of her own.
It would be easy, but dishonest, to claim that having a second parent in our house—our father or a step-father—would definitely have made any of this better. What I do know for certain, though, is that my mom could only do so much by herself, and no matter how much she tried to bring my dad into it—frequently with the sentence “Your father would be disappointed in you”—she was all by herself.
I never cared what she thought my dad would think6. Dead men don’t have opinions.
I arrive in D.C. at 5pm, but don’t make it to my hotel until 6pm, thanks to the kind of beltway slowdown that I thought was usually caused by filibustering. I check in, take my stuff up to my room, and try to decide what to do with my night.
Various evening plans tempt me, but I’m too exhausted to pursue any of them. I wouldn’t mind driving up to Baltimore and booing the Yankees at Camden Yards, but I can’t imagine another hour in the car. Seattle’s own Death Cab for Cutie is playing DAR Constitution Hall, but I can’t justify paying whatever a scalped ticket would cost when I’ve seen them nine times already.
So, I guess I’m staying in, which is fine, because today is Wednesday, which means tonight is Lost night.
Another night of feeling weird.
Ever since Orville Wright first took to the air at Kitty Hawk, society has treated plane crashes as one of the most fascinating phenomena known to mankind, and an obsession which has embedded itself firmly in pop culture. The first Final Destination movie was about a group of students escaping from a plane moments before it exploded, only for death to come chasing after them. Radiohead’s song “Lucky” features lyrics about surviving a plane crash, and Don McLean’s famously wrote “American Pie” about several musicians who didn’t. Strangely, this obsession extends to people who probably couldn’t name a single plane crash at all, who were too young to have any recollection of 9/11: Several times, classes of students that came to 826 for field trips wanted their books to be about the aftermath of a plane crash, which left me to write the first page of said stories7.
Much of (non-science fiction) modern media centers around real, concrete, relatable experiences. Everyone has dealt with a heartbreak. Everyone has interacted with the police. Everyone has had a job they hated, or a friendship built around funny quips, or a medical scare, if not a full-on emergency. And yet, despite the fact that very few people have ever survived a truly horrific plane crash—despite the fact that a significant percentage of people have never even flown in an airplane—plane crashes are one of the most compelling plot points used by writers, in defiance of the cliché advice to “Write what you know.”
Take Lost, for example—a show that hooked millions of people, myself included, with its iconic opening scene depicting the aftermath of a plane crash on a tropical island. I’ve obsessively watched this show since its premiere episode, and even though it has now greatly deviated from its initial premise, every time I watch it, one thought rings in the back of my mind: I am watching a show about the aftermath of a plane crash.
I devote an hour every Wednesday night to watching a story about people who survived what my father did not.
Do I call this a typical fascination, or a morbid one?
- I mean, what is God, some sort of all-powerful deity?
- Although I had no idea it was the end-point at the time.
- I didn’t see Jurassic Park until we bought a VHS copy in the late-’90s. In fact, I saw The Lost World in the theater, thinking I’d be fine since I read the book. Turns out, a character that died in the book lived in the first movie, and appeared in the opening scenes of the sequel, so I spent the first 15 minutes in the theater totally confused. Thanks, Ron.
- I still hate needles.
- “For the most part” doesn’t include when I got braces, towards the end of 8th grade. I was supposed to have them for at least two years, but complained so much that they were removed after only six months. Of course, I kept the Game Boy my mom bought to get me to accept them. I still have it.
- And that’s why I will always be certain I’m the worst person in my family.
- It honestly took several of these field trips to realize that maybe I should feel weird about this.