pursue them with greater urgency than witnessing the devastating end of my beloved Gramps.
* * *
One year after my appearance at the Jewlicious Festival, I was back with David in Los Angeles for another. My phone rang, and the voice on the other end of the line was my brother Zach, recently departed from Westboro. The tears running down my face were a mixture of happiness at having my brother back, and grief at the thought of my parents and siblings facing yet another void in the Phelps-Roper family. Another empty room in the home we’d shared for so long. I asked my brother the eternal question—Why?—and listened as he described a disillusionment that was achingly familiar to me.
But I had another question.
“Zach, what’s going on with Gramps? I’ve been checking the church website for months, and he hasn’t been giving any sermons. Is he okay?”
My brother’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Well … he … uh…” Zach stammered. “He’s in hospice.”
My heart stopped. My grandfather had believed that he was never going to die. That Jesus would return and bring him to Glory before that could ever happen. He’d said it so often that it seemed a foregone conclusion even then, even though I scarcely believed in God anymore.
“… and he was voted out of the church.”
Neither of us said anything for a few minutes as I sobbed at the image of my grandfather sick and dying and alone in a hospice bed. At the unparalleled cruelty of my family, which had somehow grown even worse since my departure, consuming even Gramps himself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. I had been pacing the sidewalk in front of the Booksteins’ home, walking across the elaborate chalk paintings that Grace and I had done with their children. The same sorts of drawings we’d done with my siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephew back in Topeka. I sank to the ground, pants covered in chalk, face covered with tears, ignoring the stares from groups of twelve-year-old Jewish girls walking by in their long skirts and opaque tights. And again, I put the question to my brother. Why?
I disconnected the call a few minutes later and returned to the Booksteins’ Shabbat table, sitting across from David.
“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately. I shook my head, unable to speak.
“Would it make you happy if something bad happened to my Gramps?” I finally managed to choke out. I hoped the answer was no. I thought it would be. I knew that my Gramps had taught us to celebrate the tragedies of our enemies—that many would see this outcome as his just comeuppance—but that very idea was one of the reasons I had left Westboro. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone celebrating this. Especially a good friend.
“Of course not!” David insisted. “Why would I be happy?” When I told him what had happened, he said he would pray for my Gramps. And when he returned home to Jerusalem the following week, he would go to the Wailing Wall and put a note in it asking God to help my Gramps. “I hope and pray he gets well.”
Instead of returning to my new home with Chad in South Dakota, I flew to Kansas with Grace, terrified that Gramps would pass before we had a chance to see him. Zach had given us the name of the hospice, and I knew that our best chance at seeing our grandfather would be to show up unannounced. As in the months before I left Westboro, I hated the sneaking around. The church would not want us to see him, and my fear of defying them was still almost paralyzing—but we were his grandchildren. We were his family, too. The miles from Kansas City to Topeka passed in the snowy darkness of midnight, Grace sleeping in the passenger seat as I made my case, my inner monologue growing more outraged by the second. The people charged with my grandfather’s care had cast him out of their family—out of his own church—after all these years. They had isolated him in his most vulnerable hours after a lifetime surrounded by his wife, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They were using his last days to punish and cajole him into “repentance.” And after all of that, they would surely prevent us from seeing him—the only people willing to sit by his side, to offer a comforting presence to a dying man, largely