abandoned by those he had loved and trusted—all so that they could maintain control of a narrative in their minds and in the media. I could already hear them talking dismissively among themselves: We don’t owe these people anything. They didn’t answer to anyone, least of all us.
Pulsing through me was an unmitigated disgust for my family, frightening in its intensity. Had Gramps still been a member of the church, there would have been another member keeping vigil at his bedside at all hours of the day and night—talking with him, reading with him, singing with him. I gripped the steering wheel so hard my nails bit into my palms, weeping bitterly at the thought of the church sentencing him to live out his final days alone, confused, and afraid. Not even I would have envisioned them sinking to such depths of cruelty.
I found Zach the following afternoon and spent an hour reading text messages on his phone, following the progression of my grandfather’s illness—and his status within the church—from day to day. In the beginning, my family’s words were full of tenderness and praise. “We should all be very thankful,” my uncle wrote, “that we have a faithful pastor who genuinely cares for our souls and has—at great personal lifelong sacrifice—fed us with the manna of God’s word without dilution.” I read on through the weeks and months as the tenderness disappeared, replaced by a cold and clinical distance. After my grandfather was stripped of his role as pastor and of church membership, most other members ended all contact with him, as required. And when his health deteriorated further, one of his daughters was designated to handle his care and send daily updates to a select group of trusted church members—my brother Zach among them—while the rest were kept largely in the dark. They couldn’t desert him entirely to Topeka’s medical establishment, lest word of his illness and abandonment find its way into the newspapers that had been closely watching for signs of his demise for at least a dozen years.
My aunt’s messages stopped the day that Zach left, of course, but they were enough. More than a month of daily reports while Gramps had been in professional care. In addition to his many physical problems, the messages spoke of “cognitive decline,” “dementia,” and failing organs that sometimes led to a state of “delirium.” When his body began to improve, a doctor warned that my grandfather would likely not show improvement in his cognition unless he was motivated to, suggesting that the presence of more familiar and comforting voices would help—but Westboro continued its campaign of isolation. My grandfather’s mental condition would be on his death certificate two weeks later, as well, not the cause of death—respiratory failure, pneumonia—but a “significant condition contributing to death”: encephalopathy. Disease of the brain, as Google explained, manifested by an altered mental state. Zach described some of the symptoms that ultimately contributed to my grandfather’s exclusion from the church, and it was abundantly clear that some of his actions were so strange and out of character that he could not possibly have been in his right mind in those moments.
With other symptoms, though, it seemed that his actions weren’t ravings but genuine changes in his perspective, particularly as it related to the church. According to Zach, my grandfather had come to see his congregation as cruel and unmerciful. I remembered my despair at coming to the same conclusion when I was painting in that dank basement: as if we were finally doing to ourselves what we had been doing to others. I believed Zach’s assessment, because in the months before I left Westboro, my grandfather had been one of the few men in the church who was encouraging more kindness, gentleness, and compassion. Only by pride cometh contention, the verse said, and after the new elders took over, Gramps had quoted and paraphrased it often. “If there is no pride, there will be no contention,” he intoned. “Where there is great humility, there will be no contention.” As if he were trying to reform the beast he had created.
But it was too late. He had spent decades inculcating us with an ideology that valued fear and control over mercy and grace. He was the one who had taught church members to have unshakable faith in their own perspective, to believe their judgment was as God’s judgment, with de facto status as infallible. Not even my grandfather could stop the course he had set