in motion. Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. Gramps was the heretic now. His illness was proof not of his age, but that God had condemned him. To church members, dementia was the result of my grandfather’s strange behavior, rather than its cause. If he were a man of God, the argument went, then he wouldn’t have this illness.
I thought of the blind man of John 9. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. The story—along with the entire book of Job—showed clearly that not all illness was punishment for sin.
Westboro knew better, though.
Shortly before he was removed from church membership, as Zach told me, our grandfather had stepped out the front door of the church to address the young people running the Equality House across the street. A nonprofit called Planting Peace had bought the house in 2012 and painted it in the colors of the rainbow, the global symbol of the LGBT rights movement. It was a perpetual monument standing in opposition to the church and its message of judgment and damnation. “You’re good people,” Gramps called out to them from across the street, before he was hustled back inside by Westboro members. At the church meeting where he was excommunicated, the elders gave this incident as the clearest evidence of my grandfather’s heresy—casting his lot in with the Sodomites—and judged that he was lucid when it occurred.
Given all the harm Gramps had sown during his life, I knew that many would find an end-of-life change of heart to be too little, too late. That if they could witness his devastating end, some would rejoice in it the same way that he had done to others for so many years. They would see my family’s cruel treatment of him as righteous recompense for a man who beat his wife and children into submission, who used his considerable resources to attack and antagonize the world without compunction. I could already hear their arguments, and though I wanted to defend him—“But his decades of civil rights work!”—I had no real rebuttal. Still, I couldn’t stop the overwhelming sense of hope that washed over me. My own change of heart and mind had already made me optimistic about the same potential in others—and now with evidence that even someone like Gramps could experience this kind of change, the idea of completely writing anyone off seemed senseless.
After I hugged Zach and handed his phone back to him, I picked Grace up from school and pointed my car to the Midland Hospice House. I drove past Gage Park and the corner where we had first taken our signs to the streets, past the pond where my father had taken us to feed the ducks when we were kids, and pulled my car into the most remote section of the hospice parking lot—just in case my aunt showed up. Grace and I stepped out and looked at each other across the hood of the car, assessing. What was out of place? Our earrings, we decided. We removed them while debating whether Grace should put her hair up. “It doesn’t look cut!” she insisted. We didn’t want to upset him.
The woman who greeted us at the front door looked suspicious when I asked for Fred Phelps. “And you are…?”
“His granddaughters,” I said firmly.
She looked doubtful. “Let me check with his nurse.”
The nurse rounded the corner a moment later. “You’re the one who called from California?” she asked. I was. The nurse gave me a sad little half smile, nodded, and led us down the hall to the door of his room. “This is him.”
I put my hand on the doorknob and paused. “Is he … lucid?” I asked.
“Yeah. At times, he is. At times, he is.”
I nodded and stepped carefully into my grandfather’s room. The waning light of dusk drifted in through the window over his bed, brightened by the warm glow of a few lamps scattered around the room. The television was on, as so often it had been in his bedroom back home, but he wasn’t paying attention to it. Grace stood just outside the door, waiting to see how he would respond. Would he be happy to see