Goodbye, Mom

My mother died yesterday.

Please don’t send condolences for my loss. My loss occurred years ago, and I am perfectly okay with it, because it is what my mother wanted.

Mom raised me in a cult that shuns cult members who leave…including family. Everyone outside the cult is “the world”, “bad association”, all of them…family included.

Really.

Partly for that reason, I never had any real relationship with my father (who refused to join the cult). In the last 3 or 4 years before he died (over 30 years ago), I had started developing a tiny bit of a relationship with him. When he died, I was momentarily overcome with grief, because I knew that, if a real relationship could ever have developed, it would not now.

A decade ago I left the cult (Jehovah’s Witnesses), but for a while my mother continued to communicate and visit with me. She did it secretly, though, so that my middle daughter and my ex-wife (both still in the cult; my ex-wife moved in with my mother when we divorced) would not know that she was communicating with me. (I know, if you are not a Jehovah’s Witness that sounds really screwed up…and it is. But, if you have ever been a Jehovah’s Witness, you understand.)

Then, 5 years ago, Mom sent me a letter explaining why she needed to stop associating with me. (I understood. Before leaving the cult, I had shunned 2 of my daughters who had left the cult.) I have talked to Mom exactly once since then: Four years ago she called because she heard that I was taking my first semester of college. (The cult strongly discouraged higher education when I was young. Since then they have lightened up just a little on that stance.) Mom asked me what I was studying.

“Psychology.”

“Why on earth would you want to study psychology? Jehovah knows everything there is to know about psychology!”

Bingo.

I have an answer to her question (actually several), but answering would involve an hour or more, and would result in hurt feelings. So, I thanked her for her concern.

End of conversation.

When I received word yesterday that my mother was dying (about an hour before she actually died), I thought about making the 3-hour drive there. (I’ve been in Lake Buena Vista, Florida for the past week.) But, the only person there who might have wanted to see me was my mother…and if she did want to see me it almost certainly would have been to admonish me to "return to Jehovah" before it is “too late.”

Goodbye, Mom.

(If she heard, or read, that ‘goodbye', her belief about the afterlife was wrong. She believed that she would simply cease to exist until she is someday resurrected back to perfect life on a perfect earth, to live forever. But, maybe she did hear or read it.)

Yeah, I’ll miss you. But not the way that you thought I would. I will never regret leaving the cult. Being in the cult definitely altered my life, but I was okay with that when I thought I would live forever, that I would have forever to enjoy the education, travel, and friendships that I gladly skipped for 55 years.

I will miss you because, although your love for me was 100% dependent on my being faithful to the the cult, in my lifetime we did manage to have some very good times together.

For the past decade I have, for the first time in my entire life, lived authentically. My life. The way I was born to live. Unlike during my entire first 55 years, for the past 10 years I have not allowed you, nor anyone else, to dissuade me. And I have been, by far, the happiest I have ever been in my entire life. Ever. I call myself the luckiest man in the world, and I truly believe that.

You chose your life. And, for the most part (with very few hiccups) you were faithful to it right to the end.

I am happy for you.

And, I am happy for me.