In All That I Live For (Part 2)

III.

During the days—and then weeks—that I spent recovering, I began to hate religion. I hadn’t hated it before. It had been something that other people could follow, and that was okay because it gave them fulfillment in their lives. It just hadn’t been for me.

But now I saw it for what it was. It was a delusion: a delusion which caused people to do stupid and senseless things. If my niece hadn’t believed in a hell (a vicious and horrible concept, in any case), she wouldn’t have killed herself. If she had only known that death was nonexistence, there wouldn’t have been any point to doing something so radical.

As if there was any point to it anyway. Rachel’s suicide was having a worse effect on me than maybe it should’ve. Some nights, I would cry. Others, I would just lie in the hospital bed, not feeling anything. Then there were times when I wanted to throw something out of anger or slam my bandaged arm against the wall to make the injuries hurt worse out of…

…Out of what? Guilt? It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t have felt guilt for killing Rachel: it had been her decision, and I obviously hadn’t fallen down the rapids on purpose. Rachel’s death was her own fault…No, not even her fault—and this thought made me more furious and frustrated than ever. It was her religion’s fault. Her god’s fault. If she hadn’t been so invested in that fantasy, she would have never done anything so stupid.

Yet still I felt what I had to call guilt. Some general, undefined, horrid sense of guilt. I suppose I wasn’t completely free of religious conditioning, then. Only religion spawned guilt.

Come to think of it, maybe I did feel responsible for what had happened to my niece. If I had believed all her going-on about Jesus, she would have never done what she did. But how was that my fault? I could have never believed her religion anyway, and I would never believe it now. Guilt wasn’t enough…Fear wasn’t enough…Nothing was enough to make me believe something that I knew was false. Jesus was just a man. Man made him a god.

In the end, it was all just senseless and stupid, but the senselessness of it made me angrier than ever—helplessly angry. Suddenly, I struck the bedside table forcefully with my bandaged arm, screaming at the wave of pain that engulfed me. That was what I wanted.

As nurses rushed in to see what was wrong, I calmly told them it had been an accident.

It was just an accident.

Everything was just an accident, wasn’t it?

IV.

By the time I was discharged from the hospital, Sharon’s health had taken an extreme turn for the worse. None of the treatments were working anymore, and the cancer had spread too far. Hospice workers started coming to our house regularly.

Sharon was in pain. Excruciating pain. Whenever she moved, it was as if the cancer had to punish her for it. She had to take stronger and stronger pain medications, but it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t even work in the garden anymore, though she hated not being able to do anything. She had trouble breathing…lost her appetite…started to hate foods that she used to love. I can’t write about this anymore.

I started to hate the hospice workers. I should’ve been grateful. They were kind, and they relieved part of my burden of caring for her. But everything they said made me sick! Make her as comfortable as possible, try to control her pain, give her happiness in her last days…It was all so unhelpful! Was that really all we could do? It wasn’t enough! How much would all this really matter once she was gone? The hospice worker once asked me if we would want a priest or pastor to come in, and I turned and shouted at her. Then I apologized dully and went away. The last thing I wanted now was religion with all its false hopes.

It was all stupid, though. I was being stupid. I had known and accepted all my life that once someone was gone, they were gone forever. I understood that this life was all we got, and it had always, in a way, inspired me. The fact that death was simple nonexistence had once seemed beautiful to me. It had once resonated with me. Trying to recapture some of that inspiration, I told myself that I was being too hard on the hospice workers. They were right. We should be trying to give Sharon happiness in her last days, since this was all she had. But after she died? What then? She wouldn’t remember any of that happiness, even if we could succeed in making her slightly more happy and comfortable in all this pain. She wouldn’t remember anything. Something of the same terror that had possessed me when I was lying on that rocky beach seized me now. It was a sense of everything slipping away, being reduced to an absurdity. Joy, pain…none of it would matter. I couldn’t ignore that fact anymore.

I soon found that I couldn’t completely avoid religion anymore because my mom and dad had come to stay with us until it was all over. They wanted to help take care of Sharon, and be with us, I suppose, and I appreciated that. It was really the only thing that gave me any comfort. But Dad and Mom insisted on doing their little Bible study every morning, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them to take it outside. They had no idea how much I hated religion now, so I tried harder than ever to avoid the topic.

We had brought a hospital bed into the house now, and had repurposed one of the downstairs rooms to serve as a bedroom for her. She slept most of the time now and could hardly bear to move, but when she was awake…At least, when she was awake during the daytime, we brought her out to a reclining comfy chair in the living room. Our living room was full of windows, so she could see our gardens from there, but it made her sad. Our gardens were neglected, and tangled weeds had quickly overtaken them. Even I hadn’t touched the gardens in over a month, I was so busy caring for Sharon. The garden seemed to represent our lives now: the way everything we had once loved was slowly slipping away. And soon, there would be nothing.

One morning, I woke up after a particularly harrowing night. Since they brought in the hospital bed, I had grown accustomed to sleeping in a reclining chair in her room. I couldn’t share a bed with her anymore because the hospital bed was too small and she was in too much pain. This night had been especially horrible. Sharon hadn’t been able to sleep because of the pain, and I had to keep getting up to give her medication. What was worse, she had thrown up several times that night—a nasty, thick, dark liquid from an empty stomach. For the in-between times when she was somewhat more peaceful, and resting, I couldn’t sleep from anxiety, and rattled nerves, and the discomfort of sitting in a chair. I finally managed to fall asleep around six in the morning, but at seven, I got up and restlessly wandered out to the kitchen.

As I entered the room, the warm, energizing scent of freshly-brewed coffee greeted me, lightening my spirits somewhat. Dad was there. He had just finished making a pot of coffee and was pouring some for himself. When he saw me, the old man smiled sympathetically and handed me a mug. While he was mixing cream and sugar into his, I silently poured myself a cup of strong, black coffee. We went out to the small table by the window and sat down. This was the table where Sharon and I had always eaten dinner together when we were healthy and lived alone. It didn’t look like it would ever be just us here again.

Soft silence hung over everything. It was that special silence that cloaks the early morning, before anyone else wakes up. Just now, it seemed somehow even more peaceful after the turmoil of the night, with the familiar, comforting presence of my dad adding to the calm. I sipped cautiously at my scalding coffee, then turned my head to look out the window at the ruined garden. I had sat facing the wrong way, with my now-blind eye on the side of the window. My injuries hadn’t all fully healed yet either—and some never would—so it often hurt to move.

Dad sipped his coffee too, and was silent, but his brown eyes searched my face until I felt I had to say something. “Awful night,” I muttered, raising the mug to my lips again.

“I’m sorry,” Dad replied, and he fell silent again. He continued to watch my face, and I began to get the sense that he wanted to say something.

“What?” I said dully.

“Well, Gavril, I…” Dad began. He trailed off, then sighed, then went on, “We haven’t talked about Jesus for a while. I want to know what you’re thinking.”

My expression didn’t change, but I gritted my teeth and bent my head over my coffee. Not this… I thought, Why did he have to bring this up now? Now, of all times! I had hoped I would be able to get through all this without having to talk about religion. Briefly, my mind cast about for a subtle way of escape, but there wasn’t one. I couldn’t just get up and leave or refuse to answer the question. No, I would simply approach the subject calmly and rationally with him as usual, keeping my emotions separate from it. In a way, I could avoid the subject even while talking about it.

“Nothing’s changed,” I told him, “I don’t believe in god, and Jesus was just a man. Man made him into a god by misinterpreting his words and his life. You know where I stand on this.” I hoped to close the discussion quickly. It had been a long time since Dad had brought this up around me, and when he did, he was usually quick to back off. He wasn’t nearly as insistent as Rachel had been.

Rachel. My heart twisted, and I forced the thought of her out of my mind. I had too much on my plate now to let it bother me.

“I thought, after everything that happened, and…what’s happening now…you might be thinking about this kind of thing more,” Dad ventured.

I pressed my lips together and turned my eyes up toward the ceiling as though thinking about it. Then I gave my head a little shake, meeting his eyes again. “Nope,” I said shortly, “Doesn’t often cross my mind.” This was a lie, but I wasn’t about to tell Dad how much I hated God now. How much I hated people’s belief in god.

“Your mom and I prayed continually for you when you were missing,” he went, “God saved your life, Gavril. I really believe that. When we thought you were dead, it was the most terrible feeling, and on top of that, Rachel—”

“Yeah, God didn’t really care about saving Rachel’s life, did He?” I burst out scathingly, forgetting my composure in my disgust at his inconsistencies, “And I suppose He doesn’t care much about saving Sharon’s life either. But He did drag me back into this hell for you, right? Is it because you didn’t have time to pray for Rachel before she killed herself? And maybe He doesn’t really feel like stopping Sharon’s cancer, just like He didn’t feel like stopping the 9/11 attacks. Is that it?"

“You know we’re all praying for Sharon,” Dad said, as though that meant something, “And I understand that Rachel was dear to you. She was to all of us.”

“The hell she was,” I spat.

“But please understand,” he forged on, “that God has a purpose in all of this.”

This was too much. “A purpose?!” I shouted, leaping to my feet so that my chair jerked back with a screech, “Where do you see a fucking purpose in all this? You think He had some reason for making Sharon puke her guts out all night? For letting Rachel swallow a whole fucking bottle of pills? What kind of fucking sick, twisted logic is that?!” I abruptly fell silent, shaking, spears of pain shooting through my damaged legs. My words had echoed through the quiet house, and now they hung heavy and unpleasant in the air.

Dad stared at me with slightly widened eyes, still calm, but speechless. He had never heard me use the f-word before. I met his gaze defiantly, daring him to reply with some feel-good, Christian drivel.

A shaky cry from the other room broke the tense silence: “Gavril, help! I-I’m…”

Leaning over the table towards Dad, I snarled, “Religion doesn’t have any answers for me.” Then I spun around and hurried into Sharon’s room. She was heaving again and trying to roll onto her side, too weak even to reach for the bucket beside the bed. I ran to get it to her, but I didn’t make it in time and had a mess to clean up.