15  MARY, OR, WE CAN NEVER BE SAFE

WHEN MY SON WAKES UP FROM HIS NAP, he runs to me and sits close and snuggles for minutes that stretch as long as I can make them. Sometimes we grab a blanket. As he slowly returns to the land of the living, his hair mussed on one side and his cheeks pink from the hard work of growing while he sleeps in his small bed in the corner of his room, he starts to want to play. Sometimes we make a small fort out of that one blanket and our bodies on the couch. We put our heads under the blanket, and that is enough for him. It’s magic, the way the light filters through a soft gray fabric. It’s me and him, our breath close together, in a world we created. Sometimes I will myself to remember this moment for the rest of my life. I know I won’t, which is why I am writing this down right now.

I had a brother who died when I was a baby. Jonah was four years old, almost five. Our entire family—my mother and father, my brother, my older sister, and me—were in a car accident, and my brother was killed. I only know my brother through stories and pictures and through the birthday cheesecake we ate every December 6 to remember him.

In my mind Jonah is the golden boy of our family. He was beautiful, just like my son is beautiful. When he died, so too did my parents’ golden world. Now they would go through life as those who had buried their son much too soon. I would grow up with an absence that was permeated with love. It wasn’t until I had my own son that I began to recognize the power of my brother’s absence. My son showed me afresh all the bright and terrifying possibilities of the future and all the ways it could never fully be in my control.

My brother died in the 1980s, before the ubiquity of video cameras, before we had even dreamed of smartphones. My parents have no video of Jonah, so there is no way for me to hear the sound of his voice or to see how the light moved on his hair. He is not on this earth, and like so many before and after him, there are no statues or monuments to the perfect image of God that he was. My mother and father kept the cards that well-meaning Christians sent them after my brother died. Some of them were terrible in their meaning-making—“when God closes a door he opens a window”—and others were too sad to know what to write, leaving a sympathy card blank save for the scrawl of a name at the bottom. But the card that my mother never forgot, the only card that gave her any iota of comfort, she once told me, was a tiny card that said simply, “God knows what it is like to lose a son.”

God knows what it is like to let his precious beloveds wander a world that is not safe, not for anyone. Sometimes, when my son and I are under our blanket whispering silly jokes to each other, enjoying the world we have created, I think about my brother, and then I think about my mother. She might have done this very same thing; she might have experienced this exact moment. The thought fills me with loneliness. All of us will have to experience this, the loss of our children growing up, growing away, perhaps even unto death. We are all in the same boat; we all have to die and so do the ones we love. But most of us spend an awful lot of time trying to convince ourselves it isn’t true.

We can never be safe, but oh how we try. I remember when my younger sister got into essential oils. She would breeze into a room, the enchanting scent of spices and citrus wafting in with her flowing dresses and her long, luxurious hair. She was a tornado of good smells and advice on how to use oils to keep my children from getting sick at school and to help them sleep at night. She told me constantly to use oils on my feet, at pulse points, to cure headaches and anxiety and depression. One day I did buy some oils on sale at the discount grocery store, and I even used a little contraption to diffuse them around my house. My own space started to feel better. I would breathe in the scents of clove and tea tree and eucalyptus and lavender, and I would feel as though I had taken back the tiniest bit of control over my life. Maybe today I would not wake up sad. Maybe my daughter wouldn’t get the flu. Maybe I could protect us today.

I proudly texted my sister about the oils wafting through my home, carried along by a cloud of diffused air and water. She instantly wrote back, “What brand are they?” I told her I didn’t know, I picked them up for a few bucks, which I was also proud of. She quickly texted me back that unless the oils I used were a specific, organic, and expensive brand, then I was most likely poisoning myself and my children with every cancerous, carcinogenic oil droplet we breathed in. I laughed because otherwise I would have screamed. But so often this is the way it goes: the ways we go about pursuing safety don’t always work, and sometimes they place an even heavier burden on those who are already struggling.

Eula Biss is a writer who explores this idea in her intriguing book on vaccines called On Immunity.1 She traces not only the history of vaccinations—the inoculations against disease that have transformed our world—but also the modern responses to them. Biss started exploring vaccines when she realized that her community—White, middle-class, highly educated women living in the Upper Midwest—were all having anguished discussions about vaccines. Many of them feared the (relatively minuscule) risks associated with the mandated vaccines, but the conversation never veered into the effects their individual choices to opt out would have on the community as a whole.

Biss interacts with the story of Achilles, whose mother wanted to protect him and keep him safe from the gods. She dipped him in the River Styx when he was a baby, dangling upside down in her hand. But of course, where she clutched at his ankle became the one part of his body that would now be exposed to weakness, so that in a way her attempt to save him contributed to his demise.

In our culture we value a mother’s love—or at least certain expressions of it (much of it is based in racial and class preferences that idolize White middle-class sensibilities). For instance, there is a certain motherly panache to declaring how one never gives their children foods with sugar or preservatives or colored dye or never lets them rot their brains with TV or video games. I myself have marveled at such mothers, inwardly fluctuating between wanting to give them a medal and wanting to pity how extra hard their lives seem. And this can extend to how we value our children—their safety and their well-being—and are expected to prioritize them over everyone else.

And yet vaccines are the perfect example of the dire consequences that can occur when people of privilege choose to idolize the safety of their child over the safety of another. It is an example of how those who are the most well-educated can sometimes forget their responsibility to others. Vaccines work and operate successfully based on the logic underneath what is commonly referred to as the “herd immunity.” When enough healthy people are inoculated against a disease, they can surround and protect the most vulnerable members (who perhaps can’t risk the vaccine) from the encroaching sickness. The healthy take a small risk in order to protect those who need it the most, but what happens when the healthy opt out? When people who are otherwise healthy claim they cannot stomach the risks? When people of privilege choose to value their own safety over the common good, it is the most vulnerable in the community who will suffer, as they always do.

And yet antivaccine sentiment continues to proliferate to this day. Every few months a once-vanished disease makes its way back into schools systems, endangering the vulnerable because of the cultural fixations and fears of parents who have been groomed to believe they can and must save their precious children from every hint of risk. But in their illusions of safety and control lie seeds that will grow up to damage others; by trying to save themselves they harm another.

The myth of safety and wellness continues to unspool around us, one more example of how humans love to create theories and theologies about why some people get sick and others don’t, why some get well and others die, and our own roles in keeping the ones we love alive, safe, well, and happy.

When I had my own son, nearly thirty years after my brother died, I was startled by how much I thought of Jonah. As my son grew older into the sturdy toddler years, I started dressing him in clothes that were a few decades old. I let his hair grow out long and cut it into the bowl cut I remember from the pictures of Jonah I had grown up studying. My son’s blond hair and snub nose would catch my eye in the rearview mirror as I drove around to various errands. Sometimes I would catch my breath: that’s Jonah in the backseat. Of course, it wasn’t. But maybe, just maybe, there is a shadow of my brother in there or at least the love and memory that compels me to keep him present, to keep him alive.

My son was born four weeks early because my body was failing me. He was fine, but I was not, and I spent the first weeks of his life hooked up to machines, willing my heart not to burst, angry at a God who had given me so many precious things to love that I was now terrified to die. All the things I had thought would comfort me in my darkest hour did not help a whit: thoughts of heaven, Bible verses about trusting in God, a tangible presence of the loving arms of Jesus around me. Instead, I felt an almost desperate longing to survive. I wanted to sink my fingers into the earth and stay here forever.

I did not die, but a few weeks after I was released from the hospital my son became the patient, terrifying us all with a meningitis scare at three weeks old. He was so tiny and it was so hard to comfort him with all the tubes and monitors and beeping sounds, day and night. His suffering, his fever, was the final straw that snapped whatever faint illusion of control I had. In the hospital I would go to the room reserved for parents of sick children and eat Lucky Charms slowly out of a Styrofoam bowl. I would glance around at the families, wondering what their sad story was. My son would be fine, we would be out of the hospital as soon as he stabilized, but what about everyone else? In a room filled with light and people getting coffee and talking in hushed voices, I finally felt a little less alone. Here is a room of people who are being forced to grapple with the questions no one ever wants to ask. Here is a room where I didn’t have to pretend like I was fine with this system, where everything dies and decays, where some babies survive and others don’t. Here I could eat my sugary cereal and cry, wondering how I was going to protect us from harm in the future, knowing I couldn’t.

A few weeks after my son got out of the hospital, our little family moved across the country, back home to Portland. We stayed with my parents for a few weeks while we waited for an apartment to open up in a complex I had my eye on. My mother had developed a penchant for collecting figures of Mary, a remnant of her Catholic girlhood shimmering through. She didn’t want to worry or offend her Baptist friends, so she stored the collection of pictures and vases and figurines in the guest bedroom, the room I was staying in: the room where I still struggled with my fear and anxiety, clutching my tiny baby to me. I didn’t want to leave that room, not ever. We had made it, we were safe, and I could never let anything bad happen to us again. For a few days everyone would check on us, worriedly. My husband, my mother, my father. But I mostly stayed in that room and nursed my baby, and I looked at all the images of Mary.

There was one picture in particular I couldn’t take my eyes away from. Mary, looking sad, held a Jesus who was more toddler than baby. I looked at the picture and I understood: Mary knew her son was going to die from the beginning. And still, she loved him, and she loved the God who gave him to her as fiercely as any mother among us. Her life, her eyes, her work would be to live in the tension of those two places: always relinquishing her child, always holding him as close as she could for as long as possible. Mary, with her sad eyes, became my friend that day.

I stared at Mary as all of the prosperity gospels I had absorbed throughout the years began to crumble under the weight of reality. I thought of how easy it had been to believe that if only I did the right things and believed the right things and bought the right product and said the right prayers everything would turn out okay. In my mind, warped by the American obsession with safety and wellness and success, my failure—including suffering, sadness, anxiety, and sickness—had to be some sign that God was displeased with me.

There’s a Joel Osteen sermon out there floating on the winds of social media. He’s talking about how much God loves to give us good things, how God is a good Father. Osteen says that if his own children came up on the stage dressed in ragged clothes, we would rightly judge him to be a poor father, a terrible caregiver. People in the audience clap for this; God does not want his people to be poor or in need or sad or raggedy!

What would Osteen say to Mary? I wondered. Mary who was poor, maybe illiterate, young, destined to suffer and to give birth to someone who suffered. What would Osteen say about the rest of the Bible, chock full of stories of a God who was obsessed with people, especially the sad and unwell ones? Poverty or sickness or suffering, Jesus constantly pointed out, was not a sign of the absence of God’s love or even a sign of sin. It was a sign of a broken world filled with people who exploited each other and created unjust systems that left a few wealthy and safe and well while the rest of society struggled to survive.

Prosperity gospels lurk within most of us, whether we see them or not. But as the Jesuit priest Father Greg Boyle says, God does not protect us from suffering, but God does promise to be with us in the suffering. Look at the beatitudes, that most glorious list of people that the American Dream would have us believe are to be pitied or perhaps are even on the wrong track with God: the poor, the sick, the sad, the meek, the oppressed. But Jesus says they are blessed—can I trust him when he says that?

It took me getting to the place where I was pretty poor, sick, and sad myself before this truly good news could start to seep into my bones. Locking myself in a spare bedroom to keep myself and my baby safe was a low point, but it exposed how deep the need for control is within me, how I long to believe anyone who promises the allures of safety and wellness for the people I love.

There, in that spare bedroom, I starting to build up a real faith from the bottom floor up. I was starting to believe maybe we humans did have a God with us, a God who, in this scenario, is the father and the mother and the child, a God who suffers and resurrects, giving us a hope that this could be true for us as well. In Mary I saw a mother who could model for me what it means to live with the work of God in mind. We cannot protect ourselves or our families, and this was never the point. But when we open ourselves up to the terror of love (because the underside of love is always grief) we will be joining in this endeavor with God, the one who is always being split wide open by joy and lament, children everywhere every day delighting God with their smiles and songs and creativity, breaking God’s heart with their cruelty and selfishness, harrowing God’s eyes with their sickness and accidents and catastrophes.

Pretty soon I got to the point where I could leave that bedroom, and eventually I too could join the land of the living, those who gathered the courage to keep going forward in a world of suffering, where safety and health and happy endings are never guaranteed. When I stole the picture of Mary from my mother’s guest bedroom and hung it up in our new apartment, my mother didn’t say a word. My mother knows. She knows how to keep on loving even after her world has ended, like so many mothers before her, including the mother of God.