The Dream

I woke up a few days ago in a burst of shock and fury. I was having probably the most vivid dream I have ever had, and I have had LOTS of drama in my life.


The following is a (somewhat embellished and exaggerated) account of my dream:

My sister has died. She lived to a good healthy age of 88 years old. And only her two children are left to make the arrangements for her funeral. And me. I am her older sister, but we haven’t spoken a word to each other in about 50 years. All because of the Mormon church.

Her husband passed away 30 years ago. And I remembered attending that funeral. It was held in the LDS chapel, a place I had avoided for 27 years. But, I went anyway, even though I hate funerals. All she could do was stare at me in hatred, like I had no right to be there, the evil apostate that I am. And in true fashion, she gave the eulogy for her husband, only instead of talking about him, it was full of Mormon doctrine, families together forever, holding to the iron rod, and all that bullshit. Not one thing about the man as a person. I wanted to avoid doing that to her, at her own funeral.

Mom passed away 15 years ago. And I fought TOOTH AND NAIL to make sure she had a NORMAL funeral, in a FUNERAL HOME with NO LDS officiators and NO MENTION of church doctrine. My sister insisted on having mom buried in her temple dress, which I finally relented to, but I would NOT allow that ridiculous GREEN APRON to be attached to her in her coffin, or at the cemetery. She had no one to call her forth anyway, her husband having passed away never joining the church, so there was no point in making all of us non-members go through with a memorial service that focused on the MORMON point of view in everything. After realizing that she was a minority in opinion on how mom’s funeral would be handled, she finally let us handle it all, but she was mad at me for leading the uprising. Well, we had two other brothers and two other sisters who aren’t members, and they didn’t want the Mormons handling everything and telling us what was proper and what isn’t. My sister got to have the grave dedicated and I felt that was fair enough. I got to keep the green apron, which I ceremoniously burned. She got to have her precious ceremony reserving Mom in the Mormon’s Only section of Heaven.

So, here I’m sitting at the hospital, after my sister has died, and I have to deal with her two children, both of whom remained members but only one who was active. Her daughter had five kids and none of them are members anymore. They all left when the temple ceremonies were done away with completely about 18 years ago. And her son, who quit his mission halfway through after discovering the Internet accounts about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, was there with his wife. They had never rejoined and brought up all of their kids to be free-thinkers. I know this caused my sister great distress, as it had also caused for my mother. Mom often lamented how her children were ‘refusing’ to be with her in the afterlife, and we didn’t want to adhere to Mormon teachings in order to secure our posterity’s place in the CK. My sister echoed these sentiments throughout her life, and especially when her son quit the church. I was the cause of it, she was sure all of my blogging had been what her son had read.

Her daughter immediately began to make the arrangements for her mother in traditional Mormon style, and her son was arguing with her about turning the funeral into another church function complete with green jello. So, I stepped in. I began to share with them the many things that I felt should be talked about at my sister’s funeral, and how we could have really been a Forever Family if it hadn’t been for the church distorting our perceptions of what it takes to be a family. They actually listened to an old lady (in my dreams, of course), and this is what I told them:

Funerals are not for the dead. They are for those left behind. They should not be made into “opportunities” to bring more people into the church. To do so only cheapens the life of the one they are memorializing. It makes the deceased a tool for conversions into the church, and sums up their lives in a simple thought: Every member a missionary. I would not, and could not, sit idly by while my sister’s life was turned into a sermon for the faithful, and a guilt trip for the unworthy. No matter what had happened to cause her to reject her son’s decision to leave his mission, pick out his own wife, and raise his kids independent of the church, and no matter how hard her daughter tried to raise her kids in the church and do everything “right”, only to have them one by one leave, this was not the time or ‘opportunity’ to try to bring all of these people back, force them to attend a Mormon ceremony, and be berated and belittled for their life choices. And at my age of almost 90 years, I sure the HELL was not going to be attending such a Mormon Missionary Moment again.

So, her daughter turns to her brother and says, “Is that what you want to do?”

“Yeah, definitely. I don’t want to go through a rerun of Dad’s funeral,” he replied.

And then she turns to her children, all adults with kids of their own, and none of them in the church, and asks, “What about you guys? Am I the only one who thinks she should have a Mormon funeral like Dad got?”

A middle-aged, balding man, whom I could only assume was her own son, said, “I don’t want Grandma to be used like that. Nobody who will attend will know what all that Mormon doctrine is about anyway, and I was really uncomfortable sitting through Pop’s funeral. Maybe we should just have a regular open memorial at the funeral home, so more people will come and not feel like they are getting preached at.”

So, her daughter consented to the majority, and agreed that we could have my sister’s funeral at the same place Mom’s was. She got to have her temple dress, AND her apron. (Which I was not happy about, but it wasn’t my say. Besides, that’s how her husband was buried, and I guess the kids wanted them to “match”).

This is the eulogy I gave at my sister’s ‘funeral’ in the year 2060:

Today, I became the only member of the family past 80. All the parents and grandparents gone, aunts and uncles gone, and children all grown up with families of their own. And I am still contending with the church through my blog. I helped keep my own children from joining, my grandchildren, all of my nephews and neices, their children and grandchildren, and even had a hand in helping my sister’s son leave the mission, when I wired him $4000 for a plane ticket from Bolivia. All throughout my life, my sister had hated me for my opposition to the church. She tried her best to teach her own kids how to recognize apostates like me, and avoid developing a relationship with their non-member cousins, and bring up grandchildren in the faith. And every time someone in the family left the church, she blamed me. If I would just stop writing that blog, everything would have been fine. Really?

How “fine” would it be for you to raise your children to be wary of anyone who doesn’t adhere to your belief system? How “fine” is it when you isolate yourself from your blood relatives because they chose to leave the church and are now considered ‘unfit’ to be around your kids, or talk with your husband in private about some professional matter, or even think of those who leave as ‘evil and under Satan’s power’?

My sister spent 70 years hating me for every perceived hurt I had caused her, from not defending her beliefs in front of her peers, to losing boyfriends because I was skinnier than her, for giving birth on her wedding day, (even though I would have been considered ‘unworthy’ to attend anyway). She accused me of trying to take over everything she tried to accomplish, even her first marriage failed because I spent so much time ‘flirting’ with her husband. And when she threatened miscarriage with her son, it was obviously my fault for all the stress I was causing her. When I confided in her that I thought the bishop was acting peculiar around me and in my presence she accused me of trying to undermine his marriage and take him from his wife. (!!!) She treated me with contempt for “choosing sides” when I attended Dad’s funeral 22 years ago. Just because he supported my decision to leave the church, she became convinced that he had everything to do with my apostacy. She even went as far as to accuse me of flirting with her husband of 27 years, all the while assuring me that she didn’t think I was doing it on purpose, I’m just so unaware of how I behave (now that I’m not a member), she thought she should make me aware of it. Not that her husband ever told me any such thing, or that he was uncomfortable with anything I ever said or did in his presence. She was just trying to help, after all.

See, I guess after I left the church, I was unable to reign in my passions for all men that were NOT mine, so she was actually doing me a favor by pointing it out. And she felt completely justified for over 70 years blaming me for everything that went wrong in her life, forcing me to withdraw completely from view in the community, in the school system, and in performances of singing or music so that she couldn’t point out how I was making attempts to “outshine” her. I couldn’t even sing KAROKE without pissing her off. And when she decided to put her church activities ahead of professional commitments she had made to me, I was acting unreasonable when I complained about it, since I should know better than anyone what is required of a Mormon in their lives. So that was supposed to excuse sloppy accounting and paperwork, she was busy keeping up appearances at the Mormon church. Even after I paid her for services rendered, the fact that I was not overjoyed to do it, and felt that I was charged for some things she would be ‘glad to do, no problem’, she went to her grave feeling I was still attacking her and trying to ruin her life, just because I couldn’t see the world the same way she did.

If being a member of the church makes you a better, happier person, I couldn’t see that in the way she lived her life. Everything had to be just so, she had to be so important, so elevated in her standings in church, and temple attendance, she had to be a shining example of how to do everything right, and force that upon her children in such a heavy handed style that she actually created the kind of rebellion in her own posterity that she sought to avoid. As soon as her son had the chance to be away from her, he took it upon himself to get answers to the questions he had set on the shelf, and once he decided to get out, nobody was there to help him, but me. This automatically made me responsible for his departure, if it hadn’t been for me he would have stayed in the church. Never mind that the Internet is chock-full of the same kinds of information that I posted on my blog, and is in fact the main sources for my post topics, it became my fault that her son got out.

As for her daughter, she tried to raise her family exactly as her mother did, and ended up with the same result, all of her kids wound up leaving for one doctrinal reason or another. But this couldn’t be blamed on the church, no way. It had to be some external, anti-Mormon source putting out all these LIES to destroy the faith. So, once again, I became the source of blame for leading her entire family away from the ‘truth’.

This is exactly what our Mom had feared, we would spend our whole lives on opposing sides, always fighting with each other, and never resolving our differences. Well, Mom could have done something about it while she was alive, but didn’t. And my sister could have seen me as a human first instead of as an apostate devil-worshipper, but she chose to believe her church leaders. I guess I could have (once again) made the efforts to smooth things over, but invariably the church would have come between us on some other issue, whether it was because I was depending on her for some important thing, and she decided to attend a church function instead, or whether there was still a sense of mistrust because I had once believed and no longer did, so leaving me to care for her children, even for an hour, was strictly out of the question. Being friends with my sister meant including the Mormon church in your life, and if you couldn’t do that, she just moved on without you. Which is easier to do if you can blame that person instead of your church for causing the hurt.

Once the church has a hold on you, and dictates your life from beginning to end, there is no room for non-members. We all stand on the outside, knowing what conditions have to be met in order for our inclusion, and making the decisions to be true to ourselves rather than submit to the authority of others who can’t back up their beliefs with anything other than a ‘testimony’ and a ‘burning of the bosom’. Anyone who attempts to bring in some logic, reason, or doubt in the teachings are just trouble-makers who can’t adhere to the lifestyle and the demands of the restored church.

My hope for my sister, and my mom, who have now received first-hand knowledge of what the afterlife is like, is that somehow they can convey to us in the remainder of our lives this one message: Love is unconditional. It should not matter what your religion, it should only matter what your mark is on those you came in contact with in this life. If you created goodness, that is your reward. If your life is filled with contention, with harboring grudges, with planning for the worst, then that will be how you perceive things in the great beyond. I hope they finally got the answers they were looking for, even if they had to pass through mortality to gain it. As for the rest of us, let us all renew our efforts to experience what this life has to offer for our experience, and not seek to separate ourselves into groups of ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. We should stand for uniting the family, not pointing fingers at those whose beliefs are separate from ours. That should NEVER come in the way of keeping our bonds with sisters, children and grandchildren. And I BLAME THE MORMON CHURCH FOR SAYING OTHERWISE!!!!