A story by O. Alan Weltzien
Taylor Triptych
Maybe like you, I grew up with flesh-and-blood relatives and at least a couple of ghosts. My maternal grandmother didn’t die until I was midway through college. Our step-grandmother, Barbara Weltzien, placid and well-intentioned and dull, lived longer. Behind her loomed an old shadow.
Maybe like yours, cancer visited our family, repeatedly. My favorite uncle and aunt, dead in early middle age. My wife’s father and brother didn’t reach 45 or 60, respectively. Beyond Mom’s younger sister and brother, my maternal grandfather, dead years before my folks married and had children. And before Gram Barb, Dad’s mother, victim of breast cancer who died before her mid-40s, like my uncle and my wife’s father. Several here didn’t make age 50 or much beyond it.
We never heard much about Grandma Gladys—Gladys Taylor Weltzien (1895-1939)—growing up because Dad, forthcoming on most topics, didn’t talk about her. We knew less of her than of his Army stint in World War II where, during the Battle of Huertgen Forest, predecessor to the Battle of the Bulge, he contracted tuberculosis from a stray GI who briefly shared his wet foxhole. I knew that Gladys was a Christian Scientist and that her dying was painful. Mostly, she didn’t exist. I’ve never known anyone named Gladys, an old-fashioned name that belongs in a room with horsehair sofas, doilies, and fading chrysanthemums. Or gladiolus.
Why didn’t Dad talk about his childhood and adolescence, his family life with his folks? The older I grew the more I sensed the answer. The passage of decades hardly dulled the pain. He kept it under lock and key.
When I was a kid, the neighbors behind us, the Bentons, were Christian Scientists. I sensed from the folks that Christian Scientists were Christian but different and held peculiar notions about illness and doctors. We used to ride past the local one-level Church of Christ Scientist on a bend along Overlake Drive, just off Meybenbauer Bay. The neighbors were also John Birchers and the wife opposed fluoridating the municipal water supply. I doubt she fancied doctors. I also doubt she watched Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, with General Ripper’s wacky screed about pure bodily essences and fluoridation and “safe” water supplies.
Apparently my maternal grandmother flirted with Christian Science when Mom was young. By the time her husband was dying of colorectal cancer (1939-41), she had to hock her wedding ring to pay for one of the two failed surgeries. I don’t recall her attending a Christian Science church but she couldn’t say “doctors” with saying “damn doctors,” and she never cursed.
So what was with this peculiar church and how did it play in Grandma Gladys’s life? Dad never said anything disrespectful about Christian Scientists, but his high school years were defined by his dying mother.
I don’t know exactly when Gladys contracted breast cancer. From the 1890s until two generations ago when other treatment regimes came into play, the primary treatment for breast cancer was radical mastectomy, and Gladys wouldn’t have allowed scalpels. According to the American Cancer Society website, “early in the 20th century, only cancers small and localized enough to be completely removed were curable.” Even if her breast cancer had been “small and localized” she would have refused treatment. And it likely metastasized—a word very few knew or swallowed in the 1930s.
She died on a Friday, 3 March 1939, about three months before Dad’s graduation from Seattle’s Lincoln High School (“Go Lynx!”). High school senior year: a season of flourishing ego when even bookish, shy guys like Dad might strut. How did he walk through the dark tunnel of that year or the ones immediately preceding? Was it harder for him to focus on the high school band, moisten his clarinet’s reed on his tongue?
I study a series of black-and-white photographs of Gladys, trying to enter her head, imagine her in the room, chatting. One pair shows her at age 18 (1916), her dark hair, fairly short, parted in the middle and waved back along the fringe. She doesn’t exactly grin or smirk. In one she looks directly at you, curious; on the back of the other some hand (likely her mother’s) wrote her age and “Weight 125 lbs.”.
In a large framed family portrait (1924) that hangs in my study, Gladys is seated on the left holding my aunt, a round-eyed baby. Gladys’ dark hair, carefully bobbed, shines. Dad stands on the same bench his folks sit on, dressed in a white sailor suit with a wide patterned loose tie, slightly tilting his blond head, his right hand cupping his jaw and his left curled around his father’s neck. He looks unsure about this photo session. Oliver and Gladys Weltzien, 30 and 29, respectively, are formally dressed, their smiles reserved. The portrait confirms their desire: two children, boy then girl, a middle-class life in a city. Nothing unusual.
Of course I only see this portrait and the other pictures from the future which shows how truncated that life would be. Gladys lived to see her kids as teenagers but then the movie abruptly stops.
Another small black-and-white, from the late 1920s, displays husband and wife standing on the third concrete step of the five that lead to their home’s front door. A romanesque arch frames them. The front door opens to the left, just beyond Gladys. How well I remember playing on those steps. Oliver, arms akimbo, wears a cardigan sweater over his white shirt and necktie. Gladys wears a white short-sleeve blouse with crew neck and a floral pattern, matched by a white skirt with a pleated border. Their expressions are casual. They have about a decade left together.
Their house—124 No. 55th, Seattle, below Woodland Park, on the steep west slope of Phinney Ridge—was inhabited for over thirty years by Barbara Weltzien (step-grandmother), Oliver’s second wife, after his death (he died two months following his retirement, 8/28/1959). In my youth I explored its upstairs and basement, once sleeping in Dad’s old bedroom. My nose knew its musty nooks and crannies.
The final photo forms the upper half of the Seattle Times obituary notice, “Mrs. Weltzien Funeral Rites Next Tuesday.” In a short-sleeve blouse with ruffled top matched by a pastel skirt, she sits, quarter profile to the right, her shadow (immediately left) touching, and she doesn’t smile. Her hair waves tightly, right to left, above her forehead and left cheek. Of course, by the time most saw this picture, she was dead.
These five pictures rebuff me, ultimately. I can’t hear her voice, feel her touch. Still the same thin shadow she remained during Dad’s life, a ghost measured by his silence. I’ve never visited her gravesite in Seattle’s Evergreen Washelli Memorial Park which straddles Aurora Ave. North: the city’s largest. Dad never took us there, nor do I remember him going.
On the rare occasions Dad or others reminisced, I heard words like “warm-hearted, outgoing.”
Many seasons ago a cousin oldest among Gladys’s five Baby Boomer grandchildren—sent me Gladys’s diary, which spans, excepting one final entry, eight years (1910-17), and the ghost turned into a high school girl on the cusp of adulthood with typical flights of fancy and moments of resolve. This unknown diary sprang from a century and change earlier. Her entries show her maturing through high school and college, along the way falling in love with my grandfather, after whom I’m named. It climaxes with their marriage (8/18/1917) amidst Oliver Weltzien’s Army tour.
Did Dad know about this diary? If he did, he never made mention. Discovery and study of long-dead relatives’ diaries suddenly pulls them closer, breathes them back to life, and opens a hitherto unimagined relationship with them. Now Gladys has warmed into a flesh-and-blood woman, lurching into my old age, whose vivacity matches the rare fond comment Dad ventured about his mother. Writer Mary Clearman Blew uses the diary of her aunt Imogene to imagine her independent life, as a schoolteacher in early 20th-century Washington, in Balsamroot (1994). Another Montana writer, Ivan Doig, created his memoir about his mother, Heart Earth (1993), because of a trove of (World War II) letters bequeathed to him by an uncle. Doig’s mother, Bernita R. Doig, dies in the second sentence of Doig’s magnificent This House of Sky (1978), on the novelist’s sixth birthday, and her absence forms the most powerful presence in Doig’s memoir.
Because of her diary Gladys steps out from behind her quaint name, curtsies. And I’m forced to read this love story, expressed in the conventional confessional form encouraged by a diary—those sappy exclamations, those secrets begging to be shared—in light of what happened after the first score of years. If life begins at forty, Gladys’ ended just after it began. In one sense though, it began during her high school years, which couldn’t have differed more starkly from her son’s and daughter’s.
Gladys’ diary reveals a double standard, one enforced by her mother. Her father, who passed himself off as a professional astrologer for decades, married her mother when she was a teenager. Neither had lasted long in grammar school. Gladys is the only daughter and the baby of the family by many years. She follows fashions and flirtations and attends dances and takes French and piano and tennis lessons while at Seattle’s old Broadway High School: plenty of civilizing touches. How did the Taylors pay for lessons when they couldn’t always make rent?
Meanwhile her brothers, nine and seven years older, never reach high school, scrapping for jobs in Seattle theaters and elsewhere to pay rent and buy food. After 1910, when the older brother marries, the role of breadwinner falls on Beach (then 22), middle child. On 19 July that year, she’s written, “Dear old brother Beach is so good. He is just as good as gold. How I wish he had been able to finish Grammar School.” Did she sense any unfair privilege? How much did that bother her? Did he simply accept his lot, given their father’s failures at steady income?
The diary chronicles a busy high schooler who doesn’t always wear what she wants and who knows her family lives in straitened circumstances compared to those of friends. But she’s not denied many pleasures. In a diary passage (1 August 1910) quoted earlier, Gladys, not quite 15, yearns for a better house with a front yard and parlour. She records moments of resolve that diaries solicit (e.g. study harder, lose weight) as well as birthday and Christmas gifts of jewelry, summer outings, and plenty of evening shows: the tickets usually supplied by Beach, already working as an advance man for a plethora of entertainments.
The son/brother not only subsidizes food and shelter but provides the tickets for shows.
The most absorbing story concerns my grandfather, who occupies an increasingly frequent place in the journal and whom I never knew well. Because he didn’t fancy little kids later in life and because he died before my seventh birthday, I grasp few memories in my fist. Gladys first mentions Oliver at the end of her freshman year, noting that he was good at “some lassoing stunts” a group tried; on the second occasion, a basket social, he has waited to successfully bid on the last but one remaining basket—hers—from which they hardly eat. After the latter occasion Gladys admits (6/19/1912), “I like Oliver better than any boy I have met yet and wouldn’t mind going somewhere with him.” They have already chosen one another.
Oliver sends boxes of chocolates and flowers or gives her a fountain pen or a cedar (hope) chest, takes her canoeing, summer afternoons or evenings, on Lake Washington. He carves their initials in the trunk of a maple tree. For her high school graduation (6/18/1914)—first in her family—he gifts her three dozen carnations and a “Sardonyx” ring (her birthstone). That first fall of the Great War, she attends the University of Washington—another first. That Christmas he gives her a lavelliere with “a very dainty gold chain” and suspended diamond which he puts on her neck. She imagines the living room and kitchen in their future home.
By the fall of 1915 Gladys has transferred to the “Normal School” in Bellingham (Western Washington University), “working for my room and board,” as she can’t afford the University. Oliver had gone to work for the Scandinavian Bank in Pioneer Square after his high school graduation. She student taught in Tenino and Stony Point, WA. Oliver presented her with a solitaire diamond on her 21st birthday (8/15/1916); they were married in her parents’ home three days after her 22nd birthday (8/17/1917), by which time Oliver, an Army private, was stationed at Fort Lewis as a paymaster. The newlyweds occupy “the coziest little apartment right near town and it’s fun keeping house (9/6/1917).” He never shipped overseas though he petitioned to be sent. In an entry from half a year earlier, Gladys itemizes the contents of their future house, from the living room with her Chickering piano to their bedroom and bathroom. She’d have most of that, at least, a score of years.
On one occasion a few years after the marriage, Gladys’ father, C. Tousey Taylor, told Oliver, “You won’t have her very long.” Some stellar or planetary alignment based on her natal horoscope predicted her early death, and that was that. Did his reading of her fate give him any pause? He proved prophetically right.
The same month she inventories her home with Oliver, she mentions, apropos of Valentine’s Day, that Oliver “sent me a cute valentine and Destiny and a box of candy.” Destiny, a New Thought Novel (1917), is described as an “occult-tinged metaphysical romance.” Yikes. A one-sentence teaser reads, “A young woman has a series of occult experiences when she delves into New Thought.” “New Thought”? The Taylor parents devoted themselves to the paranormal. The daughter, not quite 22, was ripe for such a trend. Oliver, raised Lutheran, indulged his fiancé’s tastes. He knew she was a reader with a college degree who wanted to stay abreast of new trends. Who doesn’t?
Part of the novel’s argument—an abstract—appears online. Turns out all books should be measured by their quantity of wisdom and its everyday applications: “This is the hour when the risen race consciousness refuses to accept a whirl of statements. The race mind resents proclamations; a present book must have true situations between its covers which teach their lessons.” “Race consciousness,” “true situations”? How did Gladys digest this gift? How did she and other readers penetrating this gauzy prose and discussing and applying New Thought?
Its author, Dr. Julia Seton (Sears), exerted a major influence on this New Thought movement through this title and other books. Seton (1862-1950) was trained as a physician but harbored spiritual ambitions, apparently. In Boston in 1905, she founded the “Church and School of the New Civilization.” This “Church” “brought the Ancient Wisdom into practical use,” and sympathetic websites extol Seton as an insider—high priestess of an ancient temple—who knew the thought of Zoroaster, Osiris, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato better than anyone else. Good grief. This Church’s mission statement is quoted on Wiki. What “practical use[s]” did Gladys glean from Seton’s hodgepodge of “Ancient Wisdom”? Did she view Seton’s book with any critical lens or did she swallow eagerly?
I spent most of my life as an academic but somehow missed New Thought. Like Seton’s Church and Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, this movement grew out of particular, late-19th century currents that variably overlapped and diverged. In his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James labelled it a “Mind-cure movement”: “The leaders of this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust.” The power of positive thinking generations before Norman Vincent Peale coined the phrase. What a Siren call.
Variations of Seton’s Church and Eddy’s faith recur and re-surface just like our attraction to astrology. It’s too easy to mock New Thought a century later—until we uncover whatever current versions command fashion this season.
The New Thought movement is attributed to one Phineas P. Quimby (1802-66)—a fine, 19th-century moniker that smacks of New England. Quimby, a Portland ME clockmaker, also served as a mesmerist and healer. He promulgated the notion that illness originates in the mind as a result of erroneous beliefs and that a mind open to God’s wisdom could cure itself of any illness. Right thinking guarantees healing. One just has to think the right thoughts: it’s that simple. Or arduous. Eddy, who invented the Christian Science movement a few years after Quimby’s death, was a patient of his for a period (1862-65), and in some respects, a protege: a relationship she later disputed. Her acute illnesses engendered her central credo of self-healing.
My grandmother, on the cusp of marriage and family life, likely embraced Destiny whole hog. It’s too easy to mock her gullibility. I imagine she fancied New Thought as her destiny and trusted Seton’s applied “Ancient Wisdom.” In 1917 it passed itself off as cutting-edge spirituality, the kind of stuff a newly minted teacher might embrace. After all, her father interwove Biblical texts with his natal horoscope writings. Her devotion marks her dedication to an overlapping movement from New England that spread quickly across the U.S. and beyond.
Within a month of receiving Destiny as a Valentine’s gift, Gladys notes on a Monday (3/5/1917), that the preceding day with two of Oliver’s relatives, “he and I went to C.S. [Christian Science] Church. It was simply packed and the boys had to stand. I am going to take C.S. up this summer for I think it’s the thing.” She felt part of a new fashion in Christian spiritualism, a trend and sect she swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
Founded by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) in Boston in 1879, the Christian Scientist church doubled its number of congregations between 1910-30. Described as a small movement wielding a disproportionately large influence, Christian Science believes prayer the central element of disease cure. Prayer forms part of the path to redemption. Mind (or heart) over matter, the core credo. But it’s more than that. According to critic Caroline Fraser, Eddy believed “disease was unreal because the human body and the entire material world were mere illusions of the credulous, a waking dream.” External reality including our animal bodies are illusory?
This is far more than one eccentric extension of Neo-Platonism.
Apparently in the 20th century, this Church collected over 50,000 healing testimonials from a host of illnesses and conditions, but few medical professionals have reviewed or assessed these. That volume of testimonials bespeaks Christian Science’s attractions because it so centrally taps into an ancient idea: that our particular outlook and disposition drive, in many respects, our bodies’ health. What an allure.
The Church keeps no records of the legions who suffered and died in pain, including my grandmother.
Eddy’s key text, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1879), became, along with Biblical verse, indispensable reading for Gladys and fellow travelers. Eddy provided the key to life, one she continually revised and re-packaged during her long life.
This “scientific” reading of Christian doctrine, above all this unreal view of prayer’s central power and efficacy (as opposed to the interventions of physicians), attracted many educated Christians such as Gladys. In one respect, its assumption of personal agency as primary determinant in one’s health counters the fait accompli determinism endorsed by astrology and her father.
By 1936 Christian Science membership through its Mother Church (Boston) numbered 269,000; by mid-century it began a slow decline, despite its proliferation in some Third World countries. Its membership nowadays counts about 1,700 congregations in 80 countries: above its 1910 total but well below its 1930 enrollment. As with many trends, it rises and falls in popularity.
According to other online sources, the Church’s “slide into irrelevance has been inexorable.” Critic Caroline Fraser’s research suggests that in the 1987 – 2018 period, over 1000 Christian Science churches closed, with only about 1000 churches remaining.
My grandmother’s adult life parallels the waxing of Christian Science; decades after her death it lost popularity. Her story does not recommend it.
Gladys’ vibrant warmth, evident in her diary, later manifested itself in her identities as generous wife and mother. The rare times Dad spoke about his mother, he described her outgoing personality and social ease as opposed to his shyness. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, she busied herself with Girl Scouts, supporting my aunt, and the school parent-teacher associations. She was also active in the Order of the Eastern Star (OES), to match Oliver’s involvement in the Masonic Order.
OES was originally established (1850; 1876) as a complementary fraternal organization to the Freemasons, targeted especially for female relatives of active, advancing Masons. Its mission statement, bland and benign, reads analogously to those of New Thought and Christian Science. A century ago, varieties of spiritual discipline manifested as esoteric knowledge claims attracted legions of followers. New Thought and Christian Science promised a personal freedom that would liberate the self from doctors; Freemasonry and EOS promised mystic rites and structured social activity.
One online opinion tartly comments, “The Star does what little it does with a tremendous amount of pomp and ceremony.”
Gladys probably savored the “pomp and ceremony” as much as the next woman. She remained active in Seattle’s Doric Chapter 69, achieving the top rank of “Worthy Matron”: presiding officer among the eighteen officers characterizing a chapter. After extensive online study, I remain uncertain about OES’s purposes except for a few charities.
My grandfather remained an active Mason all his life; Dad, however, would have little to do with it, and my brothers and I chuckled from a distance. Except for Mozart’s Masonic Music and Die Zauberflote, and John Phillip Sousa’s “Nobles of the Mystic Shrine” march, I’ve little use for freemasonry. Our social outlets veered far from this organization with its fedoras and tassels and rings, and I suspect OES membership has declined along with that of the Masonic Order. For Boomers and beyond, the rituals and funny clothes hold less attraction.
But in the Seattle of nearly a century ago, the Order and OES provided the primary social outlets for my grandparents. Dad and my aunt recalled many an evening being left at home, canned soup for dinner, as the folks dined out with their friends in the Masonic or OES chapters.
My grandmother’s diary really ends with her marriage. But after a long hiatus, she returns to it once more, briefly, on September 27, 1926: “Perhaps I should write a line or two now, after being married nine years. I am very happy with my dear daddy [husband, Oliver] and Robert [my father] and Jean Marie [my aunt]. I feel so grateful for the knowledge that God is love and an ever present help. Our little home is cosy and happiness and love abide here. And for all our blessings we are thankful.” Dad always loved the word, cozy, popular in his family. It’s a cozy word.
I’m haunted, though, by Gladys repeating that central Christian—and Christian Scientist—doctrine, “God is love and an ever present help.” Because God wasn’t a decade later.
During the Depression grandfather’s bank, Washington Mutual Savings Bank, never closed, so they were screened from the economic hardships visited upon my mother’s family.
Dad read a lot and walked to and from school, sometimes crossing to the other sidewalk to avoid the occasional classmates’ jeers built from his initials, RTW: “rotten, terrible, worse!”
But sometime in 1936 or 1937 Gladys contracted breast cancer and the family’s life turned increasingly black. Its timing—she turned 40 in 1935—made her a classic candidate for early, virulent breast cancer. As a Christian Scientist she avoided all interventions and medications, instead relying on the power of ”right thinking” and prayer. Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures remained on her bedside table. And Church “practitioners” stood or sat nearby, praying aloud or silently.
In those early growth decades of Christian Science, the AMA repeatedly sought to curb their pernicious influence in “health” care but because all the “practitioners” did was pray, they were protected by the Constitution. Medical authority has played a losing battle against Christian Science until the last generation.
In the last year of her life, Dad was a high school senior and Aunt Jean, a sophomore. One of the very few times Dad spoke about his mother in my presence, in the last two decades of his life, he told me she repeated “God is love!” continuously, her voice rising and falling in waves of pain. Her screaming awakened them during the night. No morphine, no Dilaudid, nothing. Her husband and children heard, for years, her body’s protest through her chants as the cancer took her.
I almost hear it, most of a century later, and my eyes fill as I imagine my dad and aunt, let alone my grandfather, his vibrant wife wasting away.
Maybe radical mastectomy would have done no good, only bought her a few more seasons or years. But no pain mitigation? This feels inhumane. And inhuman.
My cousin has told me that every morning my aunt, fifteen, rose extra early in order to read from Eddy’s Science and Health to her mother. One day, the first Friday in March [1939], she inadvertently overslept and hurried to school, skipping the morning reading. Gladys died that day.
Services were held the following Tuesday (3/7/1939) at her church, the Third Church of Christ, Scientist (17th Ave. N.E. and N. E. 50th, Seattle), whose new sanctuary was dedicated a decade earlier (1929).
Over the decades, Dad likely recalled more often her voice in the years before breast cancer. But I can’t imagine the horror of their family life by 1938. What Gladys put herself and her family through, ignoring a possible surgery or even pain meds: I can’t enter that bedroom door. These century-old fashions in spiritualism make a weird sense for some wannabe followers. But it’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. An aging fitness guy, I’m all in favor of the body’s sanctity, yet her stance feels only tragic.
I’m an armchair quarterback disputing calls generations later. Dad’s long silence makes sense. At least her diary turned her from being only a name and a small handbag of photos and stories. Her entries return her to life, however cut short. Every moment of my grandparents’ love story can only be read through the black curtain of her death (age 43).
And from that key entry in 1917, I read the story of an odd branch of Protestant Christianity that embraced tens of thousands in the earlier 20th century. For these devotees, we completely control any and all bodily ailments. Who wouldn’t want to subdue illness on one’s own? And as everyone knows, a positive outlook certainly improves one’s chances of recovery from illness or surgery. But a gap yawns between that and militant avoidance of medicine.
My freshman college roommate lost his first wife to breast cancer at the same age as my grandmother (43) many years ago: he raised their three sons solo for a number of years before remarriage. Oliver remarried four years after Gladys’s death. Now, because of a young Gladys’ diary entries, I hug a family ghost.
Christian Science feels like an oxymoronic phrase wherein the second term—its modern understandings and assumptions and methodologies—has been appropriated into a most peculiar context. And Caroline Fraser’s long essay in The Guardian, “Dying the Christian Science Way: the horror of my father’s final days” (8/9/2019, online), jolted me back into my father’s sad house on Phinney Ridge, Seattle, in 1938-39.
What’s changed?
This essay distills Fraser’s book, God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (2000; rpt. 2020), which was recently re-published in an expanded 20th anniversary edition. Fraser is formidable and relentless in her devastating critique. She quotes another critic who deems this sect “Jonestown in slow motion.” Fraser reviews the apex of the Church’s lobbying influence (1970s), its disastrous legacy of (medical) child abuse, its notorious (2010) retraction, in The New York Times (“Christian Science Church Seeks Truce with Modern Medicine”) of Eddy’s core belief in “radical reliance.” She calls out the Church’s system of pseudo-“nursing” programs and retirement centers, cheers its financial free fall and heavy hemorrhage of members.
But what sticks under my skin concerns her father’s demise. We all know how we feel about hospitals versus staying home if at all possible, but Fraser fires all guns: “There is something worse than death in a hospital. . .There’s dying without help, without pain relief, without care. . .dying the way Christian Scientists die. There’s dying the way my father died.”
That savage drumbeat makes me hear Grandma Gladys’ wailing voice.
Her father checked into “Sunrise Haven,” a Christian Science nursing home in Kent, WA, in late 2003, age 75, with gangrene developing in his left foot. He spent seven months there. Fraser’s father had a Ph.D. from Columbia University but even his Ivy League pedigree didn’t immunize him from the sect his grandfather and father raised him in.
During those seven months, “practitioners” were usually in attendance assigning him, as has always been their way, “strange forms of mental homework, asking [patients] to recall previous healings, or things they are grateful for”—a “hackneyed tradition,” one I know my grandmother was subject to as well. Those mostly silent figures, tall and earnest and draped in black, forever murmuring, lips moving, grim sentinels dripping with piety.
The details grow horrific, her father’s poisonous foot, for example, eventually sloughing off a few weeks before his death (4/20/2004). Her chronicle shows a pain-driven Mr. Hyde taking over her wannabe Dr. Jekyll father:
When pressed to deal with reality, he fell back on bullying, irritably refusing all but the most trivial forms of help. . .responding to expressions of alarm and concern not with kindness, but with sarcasm and contempt. . .He had always been abusive and full of rage. Where that came from is unclear, but he apparently endured much as a child, forced to ‘heal’ his broken arm at the age of eight.
This is obscene. A child’s broken arm creates a broken man whose slow dying tortures himself and his family.
Fraser’s father rode his private wrack of pain about twenty miles south of Gladys Weltzien, sixty-five years later. She converted as a young woman and didn’t force it upon her husband or two kids. And by all accounts she was a gentle soul, even in her dying. But what Christian Science put both of them through, in its absolute denial of palliative pain care, is beyond cruel. My father, like Fraser, was scarred for life though he rarely talked about it. He couldn’t go there.
As Fraser notes, no contemporary Christian Science leaders have “expressed remorse for a century of suffering and death caused by the church.” My paternal grandmother, one member of that century, tragically embraced this version of what William James broadly labelled the “Mind-Cure movement.” Blind faith in a false doctrine. This sect can’t die soon enough.
This work was featured in issue #12