Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Novel About Love, and Death and Life

PART I

THE PRE-EXISTENCE

PRELUDE

She was asleep.

As gently as I could, I carefully let go of her fingers, being cautious not to disturb the intravenous tube running into her right vein. I flexed my stiff fingers, and settled back in my chair, as quietly as possible. Sleep now, my wife; my love, I thought. That’s the best thing for you, right now. You just need to let your body rest, and get your strength back. And you’ll need all your strength, because you’ve got our baby living inside you, now. But you’re not here alone, sweetheart; I’m right here beside you, and I’ll never leave you.

It was quiet in the hallway outside Sophia’s room; the commotion and traffic in the hallway of a busy hospital had finally slowed down after dinner, when many of the people visiting family members had left. That’s good, it will be easier for her to sleep; that’s all she needs, is sleep. My poor sweetheart, she’s been so worried ever since she found out she was pregnant, in spite of all my reassurances that I’d take care of everything.

Sophia’s night-shift nurse had just finished checking up on her about ten minutes ago, and had replaced her IV drip bag. Apart from an occasional nurse or attendant quietly walking past the doorway, even the hospital itself seemed to be asleep: far less busy than when they brought Sophia up from the Admitting Room, ten hours ago. The only sounds were those coming from the machinery monitoring her vitals that stood behind and around Sophia’s bed. The glowing monitors dispassionately measured her respiration, her blood pressure, her other vital signs, electronically displaying their results in glowing numbers or graphics.

Amazing how they think they can reduce a person’s life to a simple monitoring of certain factors: heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing.

I glanced at the clock on the wall: 8:42; only a few more minutes, and visiting hours would be over for today. Sophia’s parents and siblings had left an hour ago, promising to return in the morning, if she was still here.

One thing about waiting in a hospital room, it gives you an unlimited amount of time to think. Much more time than you would ever have wanted, actually. I’d never been in a hospital for this long before. My parents died suddenly in an automobile crash while I was in college, and I’d never known anyone really close who had an extended illness, so I’d never sat in a hospital chair for more than an hour or so while I was visiting a relative or a friend—so I consequently had never thought much about them. But when you’ve been sitting in one for almost 10 hours, you decide that they are intended to make you uncomfortable, and discourage long visiting. If only they would let me stay overnight with her; but It’s hospital policy for visitors to leave by 9 PM every day. But don’t worry—we’ll call you immediately if there’s any change in her condition. And you can call us to check on her status, 24 hours a day.

Well, I’d feel better about leaving if you knew why we were here; why Sophia suddenly became so dizzy this morning that she nearly fainted. What the hell kind of hospital is this, anyway? All this technology, and they still don’t know what’s wrong with her. With newly pregnant women, there are all sorts of things that can make them dizzy, or lightheaded, the female doctor said, when they were admitting her into the hospital from the Admitting Room, where I’d rushed her after she almost passed out this morning after breakfast. But she’s only four months pregnant, I said. Doesn’t matter, she replied, smugly. We’ll know more after we run some tests; we’ll have the results by tomorrow.

Sophia stirred for a moment. I sat up immediately, and gently placed my hand over hers, scarcely daring to breathe. But she didn’t wake up, so I breathed a silent sigh of relief, and sat back again.

I remember being sick when I was young, and my mother trying to comfort me by soothingly saying, "I just wish I could take this for you, honey." But I never really knew how she must have felt until I met Sophia. I looked lovingly at her face. It was so pale—so unlike her normal, lovely Latina complexion. Her long black hair was tied in a tight ponytail behind her head, almost out of sight. But to me she was the same beautiful, wonderful woman that I’ve loved for four years. If only I could bear the tiredness and pain for her. Why can’t men share the pain and discomfort of pregnancy with their partners? And she still has five months to go…But in the end, the pain is hers alone. And people say it’s all because Eve convinced Adam to eat an apple; what bull. But at least I can stay by her side; I can wipe her feverish brow again and again with a cool cloth, I can hold her hand and murmur sweet tokens of my love into her ear, which she probably doesn’t hear, but who knows?

We’ll get through this, honey, and through anything else that comes along. Our lives together are just beginning; nothing will ever stand in our way, or keep us apart.

I thought back, smiling. We met in our junior year in college, when we had several Teachers’ Ed classes together. Sophia wanted to teach elementary school kids (first- or second-grade, probably), whereas I was aiming more toward High School kids—but everyone in the credential program had to take pretty much the same classes our first year, so we had several classes together. She was brilliant in class, and became noted among her peers for catching our professors when they were going too far beyond the course curriculum, and began getting too indoctrinating about their own personal philosophies of education. Aren’t you supposed to just be introducing us to a variety of educational philosophies and psychological approaches, and let us choose for ourselves? She was also bilingual, and spoke both Spanish and English fluently, for which I envied her; knowing how to speak a foreign language—especially Spanish—was a big plus for a teacher trying to get a job in California these days.

Although I knew her name from our shared classes together, I’d never said anything other than Hi, how’s it going? to her, until we were put into a four-person work group for a 6-week special project for one of our classes. The project required us to work in pairs to do the research; the other two on our team were long-time friends, so Sophia and I made up the other team, and I had the chance to get acquainted with her. To me (who hadn’t even been on a date since the summer after high school), she was absolutely gorgeous: beautiful long black hair, wavy and full just like the models on TV. She always had her makeup on, even at our earliest class, so your attention was always immediately drawn to her flashing dark eyes, and her full lips, usually painted a matte shade of red or pink. (Listening to her talk during our group meetings, I felt like I could just gaze into those beautiful eyes of hers forever.)

Sophia and I agreed to meet for coffee one day to discuss our research assignment, and then we went to the university library together to study. After completing the day’s research, it was only natural to go to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. Soon, we began having lunch together three days a week after our shared

11:00 class, sitting out on the grass in front of the Student Union, eating sandwiches, chips and cokes bought from the vending machines. Once while we were sitting and eating, it unexpectedly started to rain; and as I didn’t have an umbrella, she let me share hers. I offered to hold it, taking it from her beautifully manicured fingers, our hands brushing lightly in the process. Being this close to her, I could smell her perfume, which made my senses quicken and my heartbeat increase. Standing under the umbrella in the rain together felt very natural, and intimate. For the first time, we talked about things other than our classes, and how our student teaching assignments were going; we talked about our backgrounds, our goals, and our dreams. Sophia had such a quick mind and a fast sense of humor, that I think she was pleasantly surprised to see that—although I was much shyer than she, and hardly ever spoke up in class unless called upon— I had an equally quick mind and sense of humor, although mine tended to express itself more in writing, than verbally.

We made arrangements to meet for dinner at a fast-food restaurant after classes were over. We found out that we had the same favorite authors: Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison. We discovered that we had shared tastes in music: Carlos Santana (we were both delighted by Santana’s comeback album Supernatural), Torcuato Mariano, and Craig Chaquico. She loved older music, and over the next few weeks, she loaned me CDs and made me tapes of Latin bands from the 70s that I’d never heard of, like Malo and Azteca; but she also introduced me to more recent music, such as Selena, and Miami Freestyle dance music. In turn, I introduced her to mellow jazz like Pat Metheny, Michael Franks, and Tuck & Patti, as well as more recent electronica artists such as the Propellerheads and Moby, as well as crossover acts like Candiria.

It’s funny, but we never really went through a regular period of dating; we just saw each other at school every chance we had, talked on the phone every day, and shared whatever activities we could afford. Both of us were only working part-time while going to school (she lived at home, while I lived with my sister), so we didn’t have a lot of money to spare. But just going to a free movie at the Student Union, or taking a few sandwiches to the park on a combination picnic/study day on Sunday afternoons were incredibly special occasions to me, just because she was there.

Still, even though we’d been close friends for several months, I was deathly afraid that she thought of me as just being "a good friend who happens to be a guy," until one day while we were sitting next to each other on the grass beneath a tree, I got up the courage to hold her hand as we sat, and we soon ended up kiss-ing—and it was clear that we both wanted to be more than just good friends. She made it clear from the start, however, that she was a good Catholic, and wasn’t going to allow anything beyond kissing and hugging until after she was married, so I had no choice but to acquiesce. I’d never really thought about getting married, as the whole ritual seemed kind of philosophically outdated to me, when I thought about it in the abstract sense—but now when I thought of it as meaning marriage and a lifetime partnership with Sophia, it suddenly sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world. So I could afford to wait; Sophia was definitely a woman worth waiting for.

I never really thought too much about the fact that Sophia was Mexican (her parents moved to the States when she was three), and I was an out-and-out Anglo, complete with light brown hair and blue-green eyes. To me, her skin seemed just the perfect color: light brown, like coffee with lots of cream in it. We used to laughingly hold our arms next to each other (You call yourself ‘white’? she would laugh. "Pink is more like it!"), and I would feel almost jealous. She had such a natural manner and easygoing personality, it seemed like she could fit in with almost any ethnic group: Latino, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, or Anglo. Although she spoke perfect English, when she wanted to she could speak Spanish street slang as well as any of the Esés and Vatos on the block she grew up on. On the other hand, my parents were an amalgam of English, Irish, Scotch, German, Italian and even Russian backgrounds—with no discernible cultural influence from any of them—so when she asked me what nationality I was, I laughingly told her, I have no ethnic background; I’m just a generic white guy—a mongrel. She teased me that she had "picked me out because she felt sorry for the shy little Anglo boy in the back of the room."

Sophia met my older sister Sandra soon after we became close; my sister immediately liked Sophia, and vice versa (except that Sophia was a bit taken aback by my sister’s frequent use of profanity). Eventually, however, the time came when I had to meet Sophia’s parents, so she invited me for a Sunday family dinner. Neither of her parents seemed to be very pleased with me, especially her father. Although he was always polite with me, I sometimes had the impression that he didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, South American, Spanish, or anything else remotely related. (And unfortunately, I couldn’t even speak Spanish at an elementary level; I took French when I was in high school!)

At dinner, I immediately embarrassed myself by starting to eat as soon as we were served (in my family, we never said grace before eating), until I realized that everyone else was sitting with their hands folded and eyes closed. Feeling like the one off-color kitten in the litter, I quickly put down my fork and followed suit. (That’s one distinct disadvantage of being a light-skinned Anglo—it’s extremely obvious when you blush!) As dinner began, Sophia’s mother asked me gently what church I attended. United Church of Christ, I told her—without mentioning that I hadn’t actually attended church since starting to college. Are they…Pentecostal? she asked, and I stammered (not really sure what a Pentecostal was), I said, No, they’re just Protestant. Sophia’s mother seemed relieved that I wasn’t a Pentecostal, but her father seemed equally displeased that I wasn’t Roman Catholic. Since Sophia had four younger brothers and sisters, three of whom lived at home, their conversation was lively and animated at dinner. They would switch unexpectedly back and forth between English and

Spanish, and I tried hard not to feel paranoid whenever they spoke Spanish. (They’re not talking about me and trying to keep it a secret; they speak both languages, so they do it unconsciously.)

As Sophia walked me out to my car after the meal, I shared my feelings of being uncomfortable when they spoke Spanish, and she apologized. My parents both learned English as a second language, and we always spoke Spanish at home until we kids started to go to school. I told her that I felt like the dinner had been a complete disaster, and that her father hated me, and she nodded and said, "Papa has his own gardening business, and he doesn’t trust Anglos—some Anglos—very much. Then she laughed and added, But don’t worry—I think Mama is starting to like you." Then she gave me a kiss goodnight (her youngest sister watching from the window!) that made me feel much better about the evening. Ever since then, however, Sophia has make an extra effort to keep me included in the family discussions, translating for my benefit when necessary.

During the next week, Sophia suggested that her father might like me more if I went to Mass with them on Sundays, so I tried this. (It’s not like I had a church of my own to attend, instead.) Frankly, the only time I’d ever even been inside a Catholic Church was once when our high school choir did a concert in one. At first, a lot of it seemed pretty strange to me: people stopping upon entering the cathedral, dipping their hand in holy water and making the sign of the cross; lighting candles and kneeling before them in prayer; having statues and stained-glass windows of saints; kneeling down outside the pews before taking your seat; the strange, almost feminine clothes worn by the priests (I was used to ministers wearing normal business suits); the unfamiliar music, and everything else. But I realized that Sophia’s church was actually pretty informal, and when the priest invited everyone to offer the hand of fellowship to others, a number of parishoners warmly welcomed me. I continued to attend church with her family, and found out that they had Folk Masses once a month, as well Summer and Fall festivals, which were a lot of fun.

At the same time, there was also something I found attractive about Catholicism itself, with its standard liturgy, incense, ancient ritual, and the altar. Religion just seemed a lot more important to these people than religion had ever been to my parents. The huge picture of Jesus hanging in the church behind the altar made him look Mexican or even Black, and was a far cry from the lily-white representations of him that I was used to seeing, but it seemed quite appropriate here. (No one ever painted a picture of Jesus during his lifetime, or described what he looked like, so who’s to say what he looked like? He might have been Asian, for all anyone knows.) Their church also seemed to celebrate ethnic culture a lot more than any other church I had ever seen or heard about, and I really liked that aspect of it. Unlike the UCC church that I attended prior to college, or the evangelical churches that some of my friends in high school occasionally invited me to— where the congregations which were almost exclusively Anglo—there was an amazing ethnic diversity here: brown, black, white, Asian, Filipino, and more. And they all really seemed to be a part of a community. (In my own church, from a sociological standpoint, a church get-together probably more resembled a neighborhood Homeowner’s Association meeting, than an encounter with the living God.)

In a family as large as Sophia’s, you very quickly start to have to attend funerals: aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. I hadn’t attended many funerals before—and none since my parents’—but I was immediately struck by the degree to which her family and church pulled together at such times. They were really there for each other: cleaning up, bringing food, doing shopping, and taking care of anything that needed to be done for the family of the bereaved. I was also impressed by the strength of their belief in Heaven; although I had always held a sort of vague belief in an afterlife, I found myself almost jealous of the strong faith that Sophia’s family (almost all of whom were Catholic) seemed to have in it. When the priest said that Sophia’s aunt is far closer to Jesus right now than any of us are, he seemed to actually believe it; it wasn’t like the minister of my UCC church talking about Adam and Eve as being a literary metaphor, or something like that—they really believed that her aunt was on her was to being with God and Jesus for eternity. And if there were elements in their beliefs that seemed a little simplistic to me (intellectual college student that I was), I found myself thinking, What do you have that’s better, more appropriate, or more comforting, in this situation? What would you tell them differently: that "Aunt Maria may be in Heaven—assuming that it’s not just a literary metaphor"?

Our relationship deepened through the rest of our college careers, to an extent that astounded me. Although she insisted that she could not get involved physically unless we were married, our non-sexual relationship was the most erotic experience I had ever known. Just sitting next to her, smelling her feminine scent, feeling the softness of her hair as I tenderly stroked it out of her eyes, feeling the gentle warmth of her body as we hugged upon separating—even holding hands, or a simple French kiss with Sophia was more exciting than actual sexual intercourse with the two girls I had known previously in high school.

Yet even more amazing was the fact that we had such a deep and abiding friendship, on top of everything else. I’d thought that I’d had best friends before, but it was nothing like the friendship I had with Sophia. With my male friends, there is always an element of competition, of pretense, of superficiality; in a sense, you are always trying to act and be perceived as more confident, more in control of the situation, than you really are. With Sophia, this was unnecessary; once we began to really open up to each other, we just naturally held nothing back. We could share not only our dreams, but our fears, and our insecurities. Although early in our relationship I had sometimes wondered if the considerable cultural differences between us would stand in the way, I eventually came to see this notion as almost laughable: when you have so much in common and are so much in harmony with someone—when you realize that she is your true soul mate—superficial cultural differences don’t matter; and amazingly, she seemed to feel the same way. I realized that I would never, ever find a woman who was so closely matched for me.

I proposed marriage to Sophia just before we graduated from college with our teaching credentials in hand, and my heart leaped when she said Yes, and seemed delighted. Since I wasn’t a Catholic, we couldn’t get married in her church—or rather, we didn’t want to wait (or didn’t think we could stand to wait) to go through some kind of procedure, whereby we could have gotten some kind of dispensation so that our marriage could have taken place in a Catholic church. So a few days after graduation we just drove across the stateline to Reno, got married in a quick civil ceremony, and spent the weekend there as our honeymoon. Unfortunately, we didn’t tell her parents about this in advance, and I think her parents—especially her father—never really forgave me for that (big church weddings are a tradition in the family), and they held it against me, even though our decision was mutual. But Sophia had insisted that our children be baptized and raised Catholic, and I was agreeable to that. (After all, it wasn’t like I had any strong personal religious convictions, one way or the other.)

She was startled to find out when we were waiting to apply for our wedding license that I had never been baptized. ("Jobran! I thought Protestant churches did baptize babies? Well, in my denomination, I think they’d do it if you specifically asked for it, but they never made a big deal out of it—or even asked you about it when you were confirmed—so I never had it done, I told her, now embarrassed.) And so, once we returned after our two-day honeymoon and temporarily moved into my parents’ house with my sister and her two kids (who was now separated from her husband), Sophia mentioned that her church had classes for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), and I surprised myself by agreeing to try them sometime in the near future. (After all, now that my secular college days were over and I was going to be a public school teacher, I supposed that I needed to make myself as respectable" as possible—and church affiliation seemed a natural next step.) In the meantime, I faithfully went to Mass with Sophia and her family every Sunday (her father sitting as far away from me as possible), even though it required me to sit alone in the pew as practically every other person older than 13 in the church got up to take Communion.

So here we were in June: with our degrees, our teaching credentials, but no jobs. Sophia had taken her degree in Child Psychology, and I had majored in Social Science. Knowing we couldn’t stay living with my sister, we took full-time non-teaching jobs during the summer, and found a cramped apartment, and began sending off applications, hoping to find teaching jobs in the same district.

Being bilingual (not to mention having a degree in Child Psychology) helped Sophia quickly land a job teaching third-graders in an elementary school right here in Stentoria. As fall approached, I feared that I would have to do substitute teaching (cursing myself for having majored in such a common subject), when an unexpected rush of early retirements just before September in the same school district enabled me to get a full-time position teaching Social Studies at the Junior High school. Best of all, our schools were only a few miles away from each other, so we found a larger apartment close to my school (Sophia would use my car to drive to work), and our immediate future seemed to be set.

Children were a potential problem. Although we both wanted children very much, I tried to convince Sophia that we’d be better off to wait for a couple of years, until we were more well-established financially. ("Are you sure that you don’t want to try using birth-control pills? I asked, but she vehemently shook her head. Jobran, you know that I would never violate the Church’s teachings like that!) So we practiced something called the Rhythm Method as best we could, but we were hardly infallible in our practice (sometimes my passion would override the markings of unsafe" times on the calendar). Thus, it was hardly surprising that by May of the following year, we found out that Sophia was pregnant.

Although I would have thought I would be overwhelmed with financial worries—wondering how we were going to raise a baby with our entry-level teaching incomes—I ended up being delighted by the news. I immediately began to put my head against her stomach several times a day ("Jobran, you can’t feel him or her yet; it’s too early!" she would say smiling, caressing my head on her belly.) We found a nice little rental house within easy walking distance of my school, and it seemed like the perfect place to begin to raise our children. Sophia finished out the school year, then submitted a request for a leave of absence starting in the fall. I took a job doing off-hours key data entry work during the summer, to start to save up money for the baby.

Keeping my promise to Sophia that I would let our children be raised Catholic, I immediately started taking RCIA classes at her (our?) Church, which made her so happy it brought tears to her eyes, as well as a beaming smile from her mother, and even brought a grunt of satisfaction from her father. (Sophia, I would have become a Mormon if you wanted me to, I love you so much! I thought.) So far, in terms of intellectual content, the classes are rather elementary, compared to a lot of the college courses I’d taken; mostly just open-ended discussion and Q&A sessions about topics such as God, Jesus, The Church, Sacraments, and so on). We’re ecstatically happy; it usually seems to me almost like a fairy tale romance, with nothing but blue skies on the horizon.

Until this morning, that is. When Sophia almost fell over while putting the dishes away after breakfast.

My reverie ended suddenly when Sophia’s body jerked. I practically leaped out of my chair to make sure she was all right, but she didn’t move again. There was just the steady hum of the monitoring machines. One machine—the one monitoring her pulse, and blood pressure—seemed like it had a little computerized warning message at the bottom of the screen, although I didn’t understand its significance. I wondered if I should go get a nurse or doctor, but I figured that they were surely monitoring the status of all the patients from their computers at the nurse’s station, and would come running if anything serious happened. I looked at the clock again: 8:54. Grimly, I resolved, there’s no way I am leaving her side after visiting hours are over; they’d need a dozen security guards to drag me out of here.

But as I kept staring at the warning message on the machine, I was now finally forced to confront the issue I had been avoiding since this morning: What if she loses the baby?

I mean, it’s not uncommon for young mothers to lose a baby, especially their first. Although a few months ago I would have almost been relieved (from the financial standpoint alone), during the last month I had grown thoroughly accustomed to the idea of myself as a Papa (which was what Sophia called her father, and what she lovingly began to call me, once she found out that she was pregnant), and raising our baby with the woman I loved so dearly. I loved to lay watching Sophia’s bare belly, realizing that our son or daughter was inside there, growing. I would rest my hand gently on her stomach, trying to communicate mentally with the tiny life that was just beneath her skin. Our baby…that’s our baby who’s living inside there…This is Papa; can you hear or understand me? Your Mama and I are waiting for you, and we both love you very much. The thought of fatherhood, far from frightening me, filled me with a growing sense of wonder.

At times of uncertainty like this, aren’t you supposed to turn to God? So I silently prayed, God, please don’t let anything bad happen to Sophia, or to our baby; I couldn’t stand it…Thank you; Amen. I wasn’t sure that I felt much relief, however. Praying was as difficult for me as it seemed natural for Sophia. At my RCIA classes, the priest kept trying to get me to share my personal faith story with the group, but I really didn’t have one. I’ve just always believed in God, and Jesus, so it was never an issue for me.

Finally, I forced myself to admit, Even if she loses this baby, that wouldn’t be the end. Lots of couples lose a baby, especially their first. We’re young, we’ve got our whole lives ahead of us. I felt a small measure of relief, almost as if I had been expected

(by God?) to reach this point. But in the back of my mind, there was a disturbing thought that was trying to work its way to the surface: What if she not only loses the baby, but is unable to conceive again?

That’s nonsense, I told myself; it’ll never happen. Sophia just got dizzy due to some early pregnancy thing; there’s nothing wrong with the baby. Besides, they’ll be able to do amniocentesis soon, and we’ll know for sure that there’s nothing wrong. But still,…even that wouldn’t be the end of the world. We could always adopt a baby. And besides, Sophia has brothers and sisters, and I have a sister and a niece and nephew; so we can still be aunts and uncles, even if we couldn’t have children of our own. As long as we have each other, that’s all that matters. Is that what you’re trying to get me to see, God?

Sophia’s body jerked spasmodically again. Anxiously, I looked at her. She looked normal, but the error message on the monitor had changed, and was now in red. I jumped up and ran to the door, looking for a doctor or nurse, but there was no one in sight. Where the hell is that fucking nurse? Isn’t she supposed to be checking up on Sophia?

Torn between the impulse to run and grab a nurse (probably only to be told, "Oh, that’s normal for the patient to experience muscle spasms. By the way, visiting hours are over; you’ll have to leave now…) and my fear of leaving Sophia alone even for a moment, I returned to her side. Anxiously kneeling by her bed, I asked, Can you hear me, darling? softly. She made no sign. You’re going to get better soon, my love, I said, trying to fill my whispered voice with a confidence I didn’t feel. Everything’s going to be fine; you just need to get some rest, now. Squeezing her hand gently, I added, After all, we’ve got a baby to raise."

Her body began to twitch slightly, in cyclical spasms. When it hadn’t stopped after ten seconds, I thought, That nurse needs to get her ass in here—now. I frantically pressed the button to call the nurse. Kneeling by Sophia’s side again, my eyes filled with tears. Sophia, I love you so much, I said, my voice breaking. You’re the only one for me, the only one there’s ever been, and the only one there ever will be. But her eyes were closed, and she gave no sign of hearing me. "Sophia— Sophia, can you hear me? Sophia, you’ve got to hear me! There’s so much I need to tell you…"

She continued to twitch, her motions starting to grow more violent. Fuck it, this can’t be normal! and I jumped up to go fetch a nurse—by bodily force, if need be. I half-ran down the hall to the nurse’s station, which was empty. Where is that goddam nurse?!? Starting to feel frantic, I yelled out, "Doctor! Nurse! Can you come here, please? We need help!"

A tired-looking African-American woman came out from a side room with a stack of file folders in her arms, and said, Yes, Mr. Winter? What’s the matter?

I think something’s wrong with my wife, in Room 314; she’s kind of twitching and jerking…

The nurse looked serious, and quickly placed the folders on the main desk, and looked at her computer monitor. After a second, she looked genuinely alarmed, and called Akisha! Watch the desk for me! And call the doctor! and then she raced off down the hall, with me following close behind.

As we approached the door to Sophia’s room, I heard a faint buzzing sound, that grew louder as we got closer. The nurse apparently recognized the sound, and said, "Oh, my God…! then turned back and yelled, We need a doctor in 314! Hurry! then she turned and ran through the door of Sophia’s room, with me hot on her heels. She took one look at the monitors behind Sophia, then began to examine her rapidly. She tore open Sophia’s gown, leaving her bare breasts exposed, and placed her head against her chest. She pointed to me and said, Get out in the hall, and show the doctor which room!" I jumped up, and, racing through the door, almost collided with the young doctor, who was just about to enter.

How long? he asked the nurse, insistently, as he listened to her chest and felt her pulse.

Probably just a couple of minutes, she said, pointing in my direction. He said she was kind of jerking, so he came to get me, then we heard the monitors on the way down the hall.

Get Doctor Virga! Now!! the doctor hissed, almost shouting. The nurse started to head for the door, when another nurse at the door shouted, I’ll do it! and she turned and ran down the hall.

My heart was beating furiously, and I started to panic. Thank God, the doctor’s finally here; hold on, honey, help is here. And I had a sickening moment of realization, knowing that she’s going to lose the baby. I instinctively moved closer to Sophia, protectively.

The insistent buzzing continued from the monitors behind Sophia. Move! the doctor ordered me, as he shoved me aside to position himself alongside Sophia. He barked out some medical instructions I didn’t understand to the nurse, who bolted out the door. He then began to apply CPR: 3 quick breaths, 7 chest compressions; 2 breaths, 7 compressions.

Oh my God; what’s happening?

Another nurse came rushing in, pushing a cart of sophisticated-looking equipment, followed by another doctor, who came immediately to the opposite side of the bed.

Still…no pulse…, puffed the first doctor, continuing to perform CPR. It’s been several minutes, said the first nurse, as the other doctor readied what I recognized as the device used to restart a patient’s heart. She’s going to be OK, isn’t she?

I mean…we’re in a hospital, for God’s sake! The second doctor waved the first back, applied the twin devices to Sophia’s chest, and shouted, Clear! then jolted her, the shock causing her to bounce up on the bed. The first doctor frantically checked her pulse, as well as the monitors behind Sophia. Nothing, he said, grimly. The second doctor nodded, then said, Charging…clear! and jolted her again, causing her body to leap off the bed once again. The first doctor quickly did his assessment again, and shook his head, saying, Still nothing.

I fell back against the fall, to keep from collapsing. Tears streaming down my face, I thought, This can’t be happening…In a daze, I could see figures rushing around Sophia on the bed, increasingly agitated, until finally they all stopped moving, and stood silently around Sophia’s bed. What’s happening? Is she better? Why has everyone stopped working?

Finally, the second doctor walked slowly over to me, as I stood stiffly against the wall. My eyes filled with fear, I could see that there were tears in his eyes. I’m sorry, son, he said, shaking his head slowly. She’s gone.

In disbelief, I looked at him, then at the other three figures standing around Sophia’s bed. They all looked at me, their eyes wide with sympathy and sorrow, but without contradicting him, or providing any explanation for how this calamity could have happened. I shook my head at the doctor and mouthed the word No noiselessly, but the doctor shook his head grimly.

"This can’t happen!! I shouted, at no one in particular. Jesus Christ, we’re in a fucking hospital, for God’s sake! She wasn’t even in intensive care! My wife can’t just die like this—she just can’t, goddam it!!" They let me shout, and I could see tears of remorse in their own eyes. Goddam bastards, they’ve given up—that means it’s up to me, and I pushed them away from her bed.

I’d seen movies about how people who had been pronounced medically dead came back to life, even thirty minutes later. You just had to reach them, to pull them back from the darkness they were falling into. I raised my hand to slap Sophia’s face sharply, like I’d seen done in movies, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I took hold of her shoulders, and shook her as much as I dared. Sophia! I shouted at her, hoarsely. "Sophia, listen to me! You’ve got to fight it! You hear me? You’re got to come back to me! I shook her shoulders again, more vigorously, but there was no response from her. Sophia, please! Fight it! Fight it, honey!! Still no response. In a desperate voice, I said, This can’t be the end, Sophia—we’ve got our whole lives ahead of us, we’ve got our baby on the way…"

It can’t end like this! It was too ridiculous, too absurd. She had been the picture of health only a month ago, and now her body was lying before me lifeless. Her flesh still felt warm, and her skin was still soft and gentle to the touch. Turning around, I shouted in a crazed voice, "There’s got to be something you can do for her, goddammit!" The doctor shook his head, sadly.

Embracing her limp body tightly, I entreated her, "Sophia…Sophia, please don’t leave me! Honey, I need you so much…I won’t be able to live without you! Can you hear me? People can come back to life, if their spirits fight hard enough! Can you hear me? Fight it—fight it!! Come back…you’ve got a strong spirit, honey, we both know that; you’ve got to live!"

I looked around at the four faces around the bed, all of their own eyes wet with emotion. There was no hope, no ray of light in their eyes; only profound sadness.

Gently, I lowered Sophia’s body back to the bed. Kneeling by the bed, I carefully brushed her hair—which was matted with sweat—back into place. In a cracked voice, I whispered, "You can’t leave me like this, honey; you’ve got too much to live for…and our baby…please, he…she needs you…I need you, my love, my only love…."

There was so much I needed to say to her. I was struck with the bitter irony of the thousands of hours I had spent by her side, silently, as we watched a movie, listened to the stereo, or walked hand-in-hand. How much wasted time! Time when I should have been pouring out my heart and soul to her, telling her how much she meant to me, how she was the constant, unfailing source of beauty and joy in my life. How many times I had sat by her silently, keeping my innermost feelings inside, when the thing I most needed to do was tell her how I felt. I see now that I had been wrong all this time, thinking that it wasn’t manly to show weakness, to show vulnerability. I now knew with an absolute clarity that she would have wanted me to share everything with her, unreservedly; I now knew that she would have loved my openness, my willingness to trust her, to be totally open with her. I can change, Sophia; I really can…just please—come back…

But now there was nothing that I could do; no power of emotion, no intensity of thought or feeling, nothing I could say or do or offer, that would rouse her even one more time, not even for just a few moments. The doctor laid his hand gently on my shoulder—which brought me back to reality. I knew now that it was really over: Sophia was dead, and nothing that anyone could do would ever change that horrible fact. It seemed too fantastic, too absurd to be true, but it was: right here, in a major metropolitan hospital, my wife had died. The clock showed 9:29.

A priest entered the room frantically, but the doctor shook his head negatively at him. Nevertheless, he came up to Sophia, and began to administer the last rites to her.

I fell down to my knees beside her bed, burying my face in her still and lifeless body. The priest’s words droned unintelligibly in my ears, as he prayed for her spirit. It seemed as if, at that very moment, the life had gone out of me, as well.

And I welcomed death.

Rather than life without her.

1

DE PROFUNDIS*

(*Latin: From the depths)

Jobran’s Journal

Why?

Why??!?

I keep asking this question, over and over, but there’s no answer.

You didn’t even allow us a minute to say goodbye to each other in the hospital.

If there was anything I needed to do, any change to my life that was necessary, I would have done it.

But you took her from me so suddenly, I didn’t even have a chance to think, much less negotiate about it.

Are you punishing me? Then why take it out on my poor wife? What did Sophia ever do to deserve this? She was a good Catholic, who went to Mass and took Communion every Sunday; she wouldn’t even use birth control, for Christ’s sake!

And the baby we would have had—he would have been a boy, the doctors told me—he never even had a chance in life. He died, when he was no more than a small blob of protoplasm, barely four months old. He will never experience joy, or sorrow; he will never nurse from his mother’s breast, or be tenderly rocked to sleep; he will never feel his father lift him up with pride, and love; he will never know the security of being tucked into bed at night by his two loving parents; he will never know the joy of family get-togethers, of playing happily with his many cousins; he will never hold a squirming kitten, or pat a puppy’s head, or feed the ducks and squirrels in the park; he will never know music, or art, or books; he will never go to school, or graduate, or have his first job, or drive a car; and he will never know the inexpressible joy of falling in love.

And through it all, I ask myself for the ten thousandth time, Why? But there’s no answer: the heavens are silent.

Do I really expect an answer? Maybe that’s the problem; I’ve never been the most religious person in the world. Born in the late ‘70s, raised a mainstream Protestant, and in due course I was confirmed into the United Church of Christ at age 13—but I was never baptized. (Is that it? Is that why you did this to them? But why not take it out on me?) But I suppose that even after being confirmed into the church, my level of spirituality was rather debatable; my favorite part of Sunday Night Youth Group was playing games with the other kids—it was never the brief lesson, or the opening and closing prayers, which either bored or embarrassed me.

But God, even though I was never much interested in formal religion itself, I never really doubted the reality of you, out there somewhere, beneath all the religious language and trappings that people put around you. Even though I was never regular in offering prayers to you, I often felt that I was conscious of your presence watching over my life. I always felt that you were somehow overlooking me, and I found myself at various junctures in my life breathing a silent, "Thank you," in acknowledgment of your guidance or assistance.

I guess it didn’t make much difference in my everyday life, though, did it? (Is that what the problem is? Is that why you did this?) I went to church when my parents went, which was once a month or so. I secretly envied my sister, when she announced to our parents one Sunday morning that "I’m seventeen, and I don’t need to go to church with you any more." I never had the courage to make such a statement myself, particularly since I was three years younger.

But church attendance aside, about once or twice a year, something (maybe seeing The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur on cable TV) would motivate me to read the Bible—usually the Gospel of Matthew or Luke. Without fail, I would be deeply moved by the words and the witness of Jesus, and the horror and injustice of his crucifixion. When the centurion declared solemnly, Truly, this man was the Son of God, I gave my own (sometimes tearful) affirmation.

I think that I mostly avoided the Bible the rest of the year because reading it always made me feel so bad about my life afterwards. Invariably after such experiences, I would realize that I had to start cleaning up my life: I had to quit sneaking alcohol out of my parents’ liquor cabinet; I had to destroy the pornographic magazines I kept hidden in my room; I had to quit talking with my friends about girls and sex, or else find different friends. In fact, it usually took me several days to get my resolutions out of my mind, and get back to normal; but invariably, I did shortly return to normal.

But still, I didn’t think I was that bad of a kid—at least, when compared to my peers. I got good grades in school, never got in trouble with the law, didn’t hang out on the streets after curfew. I lost my virginity at sixteen, and slept with one other girl, but they were both sexually active before me. And while I liked to drink at parties with my friends, I never did any harder drugs, aside from trying marijuana twice. Considering that most of the other kids my age smoked weed on a regular basis, and got blind drunk at least every other weekday and every single weekend, I felt like I was doing pretty good; I think my parents thought so, too.

In many respects, I think I was even more conservative in my theology than was the minister of the small church we sometimes attended. During my Confirmation class, for example, I turned in my requested 1-page statement of What I Believe. (I said things like, I believe that God knows everything you do. I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that he performed miracles, and was raised from the dead, etc.) Since I was the only one in class who had done his assignment, the minister read my statement to the entire group, and I was shocked when (somewhat condescendingly, I now realize) he told the class that in his opinion, one didn’t need to believe in the literal miracles of Jesus in order to be considered a Christian; it was up to the individual, of course, but Christianity was not dependent upon supernaturalism. ("And you call yourself a Minister?" I thought, with an air of superior piety.)

It wasn’t until the last year before this minister retired (and after he had given them his notice of intent to retire) that he actually started to open up more in his sermons before the congregation, about his disbelief in the miraculous stories of the Bible; his belief that the Gospel of John wasn’t a factual account of the life of Jesus, but was just a theological interpretation of Jesus’ life dating from the 2nd century; his belief that the Nativity stories of Jesus’ infancy were little more than Oriental fables; his belief that the Book of Revelation had no relevance for today, and so on. I guess he figured that, with his application for his pension already in, the congregation wouldn’t have had time to fire him, even if anyone in the congregation would get motivated enough to start up a committee to do so. (But of course, no one ever did.) So he retired; but the next minister returned firmly to the middle of the mainstream, never openly causing such controversy.

Inspired by my sister’s earlier example, when I turned seventeen (and had pretty much ignored formal religion for some time) I no longer attended church services at all—to the chagrin of my parents, who had both abandoned much more orthodox religious backgrounds, but evidently felt that they needed to ensure that I had at least some religious indoctrination. I suppose they felt that infrequent but regular attendance at the local congregation of the United Church of Christ (which, as a denomination, seemed to be much more interested in social issues such as foreign affairs, abortion rights, and ordination of openly gay clergy, than in purely theological questions) was an acceptable compromise between their own backgrounds, and secularism. (Of course, this didn’t mean that they felt that they had to attend church frequently; it just meant that they felt I should have some kind of religious background.) After they died in a car accident after my first year in college, I regretted that we hadn’t just taken our Sunday mornings to do something together, as a family.

But that isn’t to say that religion didn’t have any value to me. I joined the choir in high school (initially because the 4-to-1 ratio of girls to guys attracted me), and I felt that I got a lot more spiritual uplift from singing spirituals with them than I did from going to church on Sundays. In fact, at our high school, we had some teachers who (outside of school) ran the local Young Life chapter, and who really seemed to be on top of things. I remember one who told a student who asked him after class what denomination he belonged to, and he said, It doesn’t matter: Baptist, Methodist, Assemblies of God, anything. I’m just a Christian, that’s all. That seemed like a pretty cool attitude to have, and I think that kind of summarized my feelings: I’m not a churchgoer, a Bible-thumper, or a holy roller; I’m just a plain old Christian.

I did occasionally get dragged along by some of my friends to more conservative churches, usually when they had a special musical event or guest speaker. I realize now that my friends were concerned because—from their standpoint—I wasn’t saved. But when their preacher or minister went into this big emotional trip (the Invitation, they called it) at the end of the service, I was always turned off by it. He would be saying, "You know that Jesus is knocking at the door of your heart," but he obviously didn’t know what he was talking about, because I didn’t feel anything special in my heart, other than disgust at the shallow emotionalism he was appealing to. I felt a lot more close to God and Jesus by reading the New Testament on my own, or watching a religious movie on TV, than when I went to one of these churches. Once I even watched a Billy Graham Crusade on TV, and although he did the Invitation thing at the end, I was actually kind of impressed with him, since he didn’t go into a big emotional/psychological routine; you just had the impression that he sincerely believed what he said. But still, the whole Invitation thing seemed kind of contrived to me—although maybe that’s just because I wasn’t raised in that kind of a tradition. At any rate, my feeling was that, "I’m already a Christian: I believe in God and in his Son, Jesus; and I always give thanks to God when he helps me out. I don’t need to call some toll-free number that Billy Graham displays on the TV screen, just so they can add my name to their numbers of converts. (And I noticed from reading in the papers that someone always kept track of the numbers of converts that they made in each city; so who knows? Maybe they weren’t only motivated by religion, but also by a desire to keep getting bigger and bigger numbers).

Still, I knew that there was some reality to religion: I was mostly just turned off by some of the excesses of my friends, who would do things like ask God to give them guidance by letting their Bibles fall open, expecting their finger to land on a passage that was pertinent to their situation. (It never did; they should have spent more time actually reading the Bible, and less time letting it fall open.) But the thing that repelled me the most was that a lot of them were all caught up in this thing they called The Rapture, which was something that the TV preachers and Christian fiction all talked about. At some friends’ request, I read a book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, but was completely unimpressed; he obviously believed that the Rapture would have taken place no later than 1981, so that Planet Earth would have been no more by 1988, so obviously he was (by his own definition) a false prophet. When they referred me to his more recent books, I said I wasn’t interested.

One night, a group of my evangelical friends took me to a church to see a film that someone had made about this whole Last Days thing. The film was so cheaply made, and the acting and scenery were laughable, that I almost laughed out loud. Afterward, when they asked about my reaction, I said, laughing, "Surely you don’t really believe all this stuff? You really think that all the ‘true’ Christians in the world could suddenly disappear at exactly the same time, and no one would understand what it meant? What’s to stop them from watching this film, or reading the books about it? And how can you really believe that animal sacrifice will be reinstituted? Don’t you think the Animal Rights people would have a fit?" But in fact, they did believe precisely that; so eventually, they stopped asking me to attend these kinds of events. (Frankly, supernatural horror movies like The Exorcist and The Omen probably had more spiritual meaning for me than any of the films I saw at churches. The self-sacrificing nature of the Catholic priest who lets the demon possess him at the end of The Exorcist in order to save the little girl’s life always brought a tear to my eye, for example.)

But to me, the strangest and most incongruous thing was that almost all of these Christian friends drank, smoked weed, and were sexually active, just like the non-Christians. There weren’t any Christians (that I knew, at least) at school that were really different—the only difference was that they went to church on Sunday morning before and after they went out and partied. They seemed to have just as many unwed teenage pregnancies as anyone else in school.

Still, although I wasn’t known as a religious person myself, I couldn’t understand at all my friends that were anti-religious. One of my best friends claimed to be an atheist, for example, which just seemed crazy to me: If God doesn’t exist, then where did the world come from? I asked him. It evolved, he said, smugly. But to me, evolution was just the means that God used to bring about life. Maybe he put Adam and Eve here specifically (although after I saw a production of Inherit the Wind that our high school drama class put on, I was kind of doubtful about the factual reality of Adam and Eve), but if God created the immortal soul only when Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon came along, what of it? Anyway, lots of the kids who claimed to be atheists were into Black Metal music and Goth bands, and I wasn’t into that scene at all. (The pseudo-Satanist imagery of these bands not only offended me as being blasphemous, it seemed stupid; why would you worship Satan if you don’t believe that God exists?) Kids who would have mocked someone for taking the Bible seriously would solemnly (and uncritically) recite some meaningless mumbo-jumbo that was supposedly a "Satanic chant for power; kids who laughed at Christians who wore crosses around their necks (powerless symbols," they called them) would expect that wearing an inverted pentagram had some special powers. (It didn’t seem like it kept them out of the Vice Principal’s office any more than anyone else.) To me, the anti-religion extreme was as stupid as the ultra-religion extreme.

After graduating from high school, I figured that I’d become a teacher, like my Dad was. So I went off to college, majoring (for lack of any better ideas) in Social Studies, which was one of my favorite subjects in high school. And religion just didn’t even seem to be in existence on the university campus. Oh, sure: they had some kind of Collegians For Jesus group that put up flyers here and there about their meetings and Bible Studies. But when I happened to walk past one of their meetings once while passing through the Student Union, it just confirmed my opinion: they were nothing but all the weirdos and geeks on campus; they did-n’t have any of the more intelligent people on campus (certainly none of the Asians that spent every free moment in the Library studying), or the best-looking girls, or even the biggest jocks. They were all the people that sat in the back of the room in class and stood out to the rest of us as being kind