The Sixth Church of Christ, Scientist, took up an entire block of Kercheval Avenue on the eastside of Detroit. Across Kercheval, the rubble of crumbled buildings. Across Ashlund on the church’s west side, a parking lot strewn with trash. Wednesday night services let out at 8:30. At 8:45, my Sunday school teacher Mrs. Bachman was crossing the street to the parking lot in the late Spring dusk. My mother and I were stepping from the same curb when a car screeched left off Kercheval onto Ashlund and laid Bachman flat.

My mother grabbed my arm and hustled me across the street, perhaps ten feet from Mrs. Bachman’s body, and into Nana’s pea-soup Plymouth three cars down. My mother drove off. No crying was indulged.

“Stef?” My mother’s voice warbles over the telephone. “I’m on the kitchen floor. I can’t get up.”

“What?” My brain bumbles over information it cannot explicate. My mother is a fifty-seven-year-old Detroit Public School teacher. For her first graders, she wears a collection of ABC and 123 dresses. She adorns them with Santa Claus, Cupid, Ghost, Witch, Turkey, Cornucopia, Easter Bunny pins.

“Did you fall?” I ask.

“No. I can’t move my legs.”

“What do you mean?”

She doesn’t answer. Her breath catches.

“How long have you been on the kitchen floor unable to move your legs?”

She whispers, “two days” through a quiet sob.

“Two days? Why? What happened before you couldn’t move your legs?”

A near-inaudible whimper.

“Okay. I’m coming. I’ll be there.” Why didn’t I call an ambulance? It takes me two hours to get out of the house, settle my two-year-old at daycare, and drive seventy-five miles, by which time the Christian Scientists have descended.

Smoosh-Face was laity in the Sixth Church flock. My sister Kim and I did not know when we bestowed this moniker that she had in fact flattened all the bones in her face by ramming a car into a wall at high speed. My mother told us when she overheard:

“Smoosh-Face is wearing her dead cats today,” I whispered toward Kim’s ear and pointed across the marble lobby. Smoosh-Face’s fur coat was a clobbered-together white pelt that looked as though it had been dragged through urine.

“Eww,” Kim said, clutched her belly, and doubled over.

“Girls,” Our mother scolded.

She snatched me by the underarm and propelled me out the revolving doors. On the step, she leaned over to spit-speak in our faces. “Mrs. Grimm was in an accident. Her car ran straight into a brick wall. How dare you make fun of her.” She shook my arm enough to flop my head back and forth, unloosed me, jutted her chin, and stomped, fists balled, off toward the parking lot.

Kim and I froze.

We moved our eyes to discover any witnesses, bowed our heads, and followed.

We refrained from asking whether the ramming was intentional.

Before calling, my mother lay on the floor, praying to know that nothing was wrong with her legs and admonishing herself to stop being ridiculous and get up.

S ick-ness is a belief, which must be annihilated by the divine Mind. Disease is an experience of so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body. My mother chanted on a loop of passages from Mary Baker Eddy’s Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures, Christian Science’s only approved interpretation of the Bible and text.

Still on the floor unable to move her legs twenty-four hours later, she capitulated, dragged herself to a phone, and called the practitioner.

The practitioner would have recited: Palsy is a belief that matter governs mortals, and can paralyze the body, making certain portions of it motionless. Destroy the belief, show mortal mind that muscles have no power to be lost, for Mind is supreme, and you cure the palsy. But the practitioner did not answer.

My mother left a message in her warbly Christian Science voice, like end-of-life Katherine Hepburn: “I seem to be on the floor unable to move my legs.” She named no symptoms lest they animate. Next, she called Kent of Sixth Church, who administered (or swindled her out of?) her finances and was authorized to refuse all medical treatment on her behalf. When Kent did not pick up, she recorded another message, adding that the practitioner “seems to be unavailable.”

Only in desperation had she resorted to me. She was petrified, moored on the linoleum, or she would not have divulged her predicament to Kim and me. She did not trust us to yield to her wishes. Worse, she believed our unfaith would injure her. We would behold her infirmity as reality and thereby slay or wound her.

I should have called 9-1-1 when I had the chance. I should have told them to break down the door.

Do I remain unwittingly programmed? For my first eighteen years, I’d been read to, read from, and chanted Mary Baker Eddy’s words every day, as the religion requires. Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures is seven hundred pages of emphatic declaration and circular argument. Six thousand five hundred and seventy days of words, words, words. They ricochet round my brain sixteen years later, plainly the compulsion’s aim.

Suffer no claim of sin or of sickness to grow upon the thought. Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate.

Permanently installed in my mortal mind’s corner sits Mrs. Eddy, ram-rod straight on her wooden chair, dark hair pleated, expression severe, Victorian jacket battened down, white ruff protruding round neck and wrists.

Meet the incipient stages of disease with as powerful mental opposition as a legislator would employ to defeat the passage of an inhuman law.

Was it terror of my mother’s rage that froze me? Mrs. Eddy’s language is combative: Banish the belief, rise in opposition, take antagonistic grounds against, rise in the strength of Sprit to resist, blot out, destroy, conquer, rebuke, negate, banish, protest, contradict, deny, oppose, argue, efface, forbid, master, overcome. Mrs. Eddy instructs the Christian Scientist to sternly, forcefully, both mentally and verbally, proclaim the Truth and cast out evil, sin, disease, and death. It is no wonder that my mother is confrontational, fearsome, and occasionally abusive.

Maybe, had I called an ambulance, my mother would have let them take her to the hospital.

My mind refutes, as Christian Science has trained: You know that is false.

Maybe she just needed someone to blame, the ability to tell the Christian Scientists she went unwillingly.

Refutation: My mother, born to a Christian Scientist, logged in at twenty thousand and eight hundred days of Mrs. Eddy’s words. She never would assent.

By the time I arrive, the Christian Scientists have answered the call.

Man is not matter; he is not made up of brain, blood, bones, and other material elements, we incanted every Sunday.

In the moment the car barreled toward Mrs. Bachman, she must have believed she had a body. She must have thought the car had the power to destroy that body. Animal magnetism, all of it. That was the lecture I received on the topic of Mrs. Bachman.

My ten-year-old-brain reasoned:

Animal Magnetism = the Forcefield of a Magnetic Animal

I trusted animals more than people and concurred they were magnetic.

As named in Christian Science, animal magnetism or hypnotism is the specific term for error, or mortal mind.

I was accustomed to sentences and phrases that made little sense but were intoned with solemn reverence. Our paranoid charismatic leader dedicated a whole chapter of Science & Health to Animal Magnetism Unmasked, defending against the notion that she was a mere mesmerist rather than the discoverer of Divine Truth. Wouldn’t the label resonate with the prescribed, incessant incantation of her words?

Prior to writing Science & Health, Mary Baker Eddy had been a disciple of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a popular hypnotist. After Quimby’s death in 1866, Mrs. Eddy began to advertise herself as a mental healer and taught Quimby’s doctrines for a fee. When Science & Health was published in 1875, many recognized Quimby’s ideas, and several accused Mrs. Eddy of outright plagiarism.

Mrs. Eddy quarreled: When Christian Science and animal magnetism are both comprehended, as they will be at no distant date, it will be seen why the author of this book has been so unjustly persecuted and belied by wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Where is my mother? I crunch through unraked leaves and yank open the back door, thirty-four-years-old now, rushing into the home I lived in from twelve to eighteen.

Not on the linoleum. I picture her already in a hospital bed in the family room, but that’s impossible. The Christian Scientists must have hoisted her from the kitchen floor, carried her to the sectional, and cleaned her of the stale urine and feces in which she had laid. She must have been whimpering, moaning, then shrieking, I realize, when I see she cannot be jostled without crying out.

Banish the belief that you can possibly entertain a single intruding pain which cannot be ruled out by the might of Mind, and in this way you can prevent the development of pain in the body.

The Christian Scientists encircle my mother, speaking in hushed voices.

Stand porter at the door of thought, admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results.

They’ve wiped the evidence from the floor.

I don’t know what to do. I have a two-year-old. A full-time job as a professor at a law school. A husband. A home. If she went to the hospital, I could visit, make sure the nurses liked us and the doctors were coordinating with Kim and me. I could ask questions. Take notes. Do research. But this. I have no idea.

Mary Baker Eddy never knew a patient who did not recover when the belief of the disease had gone.

Smoosh-Face, on the other hand, wore her embarrassment-of-a-face to church every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening. Everyone could see she had failed to properly pray to know that she did not have a face.

Unwittingly, you sentence yourself to suffer.

The next time I see my mother, she cannot move her arms. Now she is on a hospital bed in the family room. Bare black branches wave outside the slider in the damp fall. Kent and a Christian Science “nurse” keep watch.

Man is never sick.

Kent locks his liquid-brown eyes onto mine, ice-blue. “Hello, Stef,” He purrs, recalling our familiarity. I babysat his children as a teenager.

I flare my nostrils and decline his countenance.

He notices the nurse readying a bedpan. He helps roll my mother onto her left hip, arrange the pan, and try to turn her back and over it. My mother’s mouth pulls back in agony. She howls like the soldier having his leg sawed off without anesthetic in the scene from a Civil War movie that’s been tattooed on my mind for thirty years.

The film was unapproved. One Saturday afternoon, unsupervised, I slid off the couch toward the television on wheels. Cross-legged on Nana’s sunroom tile, three feet from the screen, I watched unblinking as the medics rolled the gurney into a tent and transferred the soldier to a wooden table. The tobacco-tinge-bearded surgeon wore a black belted coat and a hat with a bill. A nurse cut away the soldier’s pant, then bent her weight onto his lower leg. A medic put a bullet between the soldier’s teeth and pressed down his upper thigh. The surgeon used a bone saw. I watched him saw once, twice. The film shifted to the soldier’s face. He was screaming. I did not turn away. My mother was not there to tell me to turn away. The witnessing astonished me.

If a Christian Scientist had her leg sawed off, would she even be given a bullet to bite?

Declare that you are not hurt.

When I was seven, on the ragged cement of the pool-bottom at our grandparents’ cottage, I scraped my lower back just above the right hip bone. The wound festered over the ensuing months.

The less we know or think about hygiene, the less we are predisposed to sickness.

When it stank, swum with maggots, and I was dizzy with fever, my mother drove me from Detroit to a Christian Science nurse in Ohio. I did not know until then that Christian Science nurses existed.

The Mother Church explains that Christian Science nursing is a religious vocation distinct from registered or licensed nursing. The nurses provide practical care to those relying on Christian Science treatment, meaning refusing all medical treatment. Their existence is, I surmise, some concession to materiality available to the failures of the flock in the direst circumstance.

I remember a rectangular building with a near-empty parking lot and a commercial set of double-doors. My mother and I went no further than the first room to the left, which looked and smelled like the veterinarian where we took Nikki the Dog. How strange that the family dog received vaccines and wellness checks, while Kim and I did not.

The only person I saw in the facility was the “nurse.” She wore no white coat, like Nikki’s vet, or smock or scrubs, like his assistants. I lifted my sweatshirt to reveal my back. The nurse said nothing. She took an ordinary kitchen-sized box of baking soda from the cupboard, shook the powder on the pussy mess, covered it with gauze, taped down the dressing, and admonished my mother not to check on it. Her fear could maim me.

The belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts.

“When the bandage falls off,” The nurse proclaimed, “She will be healed.”

Two days later, my mother cannot move her face. As functions terminate, both sides of her body are affected, so she’s probably not had a stroke like Nana.

The Christian Scientists touch my arm and ask me to pray with them. I want to scream. I want to punch someone. I want to set the house on fire. I shake my head, zip my jacket, and slam out the back door. When I get home, my husband and I call his brother, a neurologist in Philadelphia. I describe the fast progression, the pain, and the paralysis on both sides.

“Has she had a virus or been sick lately?”

“I think she had strep throat,” I say because she returned six months ago from visiting Kim, who, along with her three children, tested positive for strep the day after my mother left. Her “sniffles” never resolved.

“Guillain-Barre Syndrome,” he declares, a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks its nerves, causing sudden paralysis. “You can get it from untreated strep. This is a medical emergency. She needs to be in a hospital on a ventilator. In a short time, given what you’ve described, she will be unable to swallow, then unable to breathe, and she will die without support.”

“Okay,” I say, and hand the phone to my husband.

There’s no way to make a doctor understand how my fifty-seven-year-old mother is suddenly paralyzed, in agony, about to die, and I’m doing nothing. There’s no way to make myself understand. There’s a hospital three blocks from her house.

At Christian Science Camp in the Leelanau Peninsula, I watched a girl drown in the shallow river. White pines stood witness on the bank. The river flowed into Lake Michigan, cold and clear enough to see its sandy bottom a mile from shore.

“The sick through their beliefs have induced their own diseased conditions.

The next day, I return with my toddler. I don’t want his grandmother to disappear the way Nana did. But is it worse to witness her perishing in her family room while no one does anything about it? On the way, I tell him, “Gramma Connie is sick.”

Inside, he clutches my leg and peers round at Gramma Connie in the hospital bed. She’s staring at the popcorn ceiling. Her mouth gapes. He tries to back toward the kitchen.

I pick him up and nestle him on my hip. His legs clamp. “You can say hi,” I tell him.

“Hi, Gramma,” He says.

She can’t turn her head. She tries to maneuver her mouth to acknowledge him, but manages only to bare her teeth like a trapped animal.

Wrongdoer should suffer.

Her teeth look huge in her diminishing face.

Wrongdoer should suffer.

A branch shrieks against the window. I breathe shallow, through clenched jaws, to avoid inspiring carrion. When I realize they’re about to lift her onto the bed pan again, I whisk my son upstairs. When the moans come, I kneel and cup his ears with my hands. When the sound stills, I sweep him up and rush back down the stairs, through the living room, and, from the dining room, shout to the Christian Scientists, “I have to go now.”

A dark-haired woman I don’t know turns from the bed. She drifts to the dining room, gazes into my eyes, and takes my right hand. “Aren’t you going to ride with your mother?” She asks.

“Ride with her where?”

“To the Christian Science nursing home.”

“Where?”

The other two Christian Scientists have crept in, so that now I am the one surrounded.

“In Cleveland.”

“In Cleveland? How are you going to get her to Cleveland?”

“In an ambulance.”

“She’s riding to Cleveland in an ambulance?”

“Why, yes.”

“Will they even do that? There’s a hospital three blocks away. Why doesn’t the ambulance take her to the hospital?”

“It’s all arranged. They’re taking her to Cleveland. They should be here any minute.”

“I’ll ride with her in the ambulance to the hospital.”

“Oh, no dear,” The stranger says, releasing my hand, “Of course not.”

The Christian Scientists back away. They shake their heads and avert their eyes.

I walk out the back door into the cold afternoon, my son still on my left hip, without a last look or goodbye. I fumble several times trying to click the buckle into his car seat. I am panting. On the way to the interstate, a route I’ve driven a thousand times since I was sixteen, I pound the heel of my right hand on the steering wheel. The sting of the thud tethers me. By the time I merge onto I-94, my son’s head lolls, and I weep.

You say that accidents, injuries, and disease kill man, but this is not true.

We were playing a game in our one-piece swimsuits in which we tried to grasp and tote a greased watermelon out of the water. The girl slipped on the rocky riverbed and fell face-down. She didn’t get up. When someone finally rolled her over, she wasn’t awake. The Christian Science counselors said her name while touching her shoulder, but she didn’t wake up. No one did CPR. No one called an ambulance. We were told to go back to our cabins, and no one mentioned the girl again.

Constant bathing and rubbing to alter the secretions or remove unhealthy exhalations from the cuticle receive a useful rebuke from Jesus precept, “Take no thought . . . for the body.”

My mother calls the morning after the Christian Scientists send her to Ohio. She is crying because she lay in her own waste all night. I can’t remember her words. What I understand is that, when she got to the Christian Science nursing home, which must have been in the evening because it’s three hours from her house, someone wheeled her into a room, showed her a bell to ring if she needed anything, which she, in her paralysis, had no way to lift or ring, turned out the lights, and left until the next morning.

That place has no diagnosis. That place has no idea whether she can move or swallow or ring a bell. The Christian Scientists don’t care. She is there to die. They imprison her so she can’t change her mind. They hide her to spare everyone the embarrassment of her failure. That is why they exist.

When I ask if she wants me to come get her, if she wants me to call an ambulance, if she’ll go to the hospital, she says no.

Man is immortal, and the body cannot die, because matter has no life to surrender.

There are no funerals in Christian Science. There is no death, and you can’t have a funeral without death. So: no funeral.

When my favorite lady at Sixth Church was absent one Sunday, but her toddler and husband were there, in the lobby with members swirling round, I wondered aloud where she was. My mother inhaled, cocked her head, and said: “Well, she self-immolated.”

I was nine. I asked what self-immolated meant.

“Well,” My mother lifted her chin and gazed over my shoulder, “She doused herself in gasoline and set herself alight in the backyard, where she ran all over screaming and flailing her arms, engulfed in flames, until she fell over dead in front of her toddler.” My mother flicked her right hand in dismissal, and continued, “A neighbor saw the whole thing.” She turned from me to an old lady in a stole. Skinny red foxes the size of juvenile cats chased and bit each other’s tails. I wondered if their shiny dark eyes were real. “Mildred, lovely to see you,” My mother said.

Atonement requires constant self-immolation on the sinner’s part.

I call my sister in D.C. and tell her, “I won’t judge you no matter what you decide, but if there’s a chance you’ll feel bad about not seeing Mom before she dies or not trying to convince her to go to a hospital, you should go.”

That day, Kim flies from D.C. to Cleveland. She stays in the Cleveland Convention Center, where her husband got her a last-minute reservation. She doesn’t get there until evening, so she goes to her room, sleeps, and gets up early the next morning to get to the Christian Science nursing home by eight.

The elevator at the convention center is stuffed with white-coated doctors.

“Are you here for the cardiac conference?” They ask her.

“No,” Kim says, “I’m here to see my mom. She’s sick.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” They say. “Well, she’s in a great place! The Cleveland Clinic is top notch.”

Kim nods. How can she explain, her mother is in a horrible place.

“Unlicensed Christian Science sanatoriums and nursing homes cater to patients with open wounds and bodies eaten away by tumors. There, no medical treatment is allowed to interfere with prayer. Assigned only the most basic duties – feeding and cleaning patients – Christian Science ‘nurses’ are not registered, and have no medical training either. Instead, they engage in bizarre practices such as leaving food on the mouths of patients who cannot eat. They provide no assistance for those who are having trouble breathing, administer no painkillers, react to no emergencies.”¹

By the time Kim gets to that place, the Christian Scientists have closed ranks. They touch Kim’s arm and speak in soft voices. Kim wants to punch someone. To scream. To set the place on fire.

“There were just gurneys with people on them lined up in a hallway,” She tells me on the phone that night. “It’s not a nursing home. They don’t have rooms with their photographs. They don’t have clothes and recliners and televisions and teakettles. They lie there waiting to die. Some of them are moaning. No one does anything. It smells like shit.”

Kim has now seen that place I refuse to see. I’m ashamed to admit relief. I’m not alone in my guilt and bewilderment and terror and rage.

The nurses suspected my cellulitis was from shooting up. They kept asking about drug abuse and eyeing me suspiciously when I told them I’d never used a single drug in my life. I was twenty-four-years-old and in law school. I’d become excruciatingly thin and waited too long to go to the doctor. I writhed in bed, knew I was dying. My right shin looked like a burnt campfire log. The red streaks thigh-to-groin terrorized me. The scorching fever immobilized.

A corrupt mind is manifested in a corrupt body.

On the day I was hospitalized, I tried to teach step aerobics. Shuddering as I put gas in the car, I noticed I was bleeding from all my cuticles. I drove to class anyhow. I shook too hard to place the step on the risers. I finally slunk off to Redi-Care. They put me in an ambulance. It was an emergency. I’d seen emergencies.

“Emergency!” I’d wanted to shout. My mother would only have turned away.

The siren screams were muffled. I hovered outside my body. I saw it on a gurney. I saw a stranger tending to the girl on the gurney. He was a big man. He wore blue. His boots were clunky. He moved with a swift confidence the girl had never seen before.

In the hospital, I floated to the monitors’ beep-shush. The nurses streamed in and out, took blood, wheeled me downstairs for a bone scan, sponged my forehead, and explained they were putting antibiotics and painkillers in my I.V. Drug use was their only theory as to why I would have waited so long to seek medical attention. I was not a Christian Scientist anymore, but neither did I know the when, why, and how of seeing a doctor. I did not know they could diagnose the cause of pain, swelling, discoloration, and fever.

A physical diagnosis of disease – since mortal mind must be the cause of disease – tends to induce disease.

I did not know that there were or when there were treatments. I was ashamed. I still felt my symptoms as punishment.

If you say, “I am sick,” you plead guilty. Then your adversary will deliver you to the judge (mortal mind), and the judge will sentence you.

The not naming of anything, rather than disempowering disease, rendered symptoms’ onset catastrophic. The mysterious manifestation of my impure thoughts was killing me.

Some patients would have been insulted by the nurses’ insinuation of intravenous drug abuse. I was accustomed to being blamed, but stunned silent that the doctors and nurses were helping me. I expected everyone to be mad at me for my failure, but my professors let my classmates tape lectures, and my new law school friends drove a half-hour to see me in the hospital. I’d never been in a hospital. I felt calmer than I’d ever felt in my life.

They did not tell me: “That was sepsis.” They did not say: “You almost lost your leg.”

I noticed they seemed relieved after the scan.

“No amputation,” They thought. No bone saw.

“I tried to convince her to go to the hospital,” Kim tells me. “She wouldn’t even consider it. I was begging her, crying, and then I just had to leave.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” I say. How can we accept that our mother will die alone, the same as her own, lying in a pool of waste, terrified and in pain? No one heeds her screams.

¹ Caroline Fraser, Dying the Christian Science way: the horror of my father’s last days; The anti-medical dogma of Christian Science led my father to an agonising death. Now the church itself is in decline – and it can’t happen fast enough. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/06/christian-science-church-medicine-death-horror-of-my-fathers-last-days.

Stephanie LaRose is a legal writing professor at Michigan State University College of Law where she trains soon-to-be lawyers in the art of written and oral advocacy. Formerly, she was a prosecutor of child abuse and neglect cases. She is finishing a memoir The Keeper of Shame about surviving childhood in the City of Detroit in the Christian Science Church, which served to isolate and endanger her due to the lack of medical treatment, the denial of the existence of evil, illness, and death, and the extremity and other-ness of the religion. Stephanie has appeared in the online literary journals Past Ten and Scoundrel Time. She has a Master of Fine Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Juris Doctorate from Western Michigan University.

Photo credit: Zeeshaan Shabbir

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Turn Away by Stephanie La Rose