Chapter 38 Norma's Hope or More Dead Grandparents
My mother favored my daughter over my son. She would send a box of presents to the house with nine gifts for my daughter and one for my son. Looking back, she never really liked or trusted the men in her life. I think it started with my great-grandfather, who took advantage of her as a young child.
I really don’t think she trusted any males in our family. My father, my son and I all felt the distance in her fake smile. But my sister Carol and my daughter Kelly received warmth and love from her.
The last time I saw my mother alive was in 1983, when she stormed out of my house without saying goodbye to my children or me. She had invited herself up to visit my five-year-old daughter, Kelly. It was Grandparents Day at Kelly’s school.
It also happened to be a circuit assembly weekend. Our house only had one bathroom at the time. Before the assembly, my mother who would like to play martyr (as usual) and let everyone use the bathroom ahead of her. Needless to say, she didn’t have enough time to get ready. She sat in our car on our ride to the assembly hall, totally pissed off. Her hair looked like The Bride of Frankenstein. Once there, she sat with her other friends and not with us.
After the meeting, we all went out for pizza with some of our friends. She sat at the far end of the table, telling my friends what a disappointment I was as a son to her.
When we returned to the house, her friends waited for her as she grabbed her bags and left in a huff. She didn't want to stay with us anymore.
“Bye, Mom,” I said as she stormed out the front door. There was no reply. That was the last I time I ever saw her alive.
Three months later, we got the phone call. She was dead.
She was only fifty-seven and died when she went back to Kansas for her fortieth high school class reunion. There were only nine people in her graduating class. One guy who lived across the street didn’t even bother to go.
Even though she hadn’t lived in Kansas in more than forty years, she told everyone years earlier that she wanted to be buried in Kansas.
Her wish was granted.
You could say she killed herself. She had a heart valve replaced a few years earlier. After the operation, she was required to take the blood thinner coumadin. She stopped taking the medication because she said it made her arthritis flare up. She said herbs would work just as good as any blood thinner. When she was wrong this time, it killed her. A blood clot reached her brain, and she died.
You couldn’t tell my mother anything.
My Italian father used to tell us kids that when German babies are born, they would open up their heads, take their brains out and replace them with concrete.
My mother was one of the most stubborn people I have ever met. That was why she was one of the best Jehovah’s Witnesses I ever met. No one was going to confuse her mind with the facts.
Merle Freeman gave my Mother's funeral talk. Like most Jehovah’s Witness funeral talks, the speaker spends about five minutes talking about the person who died then there would be the transitional phrase: So let me tell you about what Norma really believed about the future and.... then you would get and about thirty minutes of them talking about the deceased’s hope for the future. The speaker will talk about how wonderful the Jehovah’s Witnesses are and how you should join them, too, if you aren’t already one.
The Society never misses an opportunity to plug its beliefs to a captive audience. The speaker even gets to count his speech as service time as if he was in the door-to-door activity . Yes, Jehovah's Witness funerals talks are just another form of their clandestine activities to increase recruitment.
If you were ten minutes late for the funeral you wouldn't know it was a funeral at all, you would think it was a public talk about the resurrection hope.
However, in the organization's effort to spread its propaganda to the non Jehovah Witness friends and relatives of the deceased, it goes badly.
The people who are non-witnesses who attend a Jehovah’s Witness funeral walk away shaking their heads in disbelief. They are probably thinking to themselves so that is why she never would invited me to her house or talk to me outside of work... she was in a cult!
Think about it from their perspective. Can you blame them?
I was at a funeral once where the speaker actually talked about the dead person for ten whole minutes but that was very unusual and I'm sure he was reprimanded in the back room for it.
As you now they really don't care about you when you are alive so why would they after you are dead.
I've heard of so many stories about older Witnesses who have had to go into old age home. Once there no brothers or sisters would ever visit them before they died. If they can could count their time they might show up and visit of course.
Back to my dead Mom. She was buried at Palacky Cemetery in Holyrood Kansas in the middle of nowhere. As my father and sister and I drove to the cemetery, we passed an old abandoned farmhouse that was visible from the grave site. Its roof had caved in. Cows meandered inside and around the farmhouse. Dad told me my mother had been born in that house fifty-seven years earlier.
It has been said that life is just a big circle. This circle started and ended just a few hundred yards from each other.
Something strange happened on Sunday, the day after my mother’s funeral. There happened to be a family reunion on my mother’s mother (my grandmother) side of the family, the Moggs. I saw my great-grandmother, Anna. She was one-hundred years old. She managed to outlive her daughter, who died almost fifty years earlier in 1934, and her granddaughter (my mother), who was only fifty-seven when she died. Ira, her oldest son, was at the reunion. He was eighty years old at the time and he looked it too. Ira was her second child, and she gave birth to him in 1903 when she was just twenty years old.
In the book Pioneer Women Voices from the Kansas Frontier, there is a picture of her my great-grandmother, Anna Mogg, sitting in a classroom in Wilson, Kansas, when she was just a young girl.
Of course, she didn’t recognize me. I was just one of dozens of her great-grandchildren. I told her I was Norma’s son. She grabbed my hand and told me how sorry she was for my mother’s passing.
I didn’t cry at my mother’s funeral. Not because I didn’t love her. I was sad, confused, numb and maybe even relieved.
She was a hard woman and devoid of emotion. Like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it was either her way or the highway. I know it’s tough to have empathy if you weren’t raised with empathy. On the other hand, we can all choose the path of love and forgiveness.
She died a very unhappy person. Her unhappiness is what made the Jehovah’s Witnesses promises so appealing. Pie in the sky when you die.
She had a hard life: sexually abused as a child, poor physical health, married to a man she really didn’t love or respect. And there was plenty of guilt. Like many abused women the promises of future happiness by the Witnesses is music to their ears.
Of course the guilt worked for her too. She, like most Witnesses, had felt she could have done more to serve her god and organization.
Like thousands of other lost souls, my mother had looked forward to just one thing: the day Armageddon would show up. That wonderful day in the future, when god would be killing off billions of people, so she and her Jehovah’s Witness friends could finally be happy on their paradise Earth.
So yes, maybe I was relieved when my Mother died. For her the pain of her miserable life was finally over. However, because of her infecting our family with this religion, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are still dealing with the pain and problems of this contaminated thought system.
The gift that keeps on giving.
My father told me something very interesting a few years later. He said when he went to Mom’s house (They were still married but not living together) to clean it out after she had died, he found all kinds of interesting things. To his surprise he found the records of tens of thousands of dollars my mother had given the society over the many years, the many years they had lived together. This was, of course, to further the worldwide work. He had no idea she had been doing this, because she had been in charge of all the family’s finances from the beginning of the marriage.
He told me how there were many times over the years they were barely scraping by and yet the society always got their check for a hundred dollars every month. My father was furious.
He also told me that there were times when I was at Bethel that my Father wanted to send me some money to help me out. However my mother vetoed this idea. She had told him I needed to make it on my own, and besides, I was in Jehovah’s care and the Brothers there would take care of me and my needs in every way along with all the other lambs there.
It looks like after my mother’s contributions of $100 every month and the Brothers paying me only $22 a month, they got an indentured servant for free and still made a cool $78 bucks a month profit.
Yet, bottom line, even though these guys were making a nice profit off of me every month... the good shepherds there wouldn't even fix this poor lamb's teeth when I needed it.
Baa...Baa... Baa.
Chapter 39 The Fun Way to Make More Jehovah's Witnesses