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Eggs, Toast, and Coffee: the Way, the Truth, and the Life

We held the breathing tube as she stepped clumsily in the shower. As she pulled off her

shirt I noticed her skin and breasts hanging like drapery over the curves of her body. She had

skin you could pull up over and over to watch it deflate like a balloon running out of air. And she

was running out of air—air and time. I was repulsed. It was the first time I had seen a strange

woman naked at such proximity, and the first time I had to help someone relieve herself in the

shower. I was closest to the shower curtain when I heard the feces drop on the white shower

floor. I immediately held my nose, but I did not have another hand to shield my eyes as the

gentle warm movement of air touching the curtain exposed her as she moved the nozzle lower to

wash off the remains. Afterwards, incense was set. A holy prayer to the gods to cover rank

evidence of disease—stage four lung cancer.

My plea was the opposite. I wanted her to die. There, I said it.

I came knocking on death’s door as a young missionary in sunny LA County. The first

day I met Carol she had scheduled a lunch date with us. She lived in the beautiful and winding

hills of Glendale, California. Her house was open and had a lot of natural light. Captured

through a lens, it was a picturesque home for the living, the creative, the nature-lover. There

were red rain boots by the door, more window than wall, and a hidden garden crawling up the

steep incline where the house was perched.

As soon as we entered, she came to life ordered us to get her pants as she spit morning

bile into tissues—a habit I would come to accept over the following months. I got the pants as

my companion chatted with her because Carol sure did love to chat; at least, she loved to chat
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when her lungs allowed her to. After her pants slid like a snail up her legs, her favorite visor was

donned, and she felt appropriate enough to leave her bed, she held on tightly to my companion as

I manned the breathing tube around corners and over objects behind them. It was her

preparations, rather than her outings, that taught me the language of cancer. Every step said pain,

and every hygienic act was a long sentence with too many commas.

But when I first met Carol it wasn’t the commas I noticed. The first thing that I noticed

about Carol was her dyed red hair, which exploded from her head as if from a constant current of

electricity running through her body. Up to that point I had only experienced the death of three

people. Only one of them did I see defiled by embalmment, and only one was a relative: my

grandfather. Like others, I felt that death or disease was something like swearing in front of your

grandmother–you avoided it and hoped that it never happened accidentally. Carol’s hair

communicated a similar message. Her full head of hair was a miracle that stayed around as long

as she did, and I am sure that up to her dying day, Carol continued to apply acupuncture to

deceive and distract from the most common symbol of cancer: baldness.

Before my church mission I was as average a girl as you can be, mostly. But then I

started my mission. I had heard that there would be a tangible spiritual weight felt as they clipped

the ministerial name tag on you in the training center. There on your chest, right above your

heart, were the enlarged letters “JESUS CHRIST.” We were to bear His name for the following

18 months or 2 years. But when I got my tag it was behind an assembly line of other emphatic
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volunteers. And when it was attached to my shirt it was in a detached and hurried manner. If

there was supposed to be a literal shifting in spiritual aura, I never felt it.

By the time we got out of the house, death was off the radar, and cancer was a foreign

word that may or may not have been profanity. Or at least it was off for Carol. We still had to

play Chinese fire drill as we dragged Carol around to her driver’s seat, adjusted the web of tube,

repositioned the oxygen tank, readjusted the tube, sat down, moved over, and started the whole

process again. To Carol these were not signs of what lay ahead, just temporary obstacles. For us

it was a constant reminder of cancer, cancer, cancer. Reinforced by the fact that we had to always

be prepared with buckets to catch any projectile vomit when driving to and from the restaurants.

As we drove to a restaurant, Carol, as with all decisions, was in the driver’s seat. It was

always an exciting ride. If Carol had not died from cancer, I would have bet on anything, and at

any price, that she would have died at that wheel. Somehow, though, we always got to our

destination safely. It was as if Fate was not courageous enough to deal this woman another blow.

When we got there, Foxy’s, they were ready. All the workers knew her name, and she

knew all of theirs. She also knew that the young attractive host was attending dental school and

made us very aware of his accomplishments. She hadn’t accepted the idea that we were

practically nuns. Every time we would eat out, she would order a full course meal, but hardly

touch it. In hindsight, this at least discouraged the puking. Regardless of the size, she never

worried because her price was always subsidized by some discount offered by the house. But as

much as she was prized by the local businesses and franchises she frequented, Carol was alone.
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This may have been the reason she would allow two Mormon missionaries into her home, when

God was her ultimate enemy.

In Luke chapter eighteen, Christ the demigod is tired and needs rest. A group of children

approach and as the apostles attempt to deny them access to the Savior, Christ interrupts saying,

“Suffer the little children to come unto to me. Forbid them not: for such is the kingdom of God.”

As a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ we invite all men (and women) to come unto

Christ. At least, that’s what we recited every morning. But with Carol, it was different.

Carol was what we as missionaries called an eternal investigator, an individual

investigating the truth of our church. She was someone that, according to missionary rules or

tradition, should have been given up on a long time ago. However, Carol was different because

she wasn’t really in search of something transcendent in the religious sense. Perhaps it was the

doctors that became her prophets. They showed her the way to life when everything in her body

was failing. We were just soothsayers speaking of a truth that hadn’t helped and wasn’t helping

and probably wouldn’t help. What we could offer was service. Each morning, week after week,

we served her over-hard eggs, two pieces of toast, and one steaming cup of coffee. We became

Carol’s mothers, friends, confidants, and advisors. What we never became for Carol was

missionaries.

The fifth verse of Psalms 150 proclaims, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.”

Ironically, Carol was lacking in the breath department, and she wasn’t the only one. As a newbie

in the mission field, I met Virginia, a singer with dying lungs. Virginia would close her eyes and
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sway to the record swirling around as she listened to the girl and performer she once had been. I

never saw her happier, and I never saw her more quietly devastated.

We taught Virginia about God’s plan. Turns out, God’s plan wasn’t her plan. As we told

her about her own willingness to come to this earth and follow this plan the room filled with

Virginia’s thunderous fury. Like hell she chose to come here. Like hell she chose to lose her

lungs. Like hell she wanted to share her marriage bed with strangers. Like hell there was a God

who allowed that bastard to give her that whore’s diseases. No, God could have made a plan, but

it sure as hell wasn’t something she would have agreed to.

Virginia, like Carol, ended up dying of lung cancer, but unlike Carol, we never became

Virginia’s untrained hospice providers, and unlike Virginia, Carol never forgave God. So,

inviting Carol to come closer to His son, our main purpose as missionaries, was nearly

impossible.

If Carol was going out after her morning coffee, as she did when she invited us on lunch

dates, then it was necessary that she didn’t look like a cancer victim in the process. As she

brushed her teeth, her pace quickened. Deep breath, hold, tooth brush, exhale, deep wheezing

breath, hold, tooth brush, professional spitting. I thought by then she would give up, but maybe

lung cancer had taught her that breath was a gift, not a constant expectation. She moved on to the

face wash, which to me was the purest form of torture to inflict on dying lungs. For this she

performed a death-defying stunt. She took a long inhale from her second lungs and then pulled

her breathing tube off her face, and immediately began the process. I thought she was
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hyperventilating; I thought she was dying. But my companion stood at the ready with the

breathing tube, and as soon as the face had been splashed and massaged, she hurled the tube back

onto Carol’s face as Carol adjusted it with shaking hands. Then Carol applied the final touches.

The hair was combed and made impossibly more voluminous, and then my favorite part, the

eyeliner. It was like watching a kindergartner try to color inside the lines. Before you knew it,

her whole eyelid was black, and surprisingly it worked. She looked great. Carol’s denial of death

was off the charts, and she wanted her appearance to express that.

Each day as representatives of Jesus Christ we had to get ready in Sunday clothes—skirts

and dresses—and on top of those Sunday clothes we would place the black name tag with the

inscription of our church’s name. We never quite stood out as much as the male missionaries

with their white shirts, but we were showing a lot less skin than many women in the hot

temperatures of the LA suburbs. And many people recognized the difference. They knew when

to walk to the other sides of the street, and they knew that we would listen to them about how

much they hated their sister or how they had just gotten out of jail.

There were moments it wasn’t enough to convince ourselves. After months of routine

visits to Carol’s home in the hills, I was with my third missionary companion in Glendale. She

was blonde, she was crazy (in a fun way), and she was depressed. In the morning she would walk

out of the room still hibernating in her big fuzzy gray blanket. According to the missionary

handbook, exercises were to take place from 6:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. Each morning, though, we

found it successful enough that we were even out of bed, so we opened the sliding door, lined up

the sunflower seeds from the door to our knees, and waited for our squirrel friend to enter.
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At times, Carol was the only person we visited for the whole day. One Thursday,

however, we actually had important things to do. Thursdays were the days when the Glendale

missionaries met up to discuss how to make our ministerial efforts more successful. But that

morning Carol called us up in a state of emergency. Most days were bad for her, but this day was

especially bad. Although it seemed more promising than exercises, we still begrudged Carol’s

bad timing as we got ready to make our way up the couple of blocks to her house. Once we

arrived, Carol was in a panic, but she had a plan. We were to drive her to Hollywood for an

appointment she had already set up. It didn’t matter that it was her car. She trusted our driving

skills. Carol obviously didn’t know that the forty-seventh page of the Missionary Handbook

states, “Do not drive vehicles owned by members or nonmembers. Do not give rides to anyone

other than full-time missionaries,” so we explained it to her. Oh, but that was alright, she

wouldn’t tell anyone. We knew she wouldn’t tell anyone. She took missionaries to the beach—a

forbidden area—and didn’t tell anyone, well, except for all the missionaries she did tell.

When we finally convinced her that we were not willing to drive, and when we had called

several members at her demands, she finally gave in and told us to go ask the Armenian boys

across the street. Those college boys who couldn’t wash their own clothes. We hesitantly walked

across the street, and we hesitantly knocked on a door we normally would have accosted with

more confidence. After a couple unanswered knocks the door slowly opened. One of the

Armenian boys in a t-shirt and shorts looked at us with squinty eyes. Perhaps it was the sun or

perhaps it was the fact that two dedicated missionaries had found him just after the sun had

started to rise. We said Carol’s name and he woke up, told us to wait a moment, and met us

across the street in what seemed like five minutes at most. After we had rushed to Carol’s house,
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set up her oxygen tank, and heard Carol promise the young man a good lunch, we were all in

Carol’s car heading to our meeting at the church where we would be dropped off first.

For Biblical Jews, God’s command to keep the sabbath day holy was pivotal. Mosaic law

took the forbiddance of labor on that holy day to new heights. Heights to which Christ would rise

and challenge. In the thirteenth chapter, verses ten through seventeen, the apostle Luke recalls

one of these events. While in the synagogue, Jesus becomes aware of a young woman “bowed

together” who is not able to stand. Taking compassion on her struggle, Jesus heals her. The

scriptures detail, “the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation…There are six days in

which men ought to work: in them therefore come and be healed, and not on the sabbath day.”

Jesus, who according to Christian tradition was the author of these laws, answers with the

following rebuttal, “ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath

bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?” With this, the

“adversaries” of Christ are “ashamed” while onlookers, on the other hand, “rejoiced for all the

glorious things that were done by him.”

In Glendale there is a park where local families frequented. This then meant that it was a

place we would frequent. There we contacted a father on roller-skates, we ended meetings with

our stalker (dropping him from our investigative pool), we met an Indian family ok with

adopting another god, and we watched the Armenian elders play chess and chat. It was there I

laid one night not caring who I was, whose name I held, who I reported to, where I went next, or

why I couldn’t move from the middle of a public soccer field. I couldn’t care, I couldn’t feel, and
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I couldn’t see anything but the cold stars in an empty sky. And neither could my crazy blonde

companion. Her issue was genetic, mine was environmental. Hers could possibly be helped with

medication (depending on the day), and mine needed therapy. Either way, we both wished our

next appointment was a long discussion at the bottom of our apartment pool, and at least one of

us didn’t even believe there would be a divine lifeguard to get us out of it.

Whether we are religious or not, believers in prayer or not, I believe we all pray in

different ways. It may be in public or in private, in exclamation or in silence. We may pray to a

god or gods or to the forces around us. But no matter the differences, we all pray because we

expect or at least hope that someone or something will answer our pleadings. When I was little I

was taught to bow my head, fold my arms, close my eyes, and reverently begin with, “Dear

Heavenly Father…” But my most powerful request didn’t have any of these prerequisites. My

eyes were open, I could hear my siblings through the walls and windows of my house, and my

thoughts seemed to say, “God, Christina is mean, and she isn’t my friend, and she makes me sad,

but maybe I love her, and so maybe…will you let her live?” Whatever people might believe,

here’s what I know, my sister never had an epileptic seizure after that day. I never again woke up

to my sister’s seismic tremors shaking my bed, and I never again saw my dad’s fear as he cradled

her until the ambulance arrived.

After that, God and I became real close. He was the first person I went to in struggle, in

gratitude, in doubt. There was nothing empirical telling me he was on the end of the line, but for

some reason I just knew, He was really there. And so, when there was a rule and I believed it to

be written or revealed by God, I followed. I did not obey out of fear. I did not obey out of duty. I
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obeyed because I loved a God who had first loved me—who breathed life into my sister and

made sure her lungs kept pumping it.

With Carol we often challenged the missionary mosaic code. God says that whether it is

by His voice or the voice of His servants it is the same. Carol didn’t believe in God or prophets,

so our mentioning of a missionary handbook designed by them was like children saying there

was a monster under their bed. It wasn’t real, and we had nothing to fear. But I did fear that

instead of helping a woman or man who needed forgiveness and hope through faith in Christ, we

spent hours with Carol going grocery shopping at Whole Foods while she kept her oxygen tank

company in her car. Yes, we got an organic cupcake out of the mix, but were we missing the

Jackie’s, the Albert’s, the Stephanie’s, the Dennie Sue’s we might have found in Glendale? The

ones who wanted to transcend abuse, drugs, poverty, and hopelessness. The ones who sought us

as missionaries not nurses. And, so after days of grocery shopping, and landscaping, and

travelling, and adventuring with Carol, we decided to visit her only during the time we were

willing to spare: exercises.

However, one evening, we went against that plan. I can’t quite remember the reason, but

Carol had requested us for an evening meeting. Strangely, though, when we arrived at Carol’s

house for the scheduled meeting we found it empty, locked, and closed. We figured that Carol,

like usual, was caught up somewhere and was running late, so we explored her garden and

waited. We loved Carol’s home just as we somehow loved Carol. We loved its dedication to

living foliage in the Californian drought. We loved the hill it sat on that gave us a better view of
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the sun. That day we took several pictures to remember one of our favorite places in the area. But

even our love couldn’t distract us from fact that after at least 45 minutes, Carol had still not

arrived. After a couple phone calls Carol answered my companion. I waited through several “I’m

so sorry Carol” moments, until my companion finally hung up the phone. Carol’s prophetic

doctors had finally led her astray. They had given her a blasphemous revelation. Carol was dying

and there was nothing else they could do about it. We were shocked. They had finally had the

courage to tell Carol the truth. The truth we had seen all along. The incense and the eyeliner had

never convinced us. We knew Carol was beyond a life worth living. We didn’t get why she

wouldn’t just give up and die. At this point, it was the best alternative for both of us.

The most triumphant moment in the life of Christ was one which he had prophesied on

several occasions prior to his death. In three days, Christ would rise from his tomb as in

immortal God. He would triumph over death as the way, the truth, and the life. When would

Carol give in and follow? How could she choose suffering in ignorance and fear over Him?

Carol’s home is no longer Carol’s home. Her soul no longer dwells there. But over its

remains, there stands a cross. Ironically, it always stood there. Looming over her gardens and

shading her hill, Carol was always just a breath away from Forest Lawn Cemetery. Forest Lawn

is a place of paradoxes. Fields full of life and death. In its builder’s creed it states,

I shall endeavor to build Forest Lawn as different, as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine

is to Darkness, as eternal life is unlike death…devoid of misshapen monuments and other

customary signs of earthly death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns,

splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers, noble memorial
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architecture with interiors full of light and color, and redolent of the world’s best history

and romances.

It would only be right that Carol’s body now lies there. But no one ever really told us where they

took her body. Because although it was my companion and I who were there with her when her

doctor told her there was nothing else he could do, and we were there when she called that crap

and found a new one; although we were there to help her pick up medicine and to purchase

specialized coconut water and more eggs; and even though we were there to undress her, help

her into the shower, hold up her breathing tube, and watch and hear her feces drop because she

could no longer suffer the pain of bending her body over the toilet; still, all that was not enough

for us to be there for her funeral. In the end, we were not told where her grave was because we

were not family. We could not attend her funeral because her family conveniently showed up on

the scene after all the duties had been performed. They were family who, like Peter, cried thrice

in denial and then ran to the tomb.

But beyond the mystery of where she was buried, I wonder now were her soul is, and if

she remembered God? Is she with my grandpa who died of heart failure, my grandma who died

of pancreatic cancer, or Virginia, a kindred spirit, whose lungs also failed to aid their beating

friend? Is she with her younger brother who passed too early or her mother or her father? Does

her eyeliner still hold resemblance to our friend the raccoon?

I do not completely know, but what I do know, is that a little white handbook could not

stand in the way of what God wanted for Carol. Because, the thing is, Carol had more faith than

any of us and God knew it. Nothing showed me this more than the shelves underneath all the

coconut water and eggs where she had rows of beer. Carol had faith in life. And faith in Life is
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all Christ ever required. Because of Carol, to this day, I do not think I can acknowledge people as

dead. I still feel that if I found the right plane ticket, I could visit them tomorrow.