My husband’s stepmother, Ginny, died last week. She lived several months past her 97th birthday. Here is her obituary.
Ginny shared her life with three husbands, outliving each one. Three sons were born from her first union. She then married John, my husband’s father, and warmly welcomed us (John’s family) into her life. When John died, Ginny married Fred. After Fred’s death, Ginny told me, “Of all my husbands, Fred was my favorite. He was fun.”
Ginny lived at the Brethren Village Retirement Community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—a home with several levels of care—for over 30 years, moving there a few years after marrying my father-in-law. She said, “We made a good decision. I never wanted to be a financial burden on my children.” And she wasn’t.
Throughout her life, Ginny attended a fundamental, evangelical church. Had she been able to vote in the 2016 national election, she would no doubt have voted Republican. She had no use for feminism (women who rail against God’s ordained order), liberalism (the Devil’s message), homosexuality (perversion of God’s perfect creation) and immigrants (they siphon resources from hard-working Americans).
Yet, at the same time, Ginny was generous, giving to causes that fit with her ideological worldview such as missions. It was important to her that people come to understand the “truth” as seen through the prism of the theology she embraced. Within her community, she was loving, actively engaged, and caring, helping people in practical ways—donating food and other necessities to organizations sponsored by her church.
I’m the type of insecure wallflower who has deleted social media accounts, blogs, photos, poems, and journals because 1. I am not good at commitment or planning, 2. I shame myself for being eclectic and lacking consistency, and 3. a sentiment I have either created or exists in some form externally prods me to brand myself, something I cannot do well (see no.1 and no.2). Oh, that doesn’t mean I don’t find the brand smart, and maybe calling it a “brand” condemns it to consumerism and commodities, when really it is being focused where I am distracted and a frivolous sensationalist.
We are people, navigating in a large world filled with expectations, hopes &
When I was growing up in 1950s Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn, NY, my identity as a Jew was often called into question. “You mean you’re Jewish? And you don’t know about gefilte fish?” my best friend’s Eastern European (Ashkenazi) Jewish mother asked, shocked to discover that our family ate stuffed grape leaves rather than stuffed cabbage. “What kind of a Jew are you?” schoolmates challenged. When I answered “Sephardic . . . from Egypt,” they would reply. “But all the Jews left Egypt a long time ago, isn’t that what Passover is about?” “No,” I would say, having been taught the words by my father. “Some Jews returned to Egypt when they were expelled from Spain.” [Later I would learn that some Jews actually lived in Egypt for millennia, never having left.] “There are no Jews in Egypt,” my little friends would retort. “We never heard of any Jews in Egypt. You can’t be Jewish.”
At the end of the second Matrix film (Reloaded), Neo (the messianic figure, “The One”) is told by the Architect of the Matrix, itself a program in the system, that Neo was in fact the sixth iteration of messianic figures that the Matrix had itself created. In such a case, what hope is there when the System creates messiahs in order to produce a hope it allows—a hope it allows for the sake of reproducing itself through the exploited labor of others, who are able “to get by” because they have this same hope. A hope that a better world is possible.
The morning after the July 27 total eclipse of the moon, I wrote:
Feminism and Religion 