Who knew that Joseph Smith, the prophet and founder of Mormonism who said he discovered golden plates in upstate New York, written in strange hieroglyphics that he “translated” and published as the Book of Mormon, once ran as a candidate for President of the United States?  It seemed bizarre to me.

I veer between the stresses of caretaking and the delightful absorption in work, reading and thinking about something other than my husband’s health. Presently, I’m preoccupied with the history of Mormons and confess that I’ve always been interested in what some might consider religious eccentricities. I remember when Mitt Romney was a presidential candidate in 2012, and there was a lot of skepticism about whether a Mormon could win the election.  Many people said Mormons aren’t Christians and made fun of Romney, simply because of his religion.

But Mormonism may be the fastest growing faith group in America-- and Mormons want respect. On June 29, the New York Times published an article by Elizabeth Dias in which she wrote that “Russell M. Nelson, the church’s president, said [in August 2018] that God had ‘impressed upon my mind the importance of the name he has revealed for his church.’ “Church members should no longer call themselves Mormons, …. Instead, they should use the church’s full name and refer to themselves as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints... As he is revered as a living prophet [as all the church presidents have since Joseph Smith], the announcement had divine weight.”

This change strikes me as an attempt to declare to the world that “Mormons” are really Christians. It’s also an effort to counter charges that Mormons are weird and dangerous—a perception fueled by Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2004) about extreme Mormon fundamentalists who practice polygamy and tend towards violence. No wonder the “Mormon” church wants to be known under a different name.

I wanted to know more about Mormonism, and being fascinated by history and the origins of things, I had already started looking at books and articles published by and about Mormons in the nineteenth century. Specifically, i was interested in when they first became a religious group with the legendary Joseph Smith as their founder, spiritual leader and first “president.”  And now I’ve come across a book written by Charles MacKay, a prolific Scottish writer, journalist and poet, who in 1852 published The Mormons: or Latter-day saints with memoirs of the life and death of Joseph Smith, the "American Mahomet”.  Mackay’s book was a historical, serious attempt to understand the group, and included original documents as Mackay told their early history, their way of life, their suffering and persecution as Mormons were forced to move from place to place.

            In 1844, the Mormons, having been violently driven from Missouri, were living at Nauvoo, Illinois, where they had built a town on the Mississippi River and a Temple. 1844 was also the year of a presidential election in America, so Joseph Smith’s followers at Nauvoo nominated him as, “Candidate for Presidentship of the United States.”  Not that Joseph Smith was under any illusion that he could win, but he took this nomination as an opportunity to issue “an address to the American people,” presenting his views of government. Within a few months, Smith was murdered by a mob in a jail in Carthage, Illinois.

Joseph Smith began by quoting the Declaration of Independence about how all people are created equal, endowed with equal rights—as if this was the true America-- but immediately he pointed out that “some two or three millions of people are held as slaves for life, because the spirit in them is covered with a darker skin than ours.” Looking to the Bible, he declared that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” He spoke against slavery, racism and injustice with the passionate outrage of the prophets in the Old Testament.

Joseph Smith, of course, had his limitations, especially in regards to women. Only months before, he had published another “revelation,” a divine “commandment” on polygamy (the “spiritual marriage” doctrine), saying men could have multiple wives. The early church leaders practiced “plural marriage.” Women and wives were given to men (like property or land) for the sole purpose of “replenishing” the earth, Smith said. These days, the Mormon Church has long abandoned polygamy (though some extremists still practice it), but the church has been criticized for its positions on the rights of gays, and women, who cannot become priests, let alone “presidents” who can receive divine “revelations.”  Joseph Smith surely did not think of  women as equal to men, but he was radical in his time in attacking slavery, insisting on equality of “men.” I know what he would he say if he saw immigrants, and their children separated from their mothers, put in cages or “holding centers” (the phrase reminds me of cows and pigs awaiting slaughter) on the border with Mexico.

But back to Smith’s assessment of the state of America in1844. After invoking the original ideal of the Declaration of Independence, Joseph Smith surveyed the Presidents of America, beginning with George Washington. He quoted the noble sentiments from their inaugural addresses until he got to Martin Van Buren: “our blooming republic began to decline under the withering touch of Martin van Buren,” who (Smith pointed out) supported the pro-slavery states. Now, Smith lamented, America’s “greatness” has “departed.” We have “demagogues.”  “No honest man can doubt that the glory of American liberty is on the wane.”  When I read his words, I think: he could just as well be talking about America in 2019 in our run-up to the 2020 election.

Joseph Smith laid out his policies for what he would do if he were elected president. His concern was emancipation. No wonder, given the suffering of the Mormons that were beaten, jailed, killed, forced out of their homes. But his concern with liberty was more inclusive.

He first proposed: reduce Congress by half! “curtail the offices of government in pay, number, and power.” Next, the inhabitants of “Slave States” should petition “legislators to abolish slavery by the year 1850 [that is, in six years] or now.” (I think of how some state legislatures have very recently restricted women’s rights, their access to abortions). State legislatures should pardon every convict and bless them, saying “Go and sin no more.” (I think of our prisons, overcrowded with minorities and the poor who don’t get the same “justice” as white men or the wealthy). “Break off the shackles  of the poor black man, and hire them to work like other human beings.” “Give everyman his constitutional freedom.” This was the liberation of the people promised in Leviticus 25.10 (“Proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all the Inhabitants thereof”), which is inscribed on the Liberty Bell.

Our Democratic candidates for President in 2020 are now laying out their policies, promising a better, more equal and just America at a moment when our democracy is under attack from within. Are not Joseph Smith’s assumptions about government and the dignity of human beings echoed in the statements of our candidates and their proposals for addressing the problems we face? I’m thinking about how women are still not free, how many men (and male legislators) think they have the right to control women’s bodies (women are given to them?), through sexual assault and by denying them access to safe abortions and even Planned Parenthood. Sometimes I think it’s the remnant of the old idea that men plant their “seed” in women’s bodies and then worry that their “seed” will be destroyed, even men who don’t accept the responsibilities of fatherhood.

 I used to think Joseph Smith was just weird, a megalomaniac, a self-proclaimed prophet. But I’m beginning to think that there is more to him.  Yes, this dead white man thought he channeled God and he was hardly a champion of women’s rights. But in his assertion of the freedom and dignity of the human being, his sense that America has departed from our founding ideals, I believe he still has something to say to us, reminding us how much work has yet to be done.

Help! Help!

This is what my beloved husband softly calls out, night after night, week after week, from his hospital bed in what used to be our bedroom not so long ago. He’s got atypical Parkinsonism, the rarer Multiple System Atrophy, and he’s declining month by month. His calling can go on all night long. “Help, help, help, Achsah!” Or whatever other name he can think of, perhaps one of the aides. I’ve had to move out of our bedroom into our guest bedroom/study. I’ve had to hire a night aide so I can sleep and not be pulled down into the darkness with him.

Sometimes he asks for water, again and again. “Water, water,” he whispers. Sometimes he demands “cookies” (what he calls Carr’s whole wheat crackers).  Is he thirsty or hungry? Or does he just want human contact, knowing that someone is there for him? That he’s not alone? 

Why can’t he at least lie there quietly, if he can’t sleep, I think to myself, frustrated, feeling mean. But of course he can no more help calling out than he can help his neurological disease. It makes me so sad. I’m pulled between intense, conflicting emotions: sadness and annoyance, grief and fear, even anger. A bi-polar syndrome that’s not in the books.  Within moments I can be torn between loving, empathetic, nurturing impulses and a survival instinct to save myself. I tell him he’s heroic, which he is; he tells me I’m keeping him alive, which is also true and makes me cry. Every day we have to forgive each other.

I rate too high on the empathy scale, I’m told. Like a sponge, I absorb the sadness, fear or joy of others. But trust me, I am no saint.

What my husband is going through these nights reminds me what my father was like in his last two years, and what he put my mother through.

She was always his helpmate. It was a different time and her marriage was a quite different from mine. She was his “faithful handmaid,” as she sometimes signed birthday cards to him. My father was difficult, to say the least. A domineering father, whose will was absolute. All of us children were raised to obey him, though some of my brothers resisted. My mother was his willing handmaid, even though she was a strong, intelligent woman. I’ve always hated the thought of being a handmaid.  I have never liked that description in the Bible of Eve created to be Adam’s “helpmate,” with its implication not just of simple partnership, but of subservience. So I married someone who didn’t want a handmaiden, someone who was self-sufficient. But age and disability have changed the dynamic. He now needs most things done for him and understandably he hates it.

When my husband calls out, “help, help,” anxiety boils up in me, a momentary panic attack. Too late, too intense and too transitory to take a pill for it.  I worry about him, but also about what this is doing to me. I think back to the last two miserable years of my father’s life. No sooner would my mother get him into bed, he’d start calling, “HELP! HELP, MAMA!.MAAAMAA!” And she would go in, get him calmed down, then go back to her room. No sooner did she get into bed that his calls would start again. All night.  I was living in Illinois at the time with my husband and a young son.  I thought she was exaggerating when she told me about those nights. That is until I went back to Connecticut to visit them.

I hated it! I was furious at him because I could see he was destroying her health and I worried about my mother. We mixed sleeping pills with scotch, upping the dosage. Nothing worked. After my requisite five-day visit, I’d fly back home to Illinois, guilty that I was abandoning her, but relieved to be far away.

Scientists now are learning that going without sleep for long periods of time means the brain builds up the plaque that leads to Alzheimers. According to a February 5, 2019 post on the NIH Director’s Blog, “Sleep Loss Encourages the Spread of Toxic Alzheimers Protein.” The new findings center on a protein called Tau, which accumulates in abnormal tangles in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. In the healthy brain, active neurons naturally release some Tau during waking hours, but it normally gets cleared away during sleep. Essentially, your brain has a system for taking the garbage out while you’re off in dreamland.

By the time my father died, my mother was showing signs of dementia. So this was the reward for her years of loving but stressful caretaking.  For the next fifteen years, she would live with progressive dementia, the last nine in a nursing home.  I’ve always been convinced that her loss of sleep had destroyed her brain’s health, and I blamed my father, even though I knew he couldn’t control his disease. When I recently told my internist of my theory, she dismissed it: “Alzheimers doesn’t work that way.” But science is now proving me right. And that’s why I “selfishly” insist on not sleeping in my husband’s room, why I pay for an aide every night and why I continue teaching, writing, trying to use my brain every day. “Self-care” is too mild a term (sounds more like taking a bath or having a mani-pedi), and doesn’t capture the anguish and conflicting emotions that never go away.

I remember watching my exhausted mother and thinking, “I could never do that for my husband. I don’t want to ever do that for my husband.” And so here I am, thirty-some years later, doing everything I can to not let what happened to her happen to me.

It’s a horrible situation for both me and my husband. Worse for him, of course, though stress is taking a health toll on mine as my dermatologist told me as she took four biopsies of skin on my face and arm.

When my husband was first diagnosed, the doctors told us, “just focus on the present; don’t dwell on the future.”  Nice idea, like mindfulness. But you have to prepare for a future that we know will be worse. Living in the moment isn’t so great either. For the last six months my husband cannot walk, even with a walker, can’t stand on his own and starts to pitch to the side and collapse (they call it the “Pisa syndrome,” after the leaning tower of Pisa!). So transferring him puts us both at risk. During those hours when I’m without the support of an aide and have to move him or take care of increasingly challenging bodily needs, I often panic and shout and swear—“Oh God! Shit! Damn! God damn it. Oh God!” and even worse. I guess people would say I’m an awful, foul-mouthed caretaker, but actually I’m crying out to God for strength, for help, and I think God will forgive me.