The peace that passeth all believability

I have a quiet evening for the moment, and had another rep point to a previous remark on another thread (I'm not especially "hip" to the whole point system here); it's been a "good" day when compared to the last few days/weeks, and so I thought writing a bit might help me organize my thoughts a little bit. It may well be that there could be a few who might benefit from them, but apologies in advance for being a little bit disjointed in the telling and I'll try to be as brief as possible. My ability to respond to my own thread is going to be difficult, but I'll follow responses as I'm able.

I've been the primary caregiver for my mother for the last two years, and her battle with cancer is almost at an end. The morphine dosage has been increased and we're probably looking at hours, although the hospice worker doesn't think it will be tonight. My oldest brother has been estranged from the family for a number of years, but he came up and spent the day today; we had some very good time together and it's about the least "isolated" I've felt since the worst part came around. As I mentioned in the other thread, my mother is a Southern Baptist preachers daughter, and my father was a career minister as well. I have two brothers and a sister ...one brother is in Florida, the other lives a few hours south of here and is a happily married homosexual male even if our state doesn't recognize it (and he's pretty close to what I would regard as a "best friend"). He refers to himself as "the pink sheep of the family" and he's nine kinds of awesome (although like the rest of us, not without his share of flaws too).

As many here can imagine, a 20+ year open atheist in a highly evangelical family isn't always an easy spot to fill; the fact that I've been her caregiver for so long (as well as my father to a lesser extent; I kept him two days a week when the Alzheimer's reached a point he could no longer be left alone) defies stereotypes enough that even the support she receives from her church is a bit diminished. She had a fall earlier in the year, and although there were many offers to bring food and such, they were often on the condition that I not be here at the time (people who have never even MET me, mind you; I would drive her to and from church, but my participation ended there). Now that the end is near, some of the unsolicited proselytizing has been ....difficult ...to remain polite about, but I've managed. I'm always respectful, but it certainly feels isolating to be in the middle of a LOT of religious sentiment that I don't happen to share.

Major anger issue: In one of her last reasonably lucid moments at the end of last week, she was in utter terror of dying ...she was inconsolably crying, praying loudly and absolutely terrified that she would be going to hell. For all her faults, Webster's could easily put her picture next to the "sweet little old lady" definition; despite my distaste for a great number of her peer group, she's still a pretty good example of a "good Christian" who lived her life according to the more benevolent end of her beliefs (I wouldn't describe my father as a "bad" person at all, but hardly a sterling representative of his religion either). I hear a lot of people speaking of the comfort that comes with religion in times like this, but the memory of a little old lady absolutely terrified of going to hell in her final lucid moments is going to be a hard one for me to shake. Any remarks about "God's infinite mercy" and peace through religion in a difficult time are not only impossible for me to swallow, but tend more to elicit anger that I don't have an available outlet for at the moment (save writing this, and venting on the phone to my brothers ...both atheist as well).

The worst of it is what is utterly unintentional though. Most often from complete strangers, or at least people with no information about us to automatically make some of the assumptions out of the blue (a delivery person offering to lead a prayer, a new hospice worker pushing a chaplain for ME after being told I wasn't Christian ...TWICE ...after my sister telling her that she and my mother already had their own pastor to attend them). It's Texas though ...a few years back, I had a 911 operator suggest prayer after being robbed; since then, not much surprises me.

This is a tough one though. Not much of a local support system, although a long talk with my sister about where the line was drawn between being true to their beliefs (absolutely fine with me), mildly annoying (asking me to come in and join in prayer circles), and outright offensive (trying to use my mother's situation as a platform to inform me why I need Jesus).

Ugh ...y'know, I just can't do it in a post. I think I'll cut and paste this in a blog entry instead of a forum post. I'm just too exhausted to deal with replies, and it just feels rude to post when it might be a while to do anything else with it.