Charity Overturned
The phone rang —too early—something was wrong. It was our branch president. He must be mistaken, I thought, as I pulled on my jacket. I left my son eating breakfast with my husband, descended seventeen floors in an elevator, walked quickly through the lobby without waving at the guards, and took my first breath of cold, fresh air. I half ran up the hill, past the other two high-rise buildings crammed with medical students, past the patch of grass where the nannies hung out with the kids, up the hill where we parked our car to avoid paying the monthly parking-garage fee, and onto the grounds of Jacobi Hospital. Jacobi is a large, busy, sad-smelling public hospital in the Bronx. I knew I’d be the only one there with Sandra, and wished briefly, intensely, that it wasn’t so; I wasn’t always good with words, and neither was Sandra. I had thought our mutual clumsiness endearing, until now. Now I hoped I’d know what to say so that I could live up to my responsibility as Relief Society president.
As I jogged up the hill, my mind raced through memories of my friend Sandra. I could see her in her fancy Sunday hat at church, passing out her hand-drawn programs for Relief Society. Before copying them, she would decorate around the edges with doves and crucifixes. As she passed out the programs, she wouldn’t talk much—just answer the sisters’ questions or nod in agreement before they even finished their sentences. She was big, matronly, heavy, and strong. She wore tinted glasses that made it hard to see her eyes, but they would shine when people commented on her daughter Shakea.
To this day, I can’t think of Sandra without seeing Shakea. Mothering Shakea was Sandra’s greatest ambition in life. She did her mothering in a tidy apartment behind a door full of locks and a restraining order against Shakea’s father. She wanted Shakea to grow up to be strong and beautiful, and to avoid getting sucked down into the Bronx, like Sandra’s older daughter, who had run off while still a teenager and with whom she no longer had any contact. But now Sandra was a new member of the Church and starting a new life. Sandra planned to be a better mother for Shakea.
Shakea was a three-year-old charmer who skipped around from lap to lap throughout the time at church. On Sundays, she was always dressed to the hilt. I think showing her off every week was one of Sandra’s life pleasures—and deservedly so. We all loved Shakea. And I loved Sandra. I felt drawn to her from the first time I met her. Shyness and unselfishness combined to make her a great listener. She always let others have a chance to set the mood or have their say. Sandra prayed and read the scriptures. She did her best to educate Shakea by taking her on walks, talking to her, and treating her kindly, which unfortunately was not the usual standard in the Bronx. Even though I lived there for four years, I never figured out what to do when I saw mothers screaming at their kids on the subway.
It was moments like those when I realized how far from home I was and how I’d gotten my wish for an adventure. My husband and I had graduated from BYU, newly married and newly pregnant, and moved to the South Bronx. About a year later, I accepted the call to be a very young Relief Society president. There were about forty active sisters but only eight that were married. Two of us had been raised in the Church. Welfare dependency, abuse, drug and alcohol recovery, lack of education, illegal immigrant status, HIV infection, credit card debt, diabetes, and depression were all common problems. However, there was an innocence in the way people discussed their problems. People gave such unpredictable, personal testimonies; they shared visions and dreams. All the hot hugs and kisses, the foreign accents, and the Sunday hats combined to make it my favorite congregation so far.
Our Relief Society presidency was made up of some of the “strongest” members of the ward. But “strong” is such a relative term! I, as president, was willing and loving, but I was also inexperienced, immature, and unsteady in my new role. The first counselor was HIV-positive, a single mom of five kids, and glad to be out of the shelters and in a house. She was and is a spiritual giant. She had a gift for talking about faith, and I loved listening to her bear her testimony. The second counselor was a semi-dependable, semi-truthful, single mother of two who actually had a job and a car. She had come a long way thanks to her persistence and smarts. And then there was Sandra, our Relief Society secretary, single mother of Shakea. Sandra had been baptized a year before we moved in. I asked our branch president to call her into her first church calling as Relief Society secretary. I invited Sandra to my apartment and we took our kids to the park. I often offered her rides or called to see how she was. I thought we were friends.
The night before my early-morning phone call, Sandra called and told me Shakea was in the hospital. “A severe reaction to a flu shot,” was the diagnosis. But the next morning when the branch president called, he said that he’d happened to see Sandra in the emergency room when he walked in to work. He’d been told that Shakea was dead! He must have misunderstood the situation, I thought, momentarily exasperated that he would hurry off to work without doing more for Sandra.
I arrived at the hospital, going through the emergency room. I was shown to an exam room. I opened the door. Sandra sat on a chair next to an empty cot, her head hanging so low that I couldn’t see her expression.
“Sandra, what’s happened?”
“She’s dead. She’s gone.”
“That’s not possible—she was only sick.”
“They just told me. They just took her away.”
I couldn’t take it in. It was one of the few times in my life—I wish there were more—when I didn’t stop to think about how I should act . . . I just acted. I threw myself at Sandra’s feet, head against her knee, and cried and cried. How could a chubby, misbehaved child, with colorful bobs in her hair, be alive and well one day, and dead the next? If my own son had died so suddenly, I couldn’t imagine how my heart would break. Sandra, perhaps, had loved Shakea even more fiercely.
Because Sandra had been raised in foster homes and had no family, the members of the Church did everything they could. I had never felt as much compassion for anyone else as I felt for Sandra. I poured it out on her—I felt we were bonded forever. We visited the mortuary, we planned the funeral, we drove an hour to the cemetery and picked out a grave, we chose Shakea’s final clothes, we welcomed sympathizers into Sandra’s apartment, we talked together and sat together. I helped Sandra distribute hand-drawn flyers around the Bronx, warning other mothers about the dangers of the flu shot (although the flyers didn’t say anything about how the dangers were compounded when the child had HIV from birth, like Shakea). Shakea’s funeral was full to overflowing.
That was Saturday afternoon. Sandra missed church on Sunday. I left messages on Monday, and on Tuesday everything changed. I finally reached Sandra on the phone. But this Sandra was not the same Sandra that hugged me good-bye after the funeral. She was screaming and in tears, cursing me, cursing everything. I called again later, but this time it was worse, and the accusations escalated to a statement that if she ever saw me again she’d kill my baby, that she knew where to find me when she wanted to. She started calling other sisters in the ward and telling them detailed stories of terrible, offensive comments I was supposed to have made. I tried calling once more, but again hung up with my hands shaking and tears running down my cheeks, turning away to hide my face in the warm neck of my oblivious toddler.
I’ve been told that Sandra was going through a normal grief cycle, and it only made sense for her to direct her rage at me, because I had everything that had been denied her. Her feelings, perhaps, were more predictable than mine. I was sent into an emotional turmoil that hasn’t been equaled or surpassed in my life since. Why? Perhaps it was the first time in my life that so much charity had ever been overturned. Charity (or what I thought was charity) shattered around me, the ingredients strewn. I couldn’t help but examine the freshly exposed contents.
From this examination, I learned a deeper respect for how big God's love for us must be. Somehow what I had experienced as charity, which seemed magnificent and beautiful to me at the time, was still so small compared with what God offers us. I had offered a little, and was rejected a little. God’s charity is infinitely bigger than mine, and discarded on a proportionally grander scale. I thought about all the obvious sinners and criminals rejecting God’s love—and good people, like me, doing the same. I knew that I was guilty of turning away God’s charity, too—that’s what sinning is. The sudden realization of how beautiful charity is and how tragically it is wasted became so real to me during those days that I cried whenever I thought about it.
I never felt anger toward Sandra, although I did feel scared of her at one point. And I am still confused that our relationship could take such a turn. I am sad that she ended up so alone. I didn't know what I could do for her after she turned on me. It would be a more typical, faith-promoting story, perhaps, if I eventually bridged the gap between us through charity—or if, because of an answer to prayer, I was shown the right way to approach her. But that never happened.
Sandra and I never talked again after those maniacal phone calls. I never saw her again either. I didn’t contact her because she’d told me in no uncertain terms that she never wanted to see me again. I respected her enough to believe her. Other people from the branch contacted her, but she said that she “needed some space.” A year after Shakea’s funeral, we moved away. Another year after that, due to complications from her infection, Sandra died.
Just the other day, I saw a woman that reminded me so much of Sandra that I couldn’t help but stare. I think of her often. We are still connected. I wish I could do it all again but be able to love even more fully. I would have expressed more often my feelings for her in the time before Shakea died, and I would have tried at least a few times to reach out to Sandra after we separated. I wish I had gotten over my own hurt and fear sooner so that I could have prayed for her more often.
I value the charity I’d felt for Sandra, something that I might not have noticed as fully if it had not been rejected in the end. I value and try to understand what charity God has given me, and regret what I’ve ignorantly, pridefully rejected from Him. I had gone to the Bronx on an inspired whim, trying to satisfy a na•ve sense of adventure and desire to do good. All my sense of adventure was replaced by a sense of the importance of people as I ran up the hill to see Sandra in the hospital. I learned about charity from trying to love Sandra—succeeding in some ways, failing in others.
I started writing this essay to record what I’ve learned about charity. But now I see that I also wrote to honor Sandra, to say good-bye, and to apologize. I wish I had made sure that Sandra was buried next to Shakea.
Holly is married to Michael Jones and they have four children. They currently enjoy living in Germany, where Holly served her mission approximately ten years ago. Holly loves mountains, old friends, libraries, her heritage, budgeting, tall sizes in clothes, Scrabble, New York City, and Scarlatti.
