CANDID

Ashley walked up to the front desk with her parents. She was about to have a twelve-hour surgery. She told the woman at the counter her name, sat in a chair, and waited. Later, she and her parents were led to a room that looked like an office. She was asked the same set of questions she’d answered multiple times in the past few months. But one was new.

 

“Would you like a religious counselor?” the attendant asked.

 

Ashley’s answer was immediate, “No.” 

 

Her parents gave her a weird look, but neither of them commented. The attendant led them to a private room, one that actually looked like it belonged in a hospital, and left them alone. He assured them that the doctor would be with them shortly.

“Why did you say no to religious counseling?” Her dad asked. 

 

Ashley hesitated. Why did she have to say it? Hadn’t her parents assumed by now? Wasn’t it enough that everyone who heard the news had to bring God into it? And that people who didn’t know her assumed she was a Christian? Did her own parents have to make this more difficult for her? Why should she even care what they thought? 

 

“Because I haven’t believed since I was sixteen,” she blurted, unafraid in that moment. An instant later, she regretted it. It upset her mother too much. She didn’t understand. It had been five years since she’d stopped believing, and she wasn’t that good of an actress. Hell, she even had a copy of The God Delusion around the house once.

 

“Ashley…you need to make sure you get right with God before you go into this surgery,” her mom said. This hurt. Her mom wasn’t listening to her; she was forcing her beliefs on her. She looked to her dad.

 

“I think I’m a pretty smart guy, Ashley, but you seem to think you’re more intelligent because you don’t believe in God,” he said.

“I don’t think I’m more intelligent,” Ashley said. “It’s just…what you determine to be evidence, I don’t.” She hadn’t planned to have this conversation right now. Actually, she hadn’t planned to ever have it. 

 

They didn’t have time to talk more. This surgery was supposed to tell the doctors if she had a chance at beating her cancer. If they were lucky, it would also tell them the origin. 

 

• • •

 

When Ashley was twelve, she really liked to go to church. Every Sunday, she would get up early, dress in nice clothes, and go to the service with her family. Some of the people there didn’t like how she dressed. They said her skirts were too short. She brushed them off and dressed how she wanted to. Once, the officials told her she couldn’t read Harry Potter. She fought that one until she got her way. She believed in God and that’s all that mattered. She knew that the people in church talked about her behind her back sometimes. She didn’t understand why; it wasn’t like she did anything wrong. 

 

She was a really good Christian. Whenever she had friends come over to her house, she tried to convince them to become Christians, too, and was so happy when they agreed. She really didn’t want them to go to hell. She tried so hard to do everything right and be someone God would be proud of. She never ever swore. It was the worst when she really liked a guy, but he didn’t believe in God. That meant that she couldn’t like him anymore. He was going to go to hell.

 

• • •

 

Then, when Ashley was fourteen, she started writing things in her diary about how religion is determined by upbringing. She wasn’t sure why she started having these thoughts. She wrote about how, because she’s American, she was raised Christian, but people in China are raised Buddhist and people in the Middle East are raised Muslim. How could she know that her God, the Christian God, was the right one? She wondered why any God would allow so much suffering in the world. How did people justify it so easily? It didn’t seem right to her. She still believed, though. All of those other religions just had to be wrong. Her God was the right one.

 

• • •

 

When Ashley was sixteen, she knew she didn’t believe in God, and she was terrified of burning in hell because of it. If she were wrong, she’d be punished for eternity in the fire and brimstone her old church warned her about. Her family left that church a few years ago because of the people who gossiped about her. They never got over the way she dressed, they didn’t like that she didn’t fundraise for a mission trip because she had enough money to go, and they didn’t like that she stood up for what she believed in. The new church was way more liberal, but it’s not like their support of gay marriage and acceptance of Harry Potter could make her believe in an all-knowing being that dictated the lives and afterlives of everyone on Earth. She talked to her younger sister, Sarah, about her feelings. Sarah still believed, but she let Ashley try to reason through her thoughts. Ashley still went to church with her parents to make them happy, and because it was part of her life by now, but she mostly daydreamed. Or argued with the priest in her head. 

 

• • •

 

Ashley was twenty-one, and she was sick. No one could figure out why. She didn’t feel very sick; she just had so much bloating that she looked like she was five months pregnant and she got diarrhea sometimes. At first they thought it was a food allergy, but then it got worse. She first noticed that she couldn’t suck in her stomach as much during spring break of 2011, when she was supposed to be having the time of her life with her older sister, Katie, in Myrtle Beach. She went to a few doctors when she got back to school in Indiana, but they couldn’t tell her what was wrong. So she went home and went to a few more. Her dad, a doctor himself, seemed to think it could be serious. But, really, how serious could it be for a college junior? One of the doctors had mentioned a few possibilities, including cancer. That didn’t seem likely. She had some tests done recently and they were still waiting for the results.  

 

Her dad called the family into the living room. Ashley was anxious to hear what was causing her digestion problems and bloating. She wanted to know why she had to leave school, and her life in Indiana, only a few weeks before finals. She was already tired of being home all the time. 

“I just got a call from the doctor,” her dad said. “The cells are cancerous.” 

 

Ashley was confused. Cancerous? As in, she had cancer? She’d considered the possibility, but she never thought…cancer? College girls don’t get cancer. How did this happen to her? She didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink excessively, and she didn’t have any other health problems. How could it be cancer?

Later that night, she tried to pray. She asked God to help her understand why this was happening. She prayed for His help in making it through the cancer. The thought of an afterlife was comforting, but that brought back the fear of fire and brimstones she used to have. She felt stupid. God didn’t exist. He couldn’t hear her thoughts. She couldn’t make herself believe something that she hadn’t believed in years. She thought about the people who’d told her on Facebook that they were praying for her: “I’m not sure what’s going on, but I am praying for you,” “Thinking about u & praying for u Ash!”  These people didn’t even know that she had cancer. What did their prayers matter? Wasn’t there anything more helpful they could put their energy into? And what’s the point of putting “I’m praying for you!” on Facebook? If they really knew her, they would tell her in person or send her a freakin’ text. It felt so weird to accept these prayers, but what else could she do? 

 

• • •

 

After the twelve-hour surgery, Ashley was in the hospital for two weeks. Two really boring weeks. All she did was lie around and watch TV. She thought being back at home would be better, but no, still boring. A lot of people did come to visit her, and it was starting to look like she was collecting Christian figurines. Family friends, people from church, family members, it seemed like everyone wanted her to have a statue of an angel around her at all times. They made her uncomfortable. They represented something she didn’t believe in, something she argued against. It was easier to accept them, and to let people assume. She kept the figurines in her room and tried to focus on the positive sentiment.

 

The books about cancer and Christianity were the worst. They were all about how having faith in God would keep her alive and how she would be cured if she believed. According to the ones she flipped through, as long as she kept her faith strong, her body would also be strong. Yeah, right. How about a book about being an atheist and going through cancer? Where was that, huh? It didn’t seem to exist. All of the books she’d seen had ties to some sort of religion, or they tried to convince readers of some miracle cure. She wanted something she could relate to, something that could give her hope without faith. 

 

• • •

 

The doctors couldn’t find the origin of the cancer. They thought it was in her appendix, but the surgery ruled that out. There were so many possibilities, but it was likely either gynecological or gastrointestinal. She really hoped it was gynecological, because that meant that she would have a thirty percent chance of living for five more years. If it was gastrointestinal, she would only have a five percent chance of making it to twenty-six. She couldn’t believe she was hoping for a thirty percent chance of life. She was supposed to be enjoying her last summer break before graduating college. The only uncertainty in her life should be who was going to hire her after she graduated. Why did this happen? No one her age was ever at her doctor’s office. She was the outlier, the anomaly. She was the one having to face her own mortality when she’d spent her entire life in school. She had to change her mindset from thinking “when” about her future to “if” about her future, with no warning whatsoever.

 

Her three siblings were all atheists now, or at least, that’s what they told Ashley. How could they possibly believe in a God that would do this to their sister? Her mom was angry with her. She thought Ashley had tried to convince Sarah, her younger sister, to renounce her beliefs. Her mom didn’t understand that you couldn’t make someone believe, or not believe, something. The decision was Sarah’s. Yeah, Ashley talked to Sarah about her own lack of beliefs, but only because Ashley didn’t understand it herself. She never tried to convince Sarah to stop believing in God. 

 

Her mom made her so angry sometimes. She said that she accepted Ashley’s lack of belief, but she didn’t want Ashley to tell other people about it. God forbid the whole town should know that her daughter wasn’t a Christian.  

 

• • •

 

Hope Andrews, a family friend, sat down on the couch beside Ashley. She was a tall, broad woman who substitute taught in the local school district. Children throughout the town were terrified of her. 

 

“How are you doing with Jesus?” This was Hope’s greeting. 

 

It was a month after Ashley’s twelve-hour surgery. She was at home, resting and relaxing.  She was definitely not prepared for this.

 

“Oh…um…well, you know,” she stuttered out, kind of smiling while trying really hard to find a way to work around the subject.  How could anyone think it was okay to sit down, in her own house, and make such a bold assumption about her? Why didn’t people ever ask her if she was a Christian before going into their religious speech? She would tell them anything they wanted to know if they just asked, but no one did. They all assumed.

 

“If you died today, do you know where you would go?” Hope asked. Ashley was stunned by this question. And offended. Her mom would kill her if she told Hope that she was an atheist, though. Not to mention the fact that Hope would probably stay an extra hour just trying to convince Ashley she was wrong. 

“Well, I really hope it would be heaven.” Ashley said. That placated Hope, and she moved off the topic of Jesus to talk about easier topics, like cancer.

 

• • •

 

Ashley was getting so many cards in the mail, and every single one of them said something about Jesus, or about God, like “May the Lord help you find a path of light through this time of darkness.” Please. Each time, she got more annoyed. No one ever thought to send a card that didn’t feature Christianity “just in case.” The “practical” advice she got from people wasn’t any better. They told her they knew someone who beat cancer because they didn’t eat sugar. She looked that one up online, and, shocker, it wasn’t true. Ashley had gone through five of her six rounds of chemo. She’d lost her hair. All of it. No one ever thought about chemo patients losing their eyelashes. Talk about inconvenient. People really take for granted the way their eyelashes keep the water from getting into their eyes during a shower. People don’t think about a lot of things.

 

Her parents said they supported her, but they’d also asked her to talk to their pastor. That didn’t help. It definitely didn’t “turn” her into a Christian again. She thought back to being little, and remembered how proud she used to be that she was so good at believing in God. She used to think she was so much better than people who didn’t have faith. She was so uppity about it. Maybe it really was the people at her old church who made her begin to question her beliefs. Their comments about her clothes and her opinions were contradictory to how she’d been taught Christian people were supposed to act. Maybe it was the hypocrisy that started it all. Or maybe not. She wasn’t really sure why it happened; she only knew that she definitely didn’t believe, even now, when most people would be getting their strength from God. 

 

• • •

 

In December 2011, less than a year after she was diagnosed, Ashley signed a lease for a house at her school in Indiana. She was going back to school for the spring 2012 semester. She could easily end up back at home a month after she left, but maybe she would be able to get all the way through finals. Her chemo was done, and for now she was free of any complications from cancer. She wasn’t, as people in the rumor mill liked to believe, dying. She wasn’t cancer-free, either. By signing that lease, she was investing in a future she wasn’t sure she would have. But, she wasn’t certain that she wouldn’t have it either. She did know that she would go insane if she had to live at home with her parents for another semester. She’d take her chances with college.