But as he drove home that night, he realized he had been pretending. He was not fleeing an assignment. He was drowning in the silence of his own life. His mother had died six months earlier. She had been the one who studied with him, who took him to the assemblies, who cried when he got baptized at sixteen in a hotel swimming pool converted into a makeshift baptistery.
Then he closed the laptop. He walked to the window. Down on the street, a woman was locking her bicycle. A man was arguing on his phone. A child pointed at a squirrel. jw-org
He remembered the last time clearly. It was a Tuesday night for the midweek meeting. He had sat in the second row from the back, his leather-bound Bible open to the book of Jonah. Brother Vance, an elder with a kind, tired face, had read the paragraph aloud. Something about “fleeing from one’s assignment.” But as he drove home that night, he
Elias held the cardboard rectangle for a long time. He remembered his mother’s hands—dry, cracked knuckles from decades of cleaning other people’s houses. She had never been a public speaker or a pioneer with hundreds of hours. She was just a woman who believed that a resurrection would come, and that she would see her own mother again. His mother had died six months earlier
Without her, the meetings felt like a play where everyone knew their lines except him.
At first, the texts from his friends were frequent. “Missed you at the book study.” “Are you sick?” Then they became less frequent. Then they stopped altogether—until the emails from the elders began.