What Now,
Your correspondence with your sister certainly rings home. Three years ago I watched the same mindset set in with my ex-fiancee. I still don't fully understand how that world view is instilled from day to day even with the measures of programmed learning and outrageous claims of authority, but the effects I have watched grow tighter and tighter like an invisible strangling vine. Yet there we were. Before she decided to go back, we were trying to get married after what had been a several year, genuine romance. Since then, though I have never been a JW or even had any previous idea what they were about, I have earned honorary apostate status. Anyone who is a brother or sister is more like the angels in their proximity to God. Perhaps I am above a mineral or vegetable. I'm not sure. When one of our pet cats died, I think I observed its passing with more sorrow than my own will ever warrant.
Now that we have hardly any contact, even with official business or emergencies each seeming like a border line case, I have to wonder if something like the Candace Conti settlement even appears on her horizon. During that transition back when I would visit her on the road trips at her hotel, I soon discovered that only two forms of printed matter remained in her room: her work folders and her JW publications for study. One of the last trips, I couldn't even stay at the same hotel and she confided in me that she felt plagued by her feeling that she was still not doing enough for Jehovah. Cleaning out the house of her belongings when she finally packed it all up, one of the memento was one of those typical framed pictures with signatures of well wishing friends on the border, hoping for her success at her new job with all of its business travel. Her portrait was in the center. She cut out her portrait and saved it and threw out the signatures and well wishes of her friends (I repeat her friends - not ones I somehow imposed on her). They were all part of the demonic past - and so was I. I had met her in a non-denominational church when she was "inactive" and it was swarming with demons as she later attested. Sometimes they were bothering her when she couldn't sleep.
Some time in the midst of all this she told me what had sealed the deal. It was when her son had died of leukemia. We traveled to the midwest for the funeral and it was the first time I met her family other than her remaining daughter. Her mother, an active minister, had been dutifully shunning her. There were no arrangements for the funeral and I made many of them myself. At the funeral ceremony, an elder from a local congregation ( not her mother's several states away) spoke of her son and all the travails in his life - which were plenty - and then turned to my fiancee and proclaimed from the podium that everything that had happened to her son was her fault.
She had given birth to him at age of fourteen.
The emotional devastation of such a loss, being a teenage mother and also a mother to a very troubled son - all this was monumental from the start. And even as much as she was practically everything to me, I could feel that somehow the other shoe would drop as a consequence of such loss. So I can honestly say that I did not know how to deal with either situation. Her profound grief or the demanding monster still banging at the door. With regard to the latter, I ended up studying religious matters with a new zeal, especially when one day she came up to me out of the blue and asked: "Don't you think you need someone to advise you on the Bible, a true expert?" I had thought that that was the exactly what the Protestant Reformation was in reaction to.
Examining Protestant issues or perspectives vs. Catholic ones of my own background, it was interesting, but it was mostly heading down a cold trail. It was the apocalyptic thought that was the important branch, the one in the English speaking world and the American outback that seemed to gain impetus with sighting of mid 19th century comets. As I became more acquainted with the faith she was brought up in, I saw a lot of discrepancies. First I was amateurish with false starts. This stuff was more subtle than I had thought. But then I got some important clues.
When I dug around in the local university library and looked at the use of the term crucifixion in Greek and Latin texts, I was convinced that the issue of cross vs. stake was a red herring. But I might have driven a stake into a vampire the way she screamed in reaction. She told me that I was going to take instruction and then I was going to convert. Period.
I did eventually take instruction and very careful notes. I continued to take instructions several months even til after for reconciliation there no longer appeared to be hope. What stopped it finally was an overseer who made a guest appearance on Mardi Gras weekend. He didn't like my questions and I didn't like his anti-semitic rants in my living room.
But then I continued to pursue these matters - and I kept her aware of my progress whether she liked it or not. For example I told her she was deceived when she quoted Ephraim Stern on the destruction of Jerusalem. This was false witness for sure. She gave me no reply. Then I wanted to take on a number of people who I felt that had lied to me or were responsible for telling the lies. I wanted her to set up the meeting, but all she could supply was a postal address to the Home Office and warning not to get her involved.
I went back to the local kingdom halls. I asked to talk to any Elder that would give me time. Most of them scattered, but eventually I located some who were available to hear me out. It was the congregation that had drawn her back in. I spoke of things that I had examined and told them that, if on no other basis but Scripture, I could show that what they were telling me ( and by inference her) was wrong or a deliberate manipulation to fit doctrine. Things that I eventually spoke of on this forum. Things that other people have discovered on their own and spoken of here as well. It is sad that this process is such a lone pilgrimage, especially when you believe that others are living in a lie.
The elder and his two subordinates drew complete blanks to anything I had to say. More or less they shrugged. But he did ask me, "Does this matter have anything to do with a woman?" I said, "Yes, it did." He advised. "That woman was very sick. I strongly recommend that you forget all about her and move on." And my heart sank. Amid all the lies maybe he had actually said something that was true? And of things, one JW putting down another?
Yes. She was sick. And now, so was I. But I had lost track in the midst of all this examinations of scripture and doctrine why she was sick. It would have helped if the Org and her mother had not curtailed her high school education since the world was supposed to blow in '75. Maybe she would have been less inclined to believe Chinese cookie fortunes or business success stories based on covenants with God. But more important:
I don't think the Org could have landed a more deadly and vicious blow than to hit her as it did when her son had just died.
