#whyileft

My father, Reverend James Grimes, has passed away. My father is not alive. My father is dead.

I need to repeat those words to myself sometimes because it still seems so unreal. My father passed away on April 21st, 2020. He was living in Gracedale Nursing Home in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. For over 10 years he suffered from early onset dementia. His decline was slow and steady, eventually leading to a sort-of plateau. For the last 5 years I haven’t been able to see so much as a glimmer of the man I knew as my father. In my mind he was gone. But he wasn’t. I could still see him. He was there physically. All the things people say about Dementia and Alzheimer’s are true. It’s a fate I would not wish on everyone. That my father got it in his 50’s seems cruel. 

I always expected to receive the call that my father had passed suddenly. It was a cloud that has followed me over these past 5 years since he plateaued. As I traveled, moved and deployed with the military, I always felt on edge. I knew at any moment that I could get the news and hurry home. I expected it, yes. But, I can’t say that I was prepared, certainly not for the circumstances under which he finally left us. 

I thought his nursing home was a relatively secure place to be at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. They had gone under lockdown in March. My conversations with my mother never gave me any reason to think he was in any danger. I knew that if he were to contract the illness it was likely be a death sentence for him with his compromised immune system. Then I got the call from my mother. There had been an outbreak at Gracedale and my father tested positive for COVID-19. Within a week of up and down reports, he passed in the morning hours. He was one of the almost 70 deaths in the nursing home where he resided.

With deaths now approach a quarter of a million, I know my family is not alone in our experience. Upon his passing there was no way for me to be physically close to my sisters and mother. Having recently moved to the West Coast, I wanted so badly to hop on a plane and head home. But there was nothing to be done. Nothing I could do. I put my focus instead on a memorial video for my father and spoke with my sisters about his passing and legacy. In retrospect, it was by far the hardest video I’ve ever had to create. 

Still, It was cathartic. My father was an Evangelical minister. At the time of his dementia diagnosis I was finishing college. After leaving home and moving to Philadelphia I finally felt like I had the space to admit to myself that I no longer could call myself a Christian. What I thought was the end to a steady stream of doubt and investigation was really only the beginning of my deconstruction. It’s a journey I still find myself on all these years later. Every day I learn something new, have a preconception shattered or recognize ways that the culture that brought me up has affected the world and myself. I once feared what the conversations I would have with my father would be like after he learned I had decided to take my life down such a starkly different road. I wonder now if it is worse that we never got to have those conversations. Perhaps I needed that closure.

I didn’t often comment publicly on my beliefs (or lack thereof). I thought about it often though. I wrote screenplays. I talked with friends and family that had shared experiences with leaving the church. I wanted to dive deeper. A few years ago I decided it was time to start filming some sort of documentary about my family. It was time to put that film degree and combat camera experience to work.

On January 1st, 2016, my oldest sister, Carrie, called me at work. She had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Eventually, we learned that she had the BRCA1 mutation which is genetic. Her specific variant is one only found in Ashkenazi Jewish people. Thankfully, my sister is a complete bad ass. She kicked cancer’s ass while be a full-time mom, nursing student, Air Force Reservists and while working a full time job (seriously, I don’t know how she does it). With the news of our family having Jewish ancestry the spark was lit to begin work the documentary.

My father was adopted. We always knew that. It made it all the more difficult to know whether his dementia was something that is common in his family. We always speculated about his ethnicity. I always maintained hope that we would find out we were Jewish. Like many Evangelical families, we had a big crush on the country of Israel. But even more so than most because our father had studied in Israel for a year in college. He brought back with him a love for Jewish culture that he impressed upon us with his stories. Myself, I was always into movies. Nearly all of my idols as a child were Jewish.

So, I set forth to find my father’s biological family. I took 3 DNA tests including Ancestry DNA, 23 and Me and Family Tree DNA. Together they revealed that I had between 34-40% Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. For me that was a stunning revelation made bittersweet by the reality that my father would never get to share in the knowledge.

Over the last 3 years I have made progress on my search. I realize now that this story is as much about my search for my father’s family as it is about my understanding of myself. It’s about my family, my mother, my sisters and our childhood growing up in the Evangelical Christian subculture. It is about how we all went our own ways as adults to reconcile what faith means to each of us. I am finally gathering the courage to speak about why I left Christianity. I am now trying to find my voice and share my experience.

What I’ve learned after seeing my father’s illness and my sister’s close call is that I need to make the most of the time I have. Thankfully, over these past few months I have finally been able to take the time this venture requires. I hope to be posting more videos to my YouTube channel and also write more about my journey.

I am learning as I go. I know it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be out there. It’s the best I can do. My hope is that this story may find others dealing with loss or deconstruction. And If it does then I think I will feel like I have accomplished my goal.

On her knees and white-knuckling the porcelain bowl, Samar awaited the next surge of morning sickness to spew forth. In the kitchen, Abdul was shrieking at one of his buddies on the prepaid cell phone she’d purchased for him at Wal-Mart yesterday.

“Pray God my baby isn’t a boy,” she implored and wretched the remainder (hopefully) of last night’s shawarma into the toilet bowl. Abdul appeared in…

-purposely embarrasses you in public -yells at you for not holding his hand -stops talking to you because you don’t wanna show pda -creates an argument and yells at you for not wanting to have sex. Just because he isn’t hitting YOU doesn’t mean it’s not abusive. Sharing this basically because certain people weren’t sure why I ended my last relationship. This is a leading reason why.

First he’s hitting objects….next he’s hitting you.