For an outfit that sells immortality, Scientology really sucks about death

[Yvonne Gillham Jentzsch, center, and the early Celebrity Centre community]

[Today’s guest post is by Valerie Ross]

In June 1976, my grandmother died in my little sister’s bed. She was 80. She was my last living grandparent. After her husband, my grandpa, had died in 1968, I spent several summers at her house with her, just the two of us, staying up late watching Johnny Carson and taking the bus around town during the day. They were idyllic times.

My mother called me when my grandma died. I was called off the floor of the Briefing Course. This was about a month before I was beached. I took the call, then went back onto course and finished out the day. At dinner, I discussed with my table mates whether it would be a good idea to bring it up with my senior: I was worried about whether I should even tell anyone.

Scientology does not see people as people. They do not treat relationships as relationships. You do not form bonds, you do not have friendships. Everyone is looking out for themselves, and any secret you reveal to another is reported immediately to ethics. Any personal information you share is discouraged. Any personal information.

I was once asked why I was ambidextrous. I shared that I had fallen out of a tree when I was 5 and broke my left arm really bad so was in a cast for two years, so I learned how to write with my right hand but I still eat with my left hand. I was told that I wasn’t supposed to discuss my case out of session. What? I was sharing a life experience. It wasn’t case.

But in Scientology, anything that gives you depth is not considered something you share. I didn’t go to my grandmother’s funeral. I was busy supervising the Briefing Course that day. I did not go to my last living grandparent’s funeral because that would have been “other fish to fry.” I really don’t know how I could have been so callous. She was my grandma. She was also my friend. She loved me.

But, the thinking forced down our throats was “she just dropped her meat body, what’s the big deal? She is going to come back.” It was considered so much more important that we help clear the planet. How in the world could I go mourn the loss of my grandma when there were Briefing Course students to help?

Scientology does not equip anyone with the tools to deal with grief. You are taught that grief is a “misemotion.” It is a harmful emotion. You are taught that if you are upset, you need to get counseling to get rid of that emotion. You are not allowed to feel the very real feeling and get through it.

There were three more deaths of people who meant a lot to me that occurred in the next eight years. Scientology played a part in how I dealt with each of them.

The next death was Yvonne Jentzsch on January 23, 1978. Once again, I was still in Scientology, in LA. Yvonne died at the Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Florida. I wasn’t even aware she was ill until after her death.

There was a Flag Conditions Order put out a week after her death to limited distribution. I happened to get to see it. It said she had recently discovered that she had a serious illness that would require extensive handling so she decided on her own to leave her body and return anew.

It then went on to list her contributions to Scientology. There was a small memorial service held for her in Florida. A couple of weeks later I received a typewritten envelope in the mail postmarked from LA which contained her death certificate and a typewritten page which said CONFIDENTIAL, NOT FOR DISSEMINATION.

The informant on her death certificate was Heber Jentzsch. He did not even know his wife’s mother’s maiden name.

I picked up the phone to call Heber and then put it back down. I decided to just keep my head down and keep going.

Yvonne was my friend. But more than that, she was a shining light. Anyone who knew of her or spent a few minutes in her orbit knew this. She was one of those people who everyone wanted a piece of because she was just so shiny. That’s the only way I can describe her. She had a ready laugh, and a huge heart. Scientology wasn’t able to contain her compassion. They had no right to reduce her death to a few words on a piece of paper.

The next death was my mother’s. She died unexpectedly of a stroke on my birthday in 1983. My brother was at my house to watch the final episode of M*A*S*H. The opening credits started to roll and the phone rang. (I’ve never watched that episode.) My father had been on dialysis for some time then and we both looked at each other and said “dad.”

I answered the phone and it was my dad. I said “Hi Dad,” and looked at my brother. He sighed a sigh of relief. Then my dad let us know that my mother had been taken to the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery. We got her room number and were going to call her to wish her well before the surgery. When we called the room, they wouldn’t put us through “because there had been an emergency in that room.”

We kept calling and calling until finally a doctor let us know that my mom had had a stroke (the night before her scheduled surgery) and was in a deep coma. We packed and made the 600-mile trip to her bedside. We stopped in Bluewater Village (90 miles from the hospital in Albuquerque) at the family home to clean up. A friend of mine from school was driving by. She stopped to see what was going on, why we were there. We explained. She said “I’ll take the kids, call when you can.” I hadn’t seen her for almost 10 years and she willingly took my two children unasked. They stayed in her home for three days while I was at my mother’s bedside.

My mom was on seven machines for three days before we turned them off. My dad didn’t leave her bedside. After 36 hours, they were supposed to do a third brain scan to ensure her brainwaves were still flat, but her temperature was still flat. She had been dead for 36 hours before they would turn off the machines because they had attempted resuscitation.

This was no meat body. This was my mom. I don’t care what I had learned in Scientology, I knew damn well that even if she was going to come back, I had just lost an important part of my life.

At her viewing before the funeral, I walked up to her casket and touched her. Mistake. She was ice cold. I gasped and went running from the room. Right into the arms of
people from Bluewater Village who held me and comforted me. One of those women went up to my father after my mother’s funeral and said “You will not die alone.”

He didn’t. She took him in her home. He had his own room. She arranged for people to be in her home around the clock at his bedside on 6-hour shifts for the next 16 months
until he died.

Six months or so later, I was making a roast. Even though it was long distance and that cost a lot, I needed to talk to my mom. I picked up the phone to call and ask her what temperature to set the oven to. I had most of the numbers dialed before I remembered. I sat down in the middle of the kitchen and cried.

I talked to my dad the day he died. I didn’t know it was his last day. I just called to talk to him and asked if he wanted to talk to the kids too. He said “no I don’t want them to remember me like this.”

My brother had chosen to drop out of college while my dad was dying to spend time with him, and he was at church singing a solo that day. I asked his carer to have him call me when he came in.

At 12:01 my dad asked his carer what time it was, they told him. He said “oh good.” My brother walked in the door about then, into my dad’s room and my dad died.

My brother called me a few minutes later. We talked for a couple of minutes then I said “how are you, anyway?” and he said “not too good” and I said “why” and he said “Dad just died.”

I cried. I got to cry. I actually cried. I was sitting on the stairs in my house and I was crying and no one could tell me that I was suffering from misemotion or anything like that.

Because I knew at that moment, that there was no one left in the world who would love me no matter what.

I called my work and left a message with the answering service that my dad had died and I wouldn’t be there the next day. My boss called me the next morning to ensure that I knew they offered three days compassionate leave and that I had two weeks’ paid vacation and a week paid sick leave still coming too so take my time, they had a floater at my desk. I didn’t even have to think about whether to tell them and they certainly didn’t think to tell me I had to stay.

Scientology can tell you that they will come back, that they are only meat bodies, they can sell you on all that. What they cannot and will never be able to do is understand that there are connections that are broken when a person dies and if you are not allowed to grieve for the lost connections, you do harm to your own soul, the very acts they take to “rid you of those harmful emotions” actually harm you by not allowing you to live them.

— Valerie Ross

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