I'm working on a short story/novella about a JW family. It's called The Opal Ring. I will be posting it in installments, and would like some feedback on it. It's fictional, but all the events and characters are inspired by real life people, scenarios, events and JW teachings.
Here goes:
The Opal Ring Part One
Barbara was never meant to die in this system of things. She was never meant to die at all, and certainly not from cancer. Now she was gone, and her husband Alfred was getting on in years too, something that was also never supposed to happen.
Barbara and Alfred had prayed every day to Jehovah that he just might keep her alive to see the beginning of Armageddon. Just the beginning, so she could die happy, knowing her life’s work had come to fruition. Then Alfred would not have long to wait for her to be resurrected to the bloom of life in the beautiful paradise Earth.
But Armageddon never came. Barbara grew sicker, and while the doctors said she could have another two years, she refused the treatment. Her blood was so weakened by the chemotherapy that the doctors wanted to give her a transfusion, their Hippocratic Oath demanding of them nothing but the best for this patient they’d slaved over for years. She refused to take any, and so with downcast eyes they sent her home to die.
Alfred’s heart now had a great big empty place where Barbara once lived as part of him. They had never been particularly close; they were married at 18 after a six month romance and after several years had realised they had very little in common other than their religion. Their religion which forbade divorce except for when one spouse cheated, which was something neither Barbara or Alfred would consider due to their good standing in the congregation and fear of reprisal. So they lived almost as brother and sister for four decades, developing a familial fondness for each other.
They had one son, Adam. A career Jehovah’s Witness, he was pioneering straight of school at fifteen and was an elder at 29. Now 35, he had even worked as a substitute Circuit Overseer.
Adam had never meant to be born. In the scramble of those heady years of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s to witness to everyone, when the organisation was experiencing huge increases, no-one was really meant to have children. With Armageddon imminent, the brothers looked down on those who wanted to start a family. It seemed to be constantly preached at the Kingdom Hall and assemblies that having children was pointless and selfish. Barbara and Alfred had always loved children, but had taken the admonition to heart not to have any of their own. There’d be plenty of time for that after Armageddon. But when Adam had unexpectedly arrived and they had to quit pioneering for a few years, Barbara suddenly realised what joy she was missing. She pined for another child, but Alfred, frazzled after a long day’s work and endless Kingdom Hall meetings, put his foot down as the head of the household and told her it wasn’t going to happen. Armageddon was too close. The world was becoming too bad. The other pioneers also had stopped associating with them as much since Adam had come along.
One day Alfred sat Barbara down and showed her from the Bible where it says wives have to be obedient and in submission to their husbands. He reproached her for being selfish, when Jehovah’s name and its vindication was their mission in life. Barbara relented, and stopped begging for another child. She moped around for a while, going through the motions of being one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Alfred felt he had every right as her husbandly head to put his foot down, but he wasn’t made of stone. It was a struggle, but he saved a tiny amount of money from his weekly pay cheque for a gift. A fabulous gift. After over a year of secretly saving, he presented her with an opal ring on their anniversary. One could gaze into the huge stone and feel like one was already in Paradise, so deep and brilliant was the colour.
The ring became Barbara’s favourite possession. The eternity represented in that ancient stone, forged by Jehovah himself in the very creation of the universe, became her reminder of the eternity she would spend in the paradise Earth after Armageddon. The years wore on and Armageddon didn’t arrive, but Barbara buried herself in Watchtower study and pioneering, funnelling all her frustration into being the best Jehovah’s Witness she could be. She studied with many children in the congregation, first being looked up to as a spiritual mother, then a spiritual grandmother. She’d counted 17 children she’d led to baptism, and had another on the way when she died. This was her motherhood.
And the ring, the ring: as she felt her mortality slip away with the girlhood promise of Paradise receding farther away, she could not decide which of her spiritual daughters she would give it to. Many of them had moved away anyhow, and there were two she refused to speak to because they had left the organisation. Then as she was praying in her bed at home, Alfred brought the latest Watchtowers over from the meeting he’d just been to. When she was strong enough, she voraciously read the life experiences, articles exhorting young ones to pioneer, and the study articles. Then there towards the back of the magazine, was an article on making donations to the Watchtower, especially when one dies. A dying Jehovah’s Witness could will property, insurance benefits, shares and – jewellery! to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.
Barbara knew to whom the ring would go now. Her last gift to Jehovah would be her precious ring, which could be sold to bring Kingdom Halls and literature to the poor brothers in Africa. That ring could pay for the plumbing in Kingdom Hall in Cameroon, Rwanda, or even Malawi, where Jehovah’s people had been so cruelly persecuted!
She told Alfred of her dying wish, and quietly slipped away that night. And the ring went to the Bethel in Sydney.
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Part Two is on its way.