The Scripted Funeral

Grief, Gaslighting, and the Anatomy of Cult Control

When I was twelve, my mother gave birth to her fourth child — my half-brother — on April 18. Twelve hours later, he was gone. The autopsy said it plainly: an underdeveloped brainstem, the instrument for human life itself.

By the time I hit double digits, I was already fluent in death. My childhood was shaped less by playgrounds and more by pews and funeral parlors, raised under the tight scaffolding of my maternal grandparents’ Assemblies of God rituals. It wasn’t a normal childhood, though we were taught to call it holy. My grandmother, a master seamstress, stitched elaborate dresses for me with bows so big they swallowed my entire head. I was her doll, her holy prop, paraded through midweek funerals like a porcelain mascot of grief. The drill was unspoken but precise: sit quietly, hands folded, face arranged into something between sorrow and reverence. Do not fidget. Do not grimace when the parade of gray-haired strangers pawed at you. Pinching cheeks. Pressing your face into perfumed waistbands. And the most grotesque — the men and women who leaned in and kissed my mouth. We were not taught body autonomy. We were taught obedience. Flinching wasn’t protection; it was disrespect. Funerals became my strange playground. I grew to love the larger parlors with multiple viewing rooms. It gave me a loophole. If I said, “I want to pay my respects to the one lying in silk,” I could slip away. No one questioned a child wandering into another family’s mourning. In those dim rooms, surrounded by strangers’ sorrow, I found reprieve. The air was heavy with lilies and mothballs, hushed carpets muffling the sound of grief. I learned to read denominations by their volume of wailing. And in the silence of these side rooms, I could breathe.

But my brother’s death was different. This was no octogenarian laid out in buttery satin. This was twelve hours of borrowed breath. Infant death doesn’t make sense. It rips you into rage. It births a new category of grief, one that no hymn can contain. I wanted reason. I wanted science. At the hospital, I strained to catch every word from the doctors, perched on stiff vinyl chairs as adults cried around me. What I heard left me furious. “His angelic soul was too precious for this world. God called him home.” That was the best they could offer? A thirty-year obstetrician reducing a catastrophic neural tube defect to divine sentimentality? I was twelve and I knew it was cowardice. I wanted the truth:

Anencephaly. A severe neural tube defect, formed in the third and fourth weeks of pregnancy. Normally, a flat strip of tissue folds into a channel — the neural tube — that seals to become the brain and spinal cord. In anencephaly, the cephalic end fails to close. The brain never forms properly. The skull and skin never protect what’s missing. There are variations. Holoanencephaly: no brain at all. Meroanencephaly: a rudimentary brainstem, sometimes enough for a reflex, a breath, a faint heartbeat. Infants may live hours, rarely days, but never with consciousness. Without a brainstem, there is no survival. This was the truth. Not “God called him home.” Not “too precious for this world.”

The truth was biology. Brutal. Precise.

By the late 1990s, public health had already proven that folic acid could prevent many neural tube defects. Mandatory folic acid fortification of U.S. grain products began in 1998. By 2001, cases of anencephaly had dropped 21%. The year my brother was born, the prevalence was 9.40 per 100,000 live births. His death wasn’t God’s will. It was a collision of genetics, environment, and nutritional gaps.

But here’s the part no one told us: what was added to the food supply wasn’t natural folate — the nutrient found in liver, eggs, greens. It was synthetic folic acid. Many people can’t metabolize it properly because of MTHFR gene variants. Instead of nourishing, it accumulates in the blood, linked to immune dysfunction, cancer progression, and masking B12 deficiency. So was fortification really about saving babies — or about testing the first mass-medication of a population through the food supply?

Instead of addressing soil depletion, toxic exposures, or access to whole foods, the government took the shortcut. A synthetic substitute slipped into every bag of flour, every box of cereal. No consent. No choice. And conveniently, environmental toxins like pesticides and plastics — also linked to birth defects — stayed untouched. Polluters kept polluting. Mothers carried the blame. Industry carried the profit.

At twelve years old, I didn’t have those words yet. I just knew something was off. The doctors, the hymns, the explanations — none of it was honest. That’s when I first saw it clearly: gaslighting. Medical gaslighting told me not to trust science, but sentiment. Spiritual gaslighting told me not to trust my rage, but obedience. Cult gaslighting told me not to trust myself, but the script. The system was airtight. A God who allegedly authored life could also end it for “his glory.” And if you dared to question that, you weren’t grieving “properly.” You were being rebellious.

At the funeral, my mother’s eldest sister sang one of her original cult hymns:

“Taste and see the Lord is good, he will satisfy the soul.
Empty, broken, he will feed, when we see it’s him we need.
This is my theme, this is my song, to praise my Lord my whole life long.
He took the waters of my life, and turned it into sweetest wine.”

It was not mourning. It was indoctrination. A baby’s death became a recruitment tool, a stage for allegiance. The hymn wasn’t a comfort — it was a leash. And it struck me: to grieve in this system meant swallowing contradiction whole. You had to thank the god who both created and destroyed. You had to sing while choking. Refusal meant punishment.

This week, decades later, a political figure was assassinated. The loosh was lavish. And the very first post from his wife? Not grief. Not “I can’t breathe without him.” Instead: liturgy.

“The world is evil, but God is good.”
“Your death is a mission.”
“Well done, good and faithful servant.”

It was cult programming in real time. The language of martyrdom. Borrowed script. Grief weaponized into holy war. She wasn’t speaking her own pain — she was conscripted into canonization. And I recognized it immediately. Because I’d seen it before. At twelve years old, watching my family sing hymns over a coffin too small.

Vernacular. Platitudes. Spiritual bubblegum. Psychological jargon.
It looks impressive, sounds authoritative. But strip it down and it’s exactly what it is: mental masturbation. Words stacked like sandbags against reality. This body you inhabit — it isn’t a sermon, it isn’t a metaphor. It’s an energy-coded suit, wired to survive through sensation, not slogans. Language is the fool’s detour. The way through is not linguistic. It’s visceral. To feel, moment to moment. To step outside the loops, dissolve the narratives, and break them — again and again. Grief forced me into that lesson before anything else. It does not flatter, it does not lie. The stories we inherit are not always medicine; sometimes they are poison. And if you swallow them whole, you wither. To live, you spit them out — even when they’re handed to you as holy.

This is where deprogramming begins: not in libraries or laboratories, but in grief. Because grief is incorruptible. And what is true for the individual is true for the collective. Societies grieve too — and they either awaken from it or anesthetize themselves with the same old scripts. Look around. The patterns are the same. There are always three groups. The first obey without question. Blind compliance. They are the oxygen of tyranny. The second see the scam but obey anyway. Fear keeps their heads down. This group props up every dictatorship in history — not because they believed, but because they were too afraid to resist. And then there is the third. The ones who see and refuse. No speeches. No drama. Just: I will not comply. Every tyranny has ended because of them. Not politicians. Not armies. Ordinary people who stopped acquiescing. The first group is gone. The second must decide whether to grow a spine or be swallowed whole. The third is the spark. Always. We don’t need more data. We don’t need another expert committee. The line is already clear, and every time someone crosses it, hoping obedience will save them, they prove the point: it won’t. Grief doesn’t lie. Resistance doesn’t either. The first act of freedom is brutally simple: stop acquiescing to what you already know you must not.

And maybe that’s the symmetry: my brother’s twelve hours of life taught me earlier than most that systems lie, that platitudes choke, that grief is the only incorruptible teacher. His death was the first refusal I ever witnessed — a body that would not live inside a defective script. Everything else I’ve learned since has only been an echo of that truth.