A Cold Shoulder for God

There was a time when Rosa Gonzalez could tell several stories about God granting her blessings, and she expected to tell another one about her son coming home from war.

Don’t worry, Rosa wrote to her son, as he prepared in the sands of Kuwait for war in Iraq. God has always pampered me. You will come back.

God, it seemed, had never failed to listen to Rosa. There was the time, years ago, when she stood under a lemon tree in her El Monte backyard and asked God to protect her husband, a long-distance trucker, on the road. On that cold night there wasn’t a hint of rain, but lightning flashed and the sky conjured up a warm breeze, sweeping her face.

“I feel you, God. Thank you,” Rosa remembered saying. “Everything is going to be fine.”

But her second child, 20-year-old Jorge, died in battle, leaving Rosa to ask how God could take away her son. It’s a question mothers have always asked in war, and Rosa, 47, is now struggling with her faith, wrestling with God.

She bristled when parents of other soldiers said in television interviews that they knew why their children had returned safely -- because of God.

“Didn’t my prayers mean just as much?” she asked him.

Since Jorge’s death, she has questioned her government, questioned the motives for the war. She has questioned the wisdom of leaving Mexico for the United States -- whether her adopted country betrayed her. The cold shoulder, however, she has saved for God.

Rosa Gonzalez’s faith has always been tied to family.

She was an only child, raised in Dolores, in the Mexican state of Hidalgo. Her father died when she was a toddler, and her mother, Tanila Hernandez, found work as a house servant in the big city of Durango, coming home only on weekends.

Rosa was raised by her paternal grandmother, whom she called Mama Maria, and her Uncle Miguel. They were attentive and affectionate, but Rosa ached for her mother and father.

She spent time with a large, poor family across the street. They slept in one room and always seemed to be eating frijoles de la hoya, a simple soup of pinto beans with some salt.

But Rosa gladly ate and played with the children. Her eyes devoured the way they joyfully mobbed their father when he came home from work.

Back home, she wept for the father she never knew and asked why he had been taken from her. “Even when I was little,” she recalled as an adult, “I was fighting with God.”

Mama Maria told her tearful granddaughter that, if she had faith, God would reward her later, that one day she would not be so lonely. The old woman’s words came true.

Rosa eventually left Mexico and met Mario Gonzalez, another Mexican immigrant, in El Monte. They married. They had crossed the border as undocumented immigrants, but in time he became a citizen and she a legal resident. Their firstborn was Mario, followed only 11 months later, in 1982, by Jorge, the one who would grow into a strapping Marine.

The couple would have four more children: Ivan, 16; Nancy, 14; Marisol, 9; and Alan, 7. And as the family grew, Rosa’s faith grew along with her joy. Life in the United States was a blessing.

“Ay, my God, thank you,” she prayed once. “Maybe if you had given me everything I wanted when I was little, perhaps I would never be as happy as I am now.”

Years later, she would recall, “We’re poor, but we had a treasure. I needed nothing, nothing. As long as I had beans and tortillas on the table, and my children, I was content.”

The family did well, and after years of renting and saving and sharing homes with relatives, they bought a small house in Rialto. Her children would grow to be best friends, and Jorge once tried to explain to his mother why he rarely invited friends over.

“This,” he said with a smile, “is almost sacred ground.”

Jorge’s enlistment in the Marines as a 17-year-old had not seemed a blessing to his mother. He convinced Rosa that the family could never afford college, and she consented to let him enlist, even though she worried that he might die or find himself in a spot where he might kill a child.

When he completed boot camp at Camp Pendleton, he showed her the gift she had given him when he graduated from high school. He had asked her not to get him an expensive class ring, so she had bought him a gold medallion bearing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

“So she can be with you always and look over you,” she had said.

But when Jorge showed her the medallion, the Virgin’s image had rubbed away. Only the slight rays of light that illuminated her like a nimbus remained.

“Don’t worry,” she told Jorge. “See, the Holy Spirit stayed with you.”

When he deployed for war in January, Rosa walked into St. Catherine of Siena Church in Rialto and told God she would dedicate a Mass to her son every day.

On March 23, Rosa and Mario were watching the news when they saw an Iraqi soldier lift a dead American toward the television camera. They were convinced it was Jorge.

Early the next morning, the couple went to church again. When they returned, two Marines were waiting in the living room. They had been politely fending off questions from Rosa’s 80-year-old mother, who was worried.

Jorge had died, they said, as Marines tried to take a bridge on the Euphrates River in Nasiriyah. Rosa stomped and sobbed.

“Get out and bring back my son the way I gave him to you,” she cried.

One of the Marines wept.

*

For Rosa, going to church took on the drudgery of the routine -- if she went at all.

“I used to go with my heart in my hand,” she said. “Now, I go because it’s a Sunday, and that’s what you do.”

She no longer asked God for anything. As her last prayers turned into earnest pleas for miracles -- that authorities had made a mistake, that Jorge was still alive -- her faith began to lose its timbre, like a fading echo.

She still believed, though; still believed God deserved respect.

“I’m not a hypocrite,” Rosa said. “The way I feel right now -- angry at him, hurt -- I’m not going to ask him for anything. I’m not talking to him.”

The horrors of grief swept over her tight-knit family.

Ivan had been the family’s best hope to go straight to a four-year university, but he got two Fs in the second semester. He had become distracted, frustrated by the frequent questions at school about how his brother died.

Nancy argued with her parents, failed and missed classes and at times puzzled family members with inappropriate comments.

Nine-year-old Marisol slumped and cried as the family drove past San Diego -- where Jorge was buried -- to visit family in Tijuana. She began to see time as a burden.

“How long do you think I’ll live?” she asked her father one day. Mario considered the question and answered hopefully, “Maybe as long as your grandmother.”

Marisol screwed her face. “Hmm, that long without seeing Jorge.”

Alan spent much of his seventh birthday in April peering over his shoulder to where a memorial had been set up for his brother in the living room. Jorge’s grim-faced Marine portrait was surrounded by photos of him as a toddler with tousled hair and a goofy grin. Jorge had been Alan’s godfather.

As his family changed around him, Mario Gonzalez, 48, fought hard to center himself, to keep the family on an even keel.

“We have to harmonize as a family. We are a weakened family right now,” he said. “Our spirits are spent. We have to survive this pain we have for Jorge. Jorge suffered, he was afraid and he died, and for someone to forget his pain so easily, it seems like a betrayal. But we have to move forward.”

Days after Jorge’s death, relatives converged on the Rialto home.

Often, the family sat in a semicircle in the living room, discussing Jorge and the war. For most of Mario’s brothers and sisters living in Mexico, the war was an unjust act of aggression against a weak country.

“This is a war of ambition,” Jacinta Perez, Mario’s mother, said sorrowfully.

Jorge died, some of the relatives said, because his country was warlike, power hungry and por metiches -- a phrase used to describe someone who constantly intrudes into other people’s business.

Even as her anger against the government brewed, Rosa’s first reaction was instinctive: speak up for the country.

“Yes, por metiches, and perhaps also for power and for money, but also because this is a great country, a country that liberates,” Rosa told her relatives. She recalled how, in one of her last conversations with Jorge, he told her, “Mom, we’re going to free that country. We’re doing something good.”

And yet for a while Rosa wondered if she had made a mistake coming to the United States. In her mind, not crossing the border meant not meeting Mario and not having Jorge and not having to bury him.

“You come here so you can progress and for your children to progress and fulfill their dreams -- and what did I accomplish?” she asked one day.

When Jorge and his brother Mario were only 5 and 6, Rosa and her husband briefly moved back to Durango, where they sold shoes door to door. When Rosa got pregnant, they realized that Jorge and little Mario, as American citizens, would have opportunities the other child would lack.

So they returned, setting Jorge on the path that would lead to the Marines.

After his death, Rosa grasped for ways to honor her son. She talked about lobbying the government to create more scholarships for young Latinos.

“My son is going to cost them,” she promised Rep. Joe Baca (D-San Bernardino) when he visited the Gonzalez home. “Not in money. But in scholarships for his brothers. Not his blood brothers, but others like him.”

But her plans didn’t go far. She had no idea how to act on them.

She also tried to reach out to other families of slain Marines, hoping they would join her in protesting Bush administration policies.

Rosa and her husband attended the funeral of a slain soldier, but his family politely told them they weren’t interested in politics.

Then there were Rosa’s dreams.

In one, she was in a house in Mexico with a dark hallway leading from the kitchen. She saw the pope striding in the hallway surrounded by Swiss guards.

“Marisol, Marisol, come!” she screamed. “The pope is coming; give me a picture of Jorge so he can bless it!” She ran out of the kitchen, but by the time she came back, clutching the photo, the hallway was empty.

The one dream Rosa wanted -- the one she asked God for -- was a dream of Jorge. But she could never see him. She would wake from a troubled sleep and plead with her son.

“Ay, mi hijo, you don’t even want to talk to me,” she recalled telling him. “What did I do to you? Why are you angry at me? Why don’t you want to visit me, even in my dreams?”

Jorge’s widow, Jasty, a native of Guam, also wanted to see him in her dreams but, like Rosa, never could. Although Jasty speaks no Spanish and Rosa speaks rudimentary English, they have become unexpected confidants and shared their longing for Jorge.

When they saw a television story on Nostradamus and how the war signaled the apocalypse, they joked darkly that they hoped it were true. Then, they said, they would see Jorge.

Only the new baby -- Jorge’s 4-month-old son, Alonso -- kept them from wholly wishing for death. Alonso kept them focused on the future, a future Jorge had envisioned in letters home.

“Now that we have brought a handsome son into the world, me and you have a lifelong link,” he had written to Jasty. “I’m a daddy! I can’t believe it. I always wanted to have a family, and now I have one.”

In the last letter home, he told his mother: “If you can wait just a little, we’ll see each other in the summer. God willing.”

In time Rosa learned of the family of Ruben Estrella-Soto Jr., an 18-year-old Army private killed in an ambush outside Nasiriyah on March 23, the same day Jorge died.

Rosa and Mario resolved to see the Estrella family and drove 11 hours in their Ford Econoline to El Paso. A rosary hung over Rosa’s passenger side seat. She never touched it.

The outside of the Estrella home seemed like an extension of the knobby desert: a rusted and warped basketball hoop stuck out of the pinkish, black-rock-strewn dirt. There was no significant vegetation. Several dogs gazed at them.

Inside, the home was pleasant and dotted with small figurines of angels. The chubby face of Ruben Jr., still boyish, decorated several walls.

The families spoke about the lack of answers about the war, about their fears that their sons might have been captured and then executed.

Ruben’s mother, Amalia, said she would come home from work and turn off the lights, hoping to see her son in the darkness. But she could not.

The conversation turned to faith, and Rosa spoke of her quarrel with God. Like a parent rebuking a rebellious child, Estrella chided her.

“You are losing your faith in God, senora, and that must not happen,” she said, her voice cracking, her body swaying.

“You have to ask God for forgiveness and ask him to help you, because you’re still standing and fighting, and that’s the hand of God.”

Rosa dabbed a tissue to her mouth, her eyes vacant and sad.

“Perhaps if I had only that one child,” Estrella went on, “I would have killed myself already. But I still have two children. That’s why I believe in God.... Don’t ask God to heal the pain. Ask him to keep you standing.”

Thank God, Estrella told Rosa, for what remains and what you once had.

“I thank God for letting me borrow my son for 18 years,” said Estrella. “All I would ask for now is that he let me borrow him just a little bit more, so I can kiss him and hug him and tell him I love him. Even if I could do this in my dreams.”

But like Rosa and Jasty, Estrella had yet to see her son.

“Maybe we haven’t been able to see our sons,” Estrella said, “because we haven’t given them over to God with our heart just yet.”

These days, people tell Rosa Gonzalez that she will see her son at the appointed hour. They remind her that Jorge is with God. Rosa had said as much during Jorge’s rosary -- that he was with God.

Her husband finds solace in this thought.

“We’re a Christian family, and I see it this way, and it gives me comfort,” he said. “Great, the Marines have returned and they’re heroes. But Jorge bested them all. Because he’s with God as a hero. That’s our faith, right? Now, if you don’t have that faith, you say, ‘Jorge died, they shot him five or 10 times and that’s it -- it’s finished. There’s no more Jorge.’ ”

Rosa, meanwhile, has been waiting for a sign.

Perhaps if Jorge spoke to her somehow and told her that the joy he felt in heaven was greater than what he felt at home, his sacred home, perhaps she could understand and begin to accept.

The day of his burial, Rosa and Mario said, they saw two crosses in the sky overlooking the ocean. And after a fitful sleep, she woke and heard Jorge’s voice: “Mom, mi angelito doesn’t leave me.”

My little angel? Perhaps, she said, it was Jorge’s way of saying that he was happy, that she shouldn’t worry, that he wanted to comfort her but couldn’t. But whatever power the signs of God’s blessings wielded before -- that breeze under the lemon tree -- now her sense of loss overwhelmed her wonder; signs were not enough.

Other conflicts she has resolved. Coming to the United States, she has decided, was the right thing to do.

“My children would not have the opportunities in Mexico they will have here,” she said. “Jorge loved this country. I taught my children to love their country, to be proud of the country. Sometimes, Jorge would hug me and tell me, ‘Thanks, Mom, for not letting me be born in Mexico!’ ”

She keeps these memories, but Jorge still evades her dreams. Instead, Rosa dreamed recently of her late grandmother, Mama Maria. The old lady looked at her tenderly, but she also looked worried.

A few years before Rosa left Mexico, her Uncle Miguel died. Another uncle would die later. In fact, Mama Maria lost all three of her children -- including Rosa’s father -- when they were young. Her husband had died as well.

And yet, Rosa recalled, Mama Maria never lost her love of life, never lost her faith.

“If her faith ever shook, even a little, she never showed it,” said Rosa.

Rosa is angry at God, and yet it’s true, she said, that she loves him as an indulged child does a father who, at a critical moment, withholds a favor.

“I think one day I’m going to have to look for God and ask for forgiveness,” she said. “I’m just not ready.”