Thou Shalt Not Make a Nuisance of Thyself

Marjorie Thomas doesn’t strike me as the hidden-agenda type. She’s 84, recently widowed and dealing with a degenerative eye disease. So when she says she feels like she’s being “stalked,” it doesn’t sound like a word chosen frivolously.

But you could guess all day and still probably not come up with the object of her disaffection.

It’s the Mormon Church.

Why, she asks, won’t it leave her alone?

She asks, even while knowing that the church means her no harm. But why should it be so difficult to get them to forget about her? Why did it take her daughter to write two letters to an Orange County bishop and for Marjorie to tell unsolicited callers that she didn’t want them to come over? And even after that, why did church representatives recently contact a former acquaintance and ask if she knew where Marjorie had moved?

“I just want the harassment stopped,” she says. That’s a strong word, but I can’t talk her out of it. “Absolutely,” she says, “it’s harassment.”

Knowing of their good intentions, I ask if she can cut them some slack. “That’s why I was so polite, all those times,” she says, referring to monthly home visits that were a fixture of Marjorie’s early married life in the 1940s and ‘50s with Earl Thomas as their three daughters were growing up. After the girls had grown, the visits ended -- perhaps because the Thomases moved around a bit and the church couldn’t find them.

But then, about 14 years ago when Earl and Marjorie relocated to Leisure World in what is now Laguna Woods, “They found us, somehow,” she says.

What Marjorie once considered a nuisance became more intrusive, and things came to a head in the last few years as the unsolicited calls coincided with her husband’s lengthy illness. In April, Earl, who’d been baptized in the Mormon Church when he was 8, died at 86.

Several times a year, Marjorie says, strangers would call or show up at the door and politely want to engage her in conversation. On two occasions in 2003, she says, she was awakened by evening phone calls. One caller alluded to her husband’s illness and asked if she’d like someone to come to her home and pray. She declined. That same week, she says, two men showed up at her front door and asked to come in. She declined again, but one of them said his wife had been ill and that the church had been very helpful.

Those visits prompted a daughter to write to the then-bishop of the local Aliso Viejo church, asking him to put a stop to the parental contacts. That request took hold until this year. A few weeks after Earl’s death, someone called to inquire about him. Marjorie says she replied, “He’s dead,” to which the caller said, “Is this Sister Thomas?”

She again asked not to be contacted. Instead, two weeks ago a former neighbor told her that two men asked her if she knew where Marjorie lived. When the neighbor said she couldn’t remember, one of them named an apartment complex and asked if that was it.

It was.

To Marjorie, this is becoming spooky and overbearing. “Like the night they called and I told them my husband was dead,” she says. “It was hours before I quit shaking. It wasn’t because my husband was dead; it was because they were still calling.”

I tried without success after I talked to Marjorie to reach someone from the local Mormon Church for an explanation of its visitation policy. But I have no doubt what they’d say: They’re trying to help. Marjorie even credits the church with helping her daughters grow into upstanding women.

It’s just that she says she’s made it clear she wants to be left alone. Daughter Jill Campbell, who wrote the letters to the Orange County bishop, says, “I think their intentions are good, as they see it. They just don’t see it from any other perspective.”

I asked Jill what the bishop told her when he phoned her in response to one of the letters. “He said they probably wanted to leave her a message of peace.”