My Step-Mother Died From COVID: How I *REALLY* Felt About Her

While she was far from being a stereotypical “evil stepmother,” she made no effort to hide her complete apathy towards me.

JP Brown
7 min readOct 2, 2021
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

This story requires a bit of background:

I grew up in South Mississippi in a very complex religious atmosphere. My great-grandparents were Jewish, immigrating from Europe in the 1920s to the panhandle of Florida. To assimilate, the family did what everyone else in rural Florida did. When you’re a broke Jew in a new land with no tribe, you blend in as much as possible.

My great grandmother opened an oyster bar near Panama City, and my dad spent his boyhood shucking oysters for a penny per shell. My grandfather maintained the assimilated way of life, which was eventually passed down to my father. My dad recalls hearing his dad openly worry that people would find out.

We moved from Panama City to South Mississippi when I was two. I grew up knowing very little about my Jewish history, but being surrounded in every single direction by Southern Baptists.

Southern Baptists own every aspect of social life. It’s not uncommon for two people, who just meet, to ask each other, “So, where do you go?” They are asking which church they go to, and it better be a Baptist church lest you get an uncomfortable pause leading to the end of the conversation.

Wednesday nights are church nights. Sundays are church days. Tuesdays and Thursdays will have various Bible Study groups. Friday nights are often spent at “fellowship socials” at the church with sweet tea and definitely no dancing. Unless there’s a football game going on. Everyone goes to those, which are complete with a Baptist prayer spoken over the stadium’s speakers before the kickoff.

If you aren’t part of the Baptist church scene, you are a nobody.

You aren’t judged by your good deeds, your charity, or your love and kindness to strangers. You are judged by how much of the Bible you have memorized and how often everyone sees you at church. You are judged by how much you pray, but only if you tell everyone how much you pray.

By all means, you better not be seen as “worldly.” That’s the worst fate of a Baptist.

Christian concert complete with Jesus Satellite Dishes getting that holy reception (Photo by John Price on Unsplash)

My stepmom died at the age of 70 because she listened to morons.

Her radio was always set to Christian radio channels who were always praying and denouncing the fallen world.

“Scientists are telling us that God doesn’t exist,” these radio preachers will argue. “They say Man came from apes, and that all we are are pieces of atoms and elements. How can you believe anything they say?”

To get her political news, she’d switch over to the Rush Limbaugh types.

She prided herself on being a grand Christian. Her father was a preacher, and then a Deacon, and he was as equally strong of a complete and utter asshole as my stepmom was.

My stepmom would pray hard for a church member, but I honestly doubted that she’d throw me a rope if I was drowning.

The real measure of a person isn’t what they show at church. It’s how they behave at home when they think no one is watching. The at-home stepmom was the real stepmom I knew.

Her whole family is very Southern Baptist. Me? I’m as atheist as they come, but not antagonistically so. When people say they are praying for me, I thank them and move on. I tell people Merry Christmas all season long.

But I don’t play the Southern Baptist game. I believe in the Judge Judy school of thought of, “Don’t piss on my boots and tell me it’s raining.”

Southern Baptism is a game of how many lies and charades you can maintain until your entire life crashes around you.

In fact, Southern Baptists have a word for that: fallen. If you have fallen, you are ostracized.

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash

If you fall, it means you have succumbed to your sins. Maintaining a straight lifestyle even though you have known your entire life that you’re gay? That’s the Baptist way. Getting caught screwing the pool boy? You’ve fallen from grace.

My stepmom saw me as worldly and fallen and had absolutely no qualms about letting me know her disapproval of me.

She never asked about my life. She was never curious about my thoughts about things. She never wondered about that girl I was dating. In fact, when I visited a month before she died, I can’t remember a single conversation she and I had.

There’s a reason for this.

When I was going through the split with my wife, she staged an actual intervention where she had intended to use all of her Baptist training to make me fear God and “do the right thing.” My dad participated as well, which I’ve had to forgive him for.

It wasn’t easy.

See, I’m the worst kind of atheist to a Baptist. I did the Baptist thing for about 15 years as a kid and teen. I memorized all of the Bible Verses. Sang in the choir. I did everything. Until I woke up one morning and felt that some switch had been flipped in my brain that allows for blind faith. Overnight, I found I couldn’t do it anymore.

I retained the knowledge, and I see it now from a much different perspective. With every scripture she would throw at me, I’d throw the counterpoint back at her – equally Biblical, but conveniently ignored by Baptists. She eventually gave up trying, and I poured myself a beer as a form of “screw you” that only a Baptist would understand.

What little polite small talk we were able to maintain before Intervention Night ended completely, and she spent her final years tolerating my dad keeping a relationship with me, but only barely. When my dad would want to come visit, and she was in tow, they weren’t allowed to stay in my house.

For someone who loved God, she sure hated people.

One of her sons came out as transgender. My newly-out stepsister was immediately cut from my stepmom's life. My stepmom died having not talked to her for over a decade.

The other son has had three failed marriages – with the last one ending while the wife was in prison. She didn’t advertise much about him to her church friends. This stepbrother also has severe OCD and anxiety, “which if he would just start praying about.”

The talk leading up to the funeral was how uncomfortable my stepbrother will be in the church because he doesn’t know Jesus Christ. I wonder what they said about me.

The stepmom I knew is not the same stepmom I heard the eulogist and preacher rave about. My stepmom would bend over backward to help a Baptist, but she discouraged my dad from fraternizing with me – or any side of my family. My stepmom would pray hard for a church member, but I honestly doubted that she’d throw me a rope if I was drowning.

While I wouldn’t say my stepmom was evil, she knew what she was doing. Apathy is a sword that can cut with surgical precision. Shiny on one side to let the foes know it’s being used, but dull on the other to conceal its use from friends.

Her entire “clan” of family members are now permanently officially out of my life. There’s a large group of them that live in a small area of South Mississippi. I never needed to be liked by any of them, but it was pretty obvious I was disliked by most.

I hope to never see any of them again. She was the only solid link I had connecting me to the Baptist world.

When she contracted COVID, I wasn’t worried about her. I was angry as hell at her.

How dare she? When a solution was right in front of her, free for the taking. She chose idiocy over life.

How dare she? When my dad is in his mid-70s and will need someone to help him more and more as he ages and his illness progresses. She chose the advice of assholes over the security of my dad.

How dare she? When her choice of inaction caused so many to worry. It caused me to have to leave my family for 11 days. It caused me to lose about $1200 in business income. It caused others to have to miss work, vacation, and general life disruption. For what?

Quite frankly, I’m glad she’s dead. The world needs less people like her – judgmental separatists who wave the flag of Christ’s love while stabbing the fallen with its staff.

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JP Brown

Entrepreneur/business owner (ElopementBiz.com). Lover of the simple things, always questioning why. Committed to truth, not consistency. Twitter.com/mindofjp