Loving Linda
Politics, religion and the bonds that can’t be broken
Illustration by Kain Kaiyala
Story by Mathew Callaghan
Linda lay on her bed staring into the vast empty meadow outside her home. Bouquets of flowers, painted rocks and a copy of the Bible rest on a table near her feet. She’s frail and sick — a shadow of who she was.
Her face is gaunt, her arms are twigs and her eyes are infused with pain. Each movement is a strain against her existence. Each smile defies death.
We walk into her room and she lights up. She wants to get up and hug us, but we know she can’t. My mom bends over her bed and flings her arms open to hug Linda, now propped up on the bed. After a long embrace, my mom steps to the side and I walk forward.
It’s June 2024. I’m a lot older than I was the last time I saw her. It’s been almost four years, but she’s just like I remember. Certainly not physically, but in every other way.
She’s warm and bubbly. Her eyes twinkle with a familiar light. Her smile is kind and inviting, her left front tooth is still slightly crooked. She smells like spring flowers and the most delicious bakery you can imagine. She’s radiant like the warm embers of a dwindling fire in the late winter months.
“Hello, darling,” she whispers in my ear as we embrace. “It’s so good to see you.”
For most of my life, Linda has been the closest thing I’ve ever had to an aunt. My mom met her in the late ‘80s. After working as a waitress at various restaurants in California for nearly 20 years, my mom moved to Loon Lake, a small town in Eastern Washington, to start a mobile home park. Linda saw an ad in the paper and asked my mom if she could move her mobile home to a spot in the park. Linda was her third tenant.
“I remember she and I clicked immediately. We both liked the outdoors and rocks,” my mom chuckled, recalling the first time she met Linda. “She was a very caring person. She truly cared about other people and animals. She’s just a very heartfelt person and, of course, she liked the same things I liked, so that helped.”
My childhood was filled with visits to Linda’s. Every Thanksgiving, Christmas and many summer and winter evenings were spent with Linda and her husband, Dale. I remember running around her patches of squashes and strawberries as their tiny Australian Terrier, Sydney, chased me around. I remember petting their silky-smooth gray cat, Monte, on their black leather couch.
I remember monopoly games where my mom probably (definitely) cheated to win, birdwatching on Linda’s back porch, painting rocks, and Linda bandaging my knee after a nasty fall, all the while intently listening and minimally contributing to their conversations about anything and everything. I remember skipping home from school to go to Linda’s and poking around her kitchen to get a good whiff of whatever delicious meal she was making.
Religion was a tender topic between Linda, Dale and my mom. I knew this from a young age. My mom was staunchly atheist, while they were devout Seventh-day Adventists. My mom believed they pushed their message too frequently, though she never publicly shared her disdain for religion.
As a kid, I knew Linda, Dale and my mom didn’t agree on everything, but I never imagined it would cause a rift in their friendship. In 2016, however, a man named Donald Trump entered the conversation, and the differences between my mom and her best friend became too obvious to see past.
Dale began a pro-Trump blog during this time. Their late-night conversations frequently drifted into political and religious territory. Linda desperately wanted my mom to reach heaven and urged us to convert. My mom detested the idea of organized religion and took the opportunity to remind me of the dangers of Christian nationalism.
“It ends up being a power struggle. It doesn’t stay about religion, it ends up being about everything but religion,” my mom said. “In organized religion, they want to tell you what to do, and that’s just not right in my estimation.”
Linda’s intentions weren’t malicious; she truthfully believed her best friend might go to hell because she didn’t worship the same god. It was an odd time, and I hardly understood much of it then. I barely understand it now. Political differences, though, are what really swung the pendulum.
Just before 2016, Linda and Dale moved out of the mobile home park and bought a 20-acre chunk of property about 40 minutes north of us. Over the next few years, Linda designed and built her dream house with Dale.
We visited their new home a couple of times after the 2016 election. Eventually, contact fell off completely, right around the time of the insurrection at the Capitol in the wake of the 2020 election.
“Before both parties had a healthy mix of liberals, moderates, and conservatives, now the parties are becoming more ideologically consistent (mostly liberals in the Democratic Party and mostly conservatives in the Republican Party),” said Rudy Alamillo, assistant professor of political science at Western, via email. “With more consistency in the parties, they can pursue more ideologically extreme positions, which may lead to it being more difficult for an atheist and a relatively religious person to get along now that their preferred policies are actively being debated on the national stage.”
It wasn’t until a chance encounter at the grocery store that my mom learned from a mutual friend that Linda had been diagnosed with rectal cancer and had chosen not to do chemotherapy. My mom and I were devastated. No matter our differences, nothing could change who Linda was nor the love we had for her.
Last summer, I moved back to Spokane for the break. My mom and I visited Linda almost every Sunday. We brought her flowers, nature documentaries and even religious movies. Our conversations ranged from how bats use echolocation to the best way to make split pea soup, a favorite of mine she used to make. Politics were never brought up and religion was rarely mentioned.
She had a new Australian Terrier and an orange tabby cat named Copper now. Four big windows looked out into a vast prairie, with Linda’s vegetable garden skirting the bottom of the window. We watched the occasional deer dart across the field. We sat on Dale’s single bed directly across from Linda’s, talking to her while she rested.
Occasionally, I’d get up to get water or go out to the living room to speak with Dale for a bit. As much as I don’t like Trump, Dale’s still the closest thing I’ve ever had to an uncle.
Back in the bedroom, we’d keep talking about the worst ways to die, I’d show Linda pictures of my cat, and we reminisced on all the holidays and late evenings we spent together. No matter what we talked about, our conversations made me think about the beauty and impermanence of life, friendship, nature and just about everything I love.
We’ve all lost friends and family — to cancer, to irreconcilable differences, to tragic accidents. A person you loved earnestly is never easy to lose, and the grieving process is uncharted and never, ever, linear.
I’ve had a hard time maintaining my own hometown friendships throughout the course of the election. They brag about their victory, while I recoil in horror.
But I manage to see past our differences, like I did every time I visited Linda. I hope I can keep it up. As crazy as it may sound, I feel only one thing when I look at my friends from home… love. But why shouldn’t it be that way? Everything dies in the end, and often too soon.
When it was time to go, I went up first to Linda. She kissed my cheek and told me she loved me and to come back any time I wanted. Then she hugged me. For a long time, we just wrapped our arms around each other and sat there.
I got up slowly and walked toward the exit as my mom sat down on the edge of the bed to hug Linda. As I stood by the door, I heard Linda whisper something to my mom.
“I’m so glad you’re my best friend.”