Friday for us at Yeshiva University is an early day to honor the start of Shabbos. On this particular Friday, on Oct. 11, 2024, I'm closing up shop when the doorbell rings—unusual in our neighborhood because the delivery people just drop the goods and go, and our neighbors are not ones to be doorbell neighborly.

Standing at the door in all their prim and casual innocence were Sister Reese ("like the candy") and Sister Serrata (Italian name but not Italian herself), Mormons on their mission in Ludlow, Massachusetts, complete with the requisite courier bags and tell-tale black-plastic-with-white-lettering name tags over their hearts. (There is an LDS church nearby, something we did not know.)

Cue the inner atheist in me, who opened with a rude but polite product warning label that I believe nothing of what they believe, that I do not believe in any divinity or divinities, and that their pitch would be lost on me. They took this in stride (I am sure mine wasn't the first such incantation they had heard); Sister Reese countered with a smooth "How did you come to believe that?"

Which morphed into a civil discussion about belief/non-belief and so on. At one point, I used "determinism," a term they were unfamiliar with. After I explained it, Sister Serrata said (I paraphrase), "We don't have anything like that. We believe God gave us agency and that there are consequences for the choices we make; we have to take responsibility for those." To which I said, "I agree—that's the human condition. Just no need for a god to direct the flow of any of that."

But while the light-touch theological back-and-forth had its pleasures, it wasn't what I really wanted to hear from them. Just as they wanted to know how I came from being raised Catholic to my fallen state of beliefless wandering (my words, not theirs), I wanted to know so much more about what propelled two human beings (Reese from California, Seratta from Las Vegas) to member themselves to the Mormon church (based on a book of Joseph Smith's fevered imaginings) and then agree to come as strangers to a strange land to mission people with the word (and The Word) in the hope of getting them to cross over from their dark sides into the light of the temple.

How would they set down the narrative of their lives? How would they assess their success? How do they handle failure and rejection? What do they make of the western Massachusetts native? What do they do for fun? How do they see the world, and how do they think the world sees them?

If the Marvelous María Beatriz had not been in a session with a patient, I would have invited them for tea and cookies and more conversation. (It would have had to be an herbal tea, which is an exception to the general prohibition for Mormons against not drinking "hot drinks," which include coffee and regular tea.) But it would haven't been right for an elderly man to invite two young women into his home without that other presence, so I didn't mention the option.

And then off they went down the street. (Later, I asked our neighbor to the north, who is married to a biker and hosts the Uncaged Lions Club at her house, if they had stopped by. She laughed as she recounted how they had tried to pry something out of her husband—he was not the kind of material the angel Moroni could work and mold.)

As I watched them walk away, I realized that something had changed in me. Not that long ago, I would have relished demolishing the structure. Now, I don't really care about what they believe because beliefs, and the act of believing itself, are mostly about nonsense: figments, paracosms, dioramas, all of it just-so.

This time, I cared more about the believers: how they were trying to make their way through a world thick with danger, indifference, selfishness, suffering, sadness in a way that left themselves intact and invested and willing to get out of bed in the morning. These stories, these made-in-the-moment memoirs we call our lives—they are all any of us have to show for our time on the earth.

Which brings me to our wills and trust. We recently had them done—finally—and the thought experiment of how life proceeds after the hourglass has run out is another variation on the storytelling that is also known as "life," using the imperfect information of the present to create an imperfect rendition of an unknowable future while still being obligated to be responsible for all consequences.

It is all like the man on the Ed Sullivan show spinning plates on bamboo rods until it isn't that anymore.

Is there relief in the crashing of the dishes and the breaking of the rods? Surcease of sorrow (thank you, Edgar Allan)? Reprieve (no more being at the mercy, thank you, Alice Munro)? Or is there more profit/pride/blessing in slowing each plate down until it drops into our hands and is carefully stacked with all the others, and the bamboo rods sheaved and set aside for someone else to use—going gentle rather than not into that good night?

At this point in my life, with all my obligations, with all those that depend on me, this is how things appear to me: The emboss of a wet leaf on the sidewalk that evaporates with the sunlight.

I cannot say if this is sad or appropriate. All I can do—all I must do—is keep telling the story and ask others to tell me theirs until all goes silent.