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When I met Gary Busselman, it was one of those days when the phone calls kept coming in all day. This was the day that inspired this issue. Two weeks later, I can’t believe I am sitting here typing this and shedding tears. The caller was a middle-aged man who had been a Witness for many years, and had left the WT organization some time after the death of his first wife. Gary’s first wife had been a devout Jehovah’s Witness, always active in the Watchtower. She was diagnosed as having leukemia, a serious but not necessarily fatal disease, if proper treatment is given. The doctors strongly encouraged the dear woman to have a bone marrow transplant, as this would allow her about a 50% chance of recovery. She had a brother, two sisters and a father who were good donor candidates, were it not for the fact that they, too, were Jehovah’s Witnesses. At that time, any form of organ transplant was viewed as cannibalism by the Watchtower Society, and "Jehovah would not resurrect one who was a cannibal." Gary concurred with his wife’s feelings, encouraging her not to take the transplant, as a good Witness husband should. The disease became acute in 1969, and Gary’s wife died shortly thereafter, being buried in the cemetery just up the hill. Gary is now happily remarried and is just now coming to grips with his experience in the Watchtower, though having been away from it for a few years now. He was reading from the Reasoning from the Scriptures (WT, 1985) under "False Prophets," where the WT made the statement regarding their changes in policy over the years, "Matters on which corrections of viewpoint have been needed have been relatively minor ..." (If Delores were alive today, she would be allowed to take that transplant as a Jehovah’s Witness.) Gary thought to himself for a moment, "If we stand at the foot of Delores grave and were to read this statement aloud, how could it make sense to any thinking person?" Gary, it doesn’t.
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