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By Dannagal Young
Dr. Young is the author, most recently, of “Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation.”
On a sunny spring morning in 2006, while my husband, Mike, was showering, I secretly sprinkled his bath towel with holy water I had gotten from a friend who had used holy water from the same source on her husband. Her husband went on to survive his cancer, so I happily accepted the plastic container filled with water from a sacred site in Europe. It couldn’t hurt, right? Watching Mike dry himself off, I tapped into my childhood Catholicism and faith in a benevolent God as I pictured the magic water covering him with a protective layer. I never told Mike I did this. And I still feel guilty that I did. Neither of us went to church; we were agnostics. He would have been very annoyed. He didn’t believe in magic.
But we were six months into multiple brain surgeries and complications stemming from what was described to us as a benign tumor that had nonetheless taken over his midbrain. Thanks to hours on the internet, I had tried to Nancy Drew my way to the cause of his tumor, which devolved into my dabbling in conspiracy theories, and now I was out of options.
