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'You know, people say that after a loved one dies you emerge as a new person, but there's nothing good about it. It's devastating," says Jay Bakker. "For me, it's horrific."

It's the end of June, and the son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, the televangelists famous for their fortune and subsequent ruin in the eighties, is anticipating the death of his mother.

A month later, on July 20, Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, who remarried following her divorce from her first husband in 1992, succumbed at the age of 65 to cancer that began in her colon and spread to her spine and lungs.

Beneath all his camouflage - heavy black glasses, a baseball cap, a lip ring, full sleeves of tattoos on both arms, more on the back of his neck and on the skin that can be seen at his ankles - Mr. Bakker's vulnerability about his mother's decline is obvious.

He is like her in that way. Crying on camera, with her heavy makeup and big dyed hair, rivers of black mascara streaming down her cheeks, was her trademark. She presented an intriguing combination of physical artifice and emotional transparency to the world.

Mr. Bakker, the youngest of two children born to the notorious televangelists, was not returning phone calls last week after news of his mother's death. On the website for his alternative church, Revolutionnyc.com, he wrote that she had "a very peaceful death" and announced that a public ceremony to celebrate her life has been planned for the near future.

Talking in the lobby of a downtown hotel a month ago, Mr. Bakker is unafraid to speak about his feelings. "No, we're not sure how long she will last," he says meekly. "It's really tough." At 4 feet 11 inches, "she weighs 60 pounds."

A founding pastor of Revolution, based in Brooklyn, N.Y., he was in Toronto - for the first time - as a guest speaker at the IdeaCity conference.

"She's a freight train," Mr. Bakker says. "She just keeps going. She's on liquid morphine and is sometimes confused," he acknowledges.

"We talk about heaven and hell. We don't talk about death," he says, when asked about his relationship with his mother, who has been gravely ill for some time.

"I just love my Mom," he says, unprompted, as he looks out the window to the busy Toronto street. "We're very close. You know, she always had a room for me in her house."

He shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares at his hands. "It scares me," he says of her impending death, adding that his faith is being tested by the ordeal. "One minute, I'm closer to God because Mom is dying, and in the next, I'm screaming at Him."

That Mr. Bakker exudes an emotional fragility is understandable, given the history of his 31 tumultuous years.

The Bakkers founded their Praise the Lord (PTL) ministry in 1974, and it quickly grew in popularity and fortune. It was said that the Christian theme park, Heritage USA, built by the couple in South Carolina on 2,500 acres, was the third most popular tourist attraction in the country. At its peak, over six million visitors a year came through its gates and the PTL broadcasts entered nearly four million households in the United States. The faithful were generous: $1-million a day flowed into the ministry.

But it all came crashing down in 1987, when it was revealed that Jim Bakker had tried to cover up a sexual encounter in 1980 with Jessica Hahn, a dewy church helper. As a result, he was excommunicated from his ministry. Later, he was convicted on fraud charges for taking $3.7-million to pad his and his wife's lifestyle.

The Bakkers were forced to shut down the PTL, and Heritage USA was later lost through bankruptcy.

In 1989, Jim Bakker was sent to prison to serve a 45-year sentence, which was later reduced. (He was paroled in 1994.) Tammy Faye was never charged with a crime.

At the time of the scandal, Jay Bakker was 11. "A big piece of my life was at Heritage," he says. "Everything around me was gone. There was really a sense of loss and insecurity and fear. My life, as I knew it, was over."

He started drinking at the age of 12. "I was running from people. I was afraid of everyone. I didn't trust anybody." From the age of 14 until he was 17, he used LSD, he says.

He lived with his mother until he was 16. When she remarried and moved to California, he chose to stay in Florida and lived with family friends, but he was troubled and dropped out of school.

"I felt God hated me," he says of those years. "When you're raised in American conservative evangelical Christianity, it's all about right and wrong and dos and don'ts. ... When I was a kid hearing stuff like this, if I came into the house and it was empty I'd think that something had happened and I had been left behind.

"It's very unhealthy. It's a horrible culture. I don't think anyone should be forced to live that way."

In 1994, he started Revolution with two friends, preaching about inclusion to his own tribe, disaffected youth, in their gathering places - bars and cafés. Revolution is "a church for people who have given up on church," reads the literature. He later embraced the gay community.

Eleven years ago, he attended Alcoholics Anonymous and has been sober ever since. "I've never had a legal drink," says Mr. Bakker. "My 21st birthday was torture."

That same year, he met his future wife, Amanda, a pretty medical student now studying psychiatry at New York University. They have been married for eight years and were both featured in One Punk Under God, The Prodigal Son of Jim and Tammy Faye, a six-part documentary series about their faith that aired on the Sundance Channel last year.

He is tired of defending his parents, who have been both a burden and a lesson in his life, he suggests. "My Dad is a complicated person," he says, acknowledging that for many years they were estranged but have since reconciled. (Jim Bakker, who remarried and adopted five children, lives in Branson, Mo., and has a talk show.)

His mother provided a lesson in survival. "I have learned about not changing from her. The [right-wing Christian] church would have wanted me to change, but I refused to do it.

"She didn't change when people made fun of her," he says, offering a smile for the first time.

"She didn't come out au naturel. She put more makeup on."

shampson@globeandmail.com