I’ve been convinced for quite a while that racism is the fire THIS time. Still. Just like lots of people affirm that life and civilization appears to have started in Africa, destruction of life and civilization appears to begin with racism. It’s quite amazing, truthfully, that microscopic structures in our skin inspires people to create entire structures of legal and intellectual bases to justify treating people poorly. It’s probably started off as cultural bias, but it’s mostly irrelevant which came first, the skin color bias or the cultural bias. To a certain extent, I suppose it is mostly cultural, but the culture and the skin color cannot be differentiated at this point. Because those social structures have been in place for so long, they’re part of our social DNA, like any good caste system, and we have cellular memory around that. In very many cases, on either side of the racial divide, we’re not very eager to change the social status quo of isolationism. We generally enjoy “being with our own kind”, but we resent the legal and empowerment implications. I sincerely doubt we can maintain that kind of a structure.

When a nation attempts to maintain global isolation in it foreign and economic policy, it faces a stiff uphill climb. Trade is virtually the only way to empower economic growth, and secondarily, cultural development. When I was a kid, and living amongst only people who looked like me and who had roughly the same resources and status as me, I was very ignorant of many historical facts, and the world of people who were different. Looking back on it, my world was pretty small, and I had no reason to enlarge it. The first time I was confronted with difference, however, was traumatic because I had not had any reason to consider other ways to be in the world. There was a lack of tolerance and compassion built into that ignorance, because I didn’t have to consider anything beyond what I needed to obtain from that different environment…my nurturing, my socialization, my comfort all came from those people who looked more like me. Everything else was more or less transactional, at the level of power and will, rather than love and trust. Of course, I didn’t realize that, but that seems to fit the experience in retrospect.

So, when I did begin to interact with other ‘cultures’ and people who were not like me, people who could go anywhere without being questioned, people who didn’t have to ride public transit, people who had other people clean up their houses and who smiled all the time but did mean things. Those people. When I did begin to be in even casual relationship with them, I was immediately confronted with power dynamics. They were not presented as such, but it was very obvious there were lines drawn, socially and in the public. I understood very early that white people could get away with things my people could not. My people. I didn’t even understand the concept of “my people”, but I did understand that I wasn’t white, that I had limitations (and I don’t mean about not being good in math or something academic). Was it just what I was learning from my family members, or was I seeing this inequity for myself? I think it was both, because I saw television reports of various things happening in the community, and then heard my family’s reaction to those. What i heard from the family seemed to match my experience, seemed to match what I was seeing. I suppose, for better or worse, that’s how it goes, no matter which side of it you’re on. People who look like me have experiences that more closely match my own, but…I don’t know if the resultant outlooks track in the same fashion.

For example…both my parents were college graduates. The plan was always for me to go to college. It seemed like a given, unless I couldn’t afford to go or wasn’t smart enough to go, but otherwise, I was going. There was really no question about that. I’m sure I could have refused to go, but it never even occurred to me. That was normal for my family, although when I look at the actual history of my family, only my parents’ generation and my maternal grandfather became college graduates as a matter of course. My mother’s sister was a graduate, but only one of my father’s siblings graduated. His father was not a college graduate. My maternal grandmother went to “normal” school, which from what I remember was a teacher’s college for people of color, during segregation. Her sister went to nursing school, and became a registered nurse. I’m not aware that anyone else went, but it was expected for my generation…all my cousins are college graduates. I never really gave much thought to doing anything else, either. Just seemed like that’s what you did, and so I did that. I’m not sorry I did it, either.

College didn’t so teach me academics as it taught me about how the world worked, how other people lived, how vastly things could be different. It taught me how to think and how to self-differentiate, no matter how awkwardly (or drunkenly). It taught me that I could be angry, and that I could survive in ways I had not dreamed of. It taught me that life was very simple, but that it was not easy, and that people could be meaner than I could imagine and kinder than I could dream. I learned how to cry and I learned how to hate, and I thought I learned how to love, but I was wrong. I tasted freedom, and learned that it really wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. And then, I learned that life was short. Very short.

I had been silently wrestling, and getting pinned repeatedly, by bumping my sexual orientation against the religion of my childhood. I knew there was something going on, I knew that my attraction was to women, but I couldn’t reconcile that with what I’d been taught. What would my mother think??? In college, though, the door was open wide and I smelled the breeze that blew in. Without even trying, I saw and heard and met women who loved women, women who had sex with other women. And me who loved men and had sex with other men. Come to think of it, I was encountering people who had sex for mostly the first time…I was a good Catholic girl, and we didn’t do those things (or at least, we didn’t talk about it). My mother always whispered about such things, as though whispering somehow hid it from God, I suppose. Nice girls just didn’t. Just didn’t. That was a really confusing message, though, since if you were going to have a baby, which couldn’t happen unless you did that thing you were only supposed to whisper about, everything changed and you were the pinnacle of respectability and attention. But, fortunately for me and unfortunately for my mother, I had no desire to be one of THOSE women. I never had the baby bug, and looking back on it, that was the correct thing for me. It would have been disastrous for me to have reproduced and tried my hand at motherhood. Utterly disastrous.

At any rate, college was my age of exploration, of figuring out that just because I thought girls were really nice and stuff, a flaming crucifix was not going to come flying out of the sky and impale me where I stood. I read books, I saw people doing things, I talked to people who were doing the things, I saw movies, I read more books. I researched. I talked more. But I did little. That feeling of being a misfit, and ugly duckling, having nothing to offer was already how I saw myself. Ain’t that somethin’? It seems like that has been a constant, from the beginning, not thinking I have anything to really offer, that I’m not really worth anybody’s time, or love, or effort. I believe I have to be exemplary for it to matter, and not the imperfect specimen that I am. But that’s another story, one of many.

So, college was my big awakening, on very many levels. It also exemplified the separation from the world in which I had grown up, the culture I knew best. I knew there was a different way, and in so many ways I liked this new way better. But I didn’t feel as though I really had a right to it, that I really was accepted by it. I didn’t feel as though I had any right to the one I had known all those years ago, either, and definitely didn’t feel as though I was accepted there, either. So, where the hell was I supposed to be? In so many ways, I had never felt as though I truly fit into the world in which I was raised, at least once I became an adolescent, and so…I was cemented into the state of being alone, like a relief carved into a concrete block. Han Solo in carbonite again. Frozen solid. That is more or less the conscious rationale for the self-medication – at least there were flashes, albeit delusional at times, but at least a spark of fitting in, of being a part of something. It stopped working after a time, and there was still just so much pain, but that’s where it started. It started with trying to ease the pain of separation from everyone and everything, from existing in some bizarre diaspora that could not even recall the homeland. But the feeling of separation was very real, and it remains very real. It’s better now, but there is still the pang of knowing the world I know is only my own, and the community is a fictitious place somewhere…over there. Sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, but always…over there.

I was just on a 12-step meeting, and we were talking about some of the same issue as we begin to consider being able to gather in-person once again. I’m not all that eager to begin that ritual, but I think some of us are just rarin’ to go. I haven’t voiced that, and figure there will be time enough to figure it out, and I’ll do what I need to do then. To my surprise, I am not the only one having some misgivings about rushing to return to the in-person environment. We had a reasonable discussion about that, and I was more at peace with it than I was the other day, when I felt there was some tendency to be rushing into re-entry. The virtual meetings are doing just fine right now, and I don’t see that in-person is the ultimate goal. I was actually having a little anxiety about that, but being able to discuss it earlier has given me a bit more peace about it. People who want/need to do the in-person thing are more than welcome, and people who want/need to do the virtual thing…likewise. There’s room for both, whether some of the purists see it that way or not. So there.

It amazes me that I get so worked up about how my feelings will be received…will I be the spoil-sport? Will I ruin it for everyone else? Am I wrong to feel the way I’m feeling? Ack. Shut up, brain. Just feel what you have to feel and keep it moving. My feelings aren’t going to crash the world and stop the planet from spinning. Get over your cheap self, as I have been known to say. I’m cheap, but I’m not easy is the follow up to that. I’m definitely not easy, and that’s just how I roll. I wish that I could remember that when it gets dark and the incline is a bit steep. I’ll learn. I always do, but even if I don’t, I seem to have a tremendous capacity for repetition and, if necessary, for pain. It hurts when I bang my head against the wall, doctor. Then stop doing that, says the doctor. Oh. Simple. But let me try it a few more times to see if I can find a way to do it without the pain. OK, you keep trying, and when it hurts enough, you’ll stop. That’s how I roll – when it hurts enough, I’ll do something else. But my capacity for pain is gargantuan, so…it usually takes a minute. Or an hour. Or a few decades. I can be a very slow learner.

So, it’s later than usual – daylight saving time kicks in at 2am tomorrow morning. Half the country will be late for church, the other half will be trying to wake up after having an extra hour to drink the night before. I’ll be right here, contemplating some other aspects of my life, wondering why the hell I am eating so much lately, like food was going to go out of supply or something. That’s another topic – there’s aloneness, loneliness, and emptiness happening right now. Ugh. I know I can’t fill up that emptiness with food, but I am damn sure making the effort. I need to get a handle on that, though, because I’m not feeling … good. Not feeling sick, but not feeling good in my skin because of the overeating. That’s for later, though. Right now, I’m going to one last 12-step meeting for the evening, and then I’m going to play a stupid FaceBook game and maybe watch SNL and hopefully catch some quality sleep. Sweet dreams are made of this…who am I to disagree?

So, I’ve got something going on, the proverbial burr under my saddle. Somethingis bugging me, and I’m not entirely sure what it is. I have not left the apartment today, except for taking the dog out. We didn’t go far, just up to the front of the complex and back. It worked out well for her, though, because she got to see her apartment husband and he gave her lots o’ lovin’. She adores him, and he seems very taken with her. He’s our neighbor who had quadruple bypass surgery in December – he’s over 80, and sailed through surgery and is doing wonderfully. He and his wife are very nice people, from West Point NY, They both love this lunatic dog, and she literally howls when she sees them or smells them nearby. They are what one might call “salt of the Earth”; not pretentious, good solid people who seem to give a shit. Second marriage for both of them, they are the sterotypical Brady Bunch – both had three children of their own when they came together as a blended family. One of their sons is an anesthesiologist who lives in Texas, and another one lives nearby in Pfafftown. The rest of them are scattered out in other places, but everybody seems to come together like families do. I think they are mostly Irish heritage, because both have that snow white hair that seems to typify the Irish as they age. Nice, nice people.

So, I’m not sure exactly why I’m in such ill humor at the moment. The dog is making me a trifle nuts, licking everything in sight, and generally being kind of clingy and needy. She would not let me sleep this morning when I was in that half-awake state around 6am, and carried on like a lunatic whining and barking and cavorting on the bed. She has been doing that for a while now…and it really doesn’t seem as though she is prompting me to take her outside for a constitutional, but wants her morning treat. She usually gets one when I get up to get my first cup of coffee, and I am convinced she is addicted to them, the little shit head. They must put crack in those things, because she snatches them out of my hand when I’m reaching down to give one to her, and then races off to the bedroom to get into her special spot to start gnawing on it. Then she’s calm for a good while. I know addict behavior when I see it, and she’s a totally strung out treat junkie.

So, my writing prompt is about new beginnings. Have I ever had a conversation that or read a book or anything that changed my life? Yes. The conversation that comes to mi nd first is one that I had with my aunt a few years ago, when my mother was beginning to slide into dementia but was still convincing everyone, including herself, that all was well. I was in town for a holiday, I guess, and I had made arrangements with my mother and my aunt to have lunch at a favorite restaurant. I think we were all supposed to meet there, or I was going to pick up my aunt – can’t remember – but my mother was definitely coming on her own. I arrived at the designated time, and was seated. My mother was perpetually late, so I expected to wait a bit for her. At some point, my aunt and I were having conversation, always a pleasant experience for me. I’ve said before that I always liked my aunt, and she and I had great fun together. We were talking and sawing through the complimentary Italian bread and olive oil that was brought to the table, and the conversation turned to past events and my mother’s foibles. Somehow, we got onto the topic of my parents’ marriage, and their divorce. I was recounting how I understood how my father would need to get the hell out of that marriage, but I couldn’t understand the way he’d done it, and that he’d left me there to deal with HER. I was telling her that I didn’t understand why he’d stayed as long as he had, and why he just drug out the leaving, because it was so obvious that she had basically lost her mind. She was abusive, to him, and to me, and there was really nothing anybody was going to be able to do about it because she saw nothing wrong with her behavior. I told my aunt that I just couldn’t figure him out, and why he kept leaving and coming back at one point, until I had told him to just stay gone. My aunt got kind of quiet, and we talked about how my mother was convinced that my aunt’s husband – who had died a few years before – was convinced that my father had tried to put the moves on my aunt when my father had gone to Detroit to rescue her when they were much younger. My aunt said, very seriously, your father was NOTHING but a perfect gentleman. Not one inappropriate thing happened, and without his coming to rescue me from a disastrous situation I had gotten myself into, I didn’t know how else I could have come home. He was a big help to me, and did nothing wrong. I think I had always wondered if that was true, and so now I knew. I admit to being slightly and unexpectedly relieved about that, so maybe I had really doubted him. I think my mother may have also been a little suspicious about it as well, but she never admitted that, not to me at least.

So, my aunt and I continued, alternately laughing hysterically about goofy things from the past, and getting serious about other things, like my mother’s mental health issues and her insistence that she wasn’t going to rely on medication for it. Our meals arrived, but our mouths were busy with things other than food, and the conversation continued. My mother called at least three times in between our activity, with some confusing crisis about not being able to start the car after visiting the post office, and I needed to come and get her but AAA was coming and then they came and then the car got started but she had to use the bathroom and didn’t know where to go and … i don’t even know what else. We kept eating, thinking she was going to show up. I was totally enthralled with spending time with my aunt, and the trip down memory lane was giving me tons of information and perspective I hadn’t had before.

Somehow, between the entree’ and dessert, we got back to my father, and I iterated my resentment of the obnoxious woman he’d married. My aunt jokingly called her my step-mother, and I threatened to pull her undigested meal from her stomach in retaliation. We laughed hysterically, because that’s how we rolled together, she and I. That’s why I loved her so much – we were silly together. So, after I said again that I couldn’t figure out why in the hell my father had stayed fifteen years with my mother, after she’d tried to kill him at least once that I witnessed, and was so verbally and emotionally abusive to him. Why didn’t he just go, and end the drama? My aunt looked at me, directly, and she said, “I think that was because of you.”. The world stopped for a minute. My heart stopped for a minute. All the sound in the restaurant went away, and I wasn’t seeing anything. It would never occur to me that anything my father did was because of me. He was never physically, or really even verbally, abusive toward me, but I really did not think he gave a shit about me. He never said different while he was there, but like I have recalled before, none of us were accustomed to saying lovey dovey things to each other. I just really thought he merely tolerated me, didn’t really like me at all, thought I was just a pain in the ass. He was always saying that my mother had “warped the child’s mind against me”. I did side with her, followed her example to make fun of him and belittle him, but I was 12. He was largely absent, she was there, and he didn’t insert himself into anything concerning me. So, I thought I knew what I was doing, and nobody told me any different. What I didn’t realize was that I was the most responsible adult in the family, which is very sad.

Anyway, when my heart started beating again in that restaurant, nothing much had changed. My aunt was taking another sip from her coffee cup, and the wait staff was clearing the dessert plates, and other diners were talking and laughing and nobody had any clue that the world had changed. To hear that my father didn’t hate me, that he hadn’t left me as well as my mother, that he had tried to honor what he felt was a commitment to his child…that. changed. everything. When I was in college, I drank him. I didn’t drink alcohol…I drank HIM. I tried desperately to erase him, to hate him, to overcome the very conscious identity of a reject. Rejected by the very person who gave me life. I would say that all the time, when people asked me why I drank so much. You don’t understand, I would say. You just don’t understand. I didn’t understand – how could anyone else understand that pain in the bottom of my soul, that I wasn’t good enough for even the person who created me to stay. When my aunt opened the door to a new way to see him, and a new way to see how he felt about me, that hatred and rejection just crumpled into the flames of the inferno that was my burning heart.

How could this be? How could I have been so wrong about my father? Could it be this easy to feel less…wrong? It wasn’t instantaneous, but I felt as though the rock wasn’t rolling down the hill and over me so much anymore. It just didn’t feel as though every day was such a steep incline. I felt a little bit lighter, a little bit less incorrect, a bit less damaged. And I did feel so damaged, and unrepairable. A total loss. That conversation with my aunt softened the edges of what I felt were permanently jagged edges in me. It was a totally unexpected bit of resolution for me, and I had not been looking for it. He stayed, and took all that crap from my mother, because of me. Because of me. For a time, I was very angry with my mother, because I saw for the first time how he must have felt, and I understood why he kept saying that she had “warped the child’s mind” against him. I regret that. I grudgingly give myself a break on that because I was only a kid, and he didn’t do anything to bring me closer, but still…I feel a little guilty about it. He and I more or less reconciled before he died, and I had “the talk” with him before that happened. I tell people all the time I have a much better relationship in death than I ever had with him in life. That’s very true, but it sucks. I have a lot of him in me…the avoidance part, and the inability to say no to stuff that’s probably not good for me, or even morally sound. I have a lot of my mother in me, too…and that’s another story, and that’s problematic.

My father was not a mean person. Neither am I. My mother…well…she had her kind moments, but she could be VERY mean. She was mean to him, and she was mean to me. She was mean to my aunt. She was mean to herself. That was her. My father was like me – he never came out of the gate with his dukes up. He’d rather avoid the fight, let you have whatever you wanted, and he’d just let it die down. He had his kind moments, too…but he was morally/ethically a little fleshy. I’m like that. I have done more than a couple of things I knew were unsound, I should have said no, but I did them anyway. I knew they were wrong choices, and sometimes they hurt other people. In at least a few of those cases, I did them because I thought it proved to people that I loved them, and proved to me that I was receiving love. That was all false, and I regret those choices. I wonder if my father regretted his choice to leave and marry this woman, who was so much like my mother, just a little flashier and a little more sure of herself. I experienced her directly, and she was every bit as nuts as my mother, but sexier. She probably flattered my father, who was actually pretty handsome, and I think he was a sucker for that. I can’t say he didn’t love her, but I definitely think he could have done a hell of a lot better. But, she messed with me on a very personal level when I was 17, and…that thing she did for me, I will not forget. Never will I forget. If she made him happy, I’m glad. If she didn’t, she’ll get hers. I think she’ll be getting hers regardless, and that’s not my gig.

So, that conversation with my aunt changed a lot for me. I don’t know if I’d forgotten it until I started writing this or not, but I think it was a fundamental change in my vibration, in my root. I hope that I smile a bit more than I used to, I hope that I know who I am more than I used to. I hope that I’m not as mean as I used to be before I gave up the notion that my father had purposely thrown me away. I hope. I think before I had that conversation, I may have stopped hoping, at least in that innocent way that I did when I thought I wanted to be a roller derby star. Hope had become a desperate endeavor, a constant entreaty to the stars that I be somehow inserted into the stock photo that was captioned “happy couple”. The only flights of fancy I embarked upon were desperate flailing in the rapids, in deep and choppy waters, and I can’t swim. Never learned. I was always drowning and always sure that I was destined to struggle, that life was struggle, that I was destined to struggle and never get any closer to shore no matter what I did. Sometimes I still fell that way, but intellectually I understand that’s a false construct. I understand that when one is drowning in the ocean, and the Coast Guard comes to rescue you, the rescuer will tell you to not struggle and let them handle everything. If you struggle, you’re imperil them and yourself, and they’ll drop you. I keep struggling, because I’m not aware there is any rescuer, or any lifeline, or any helicopter waiting to hoist me to safety. I honestly don’t know if that is a question of faith (or lack thereof), or if I am just not seeing the obvious. I do wish I had learned how to swim, though.

A couple of days ago I had occasion to remember, once again, the words of a minister who served my congregation for a time. He was an intellectually gifted man, and understood organizational dynamics implicitly. The dude had skillz, credentials – he had been employed as a marine geologist during his lifetime and I found articles that he had published during his career. A Harvard graduate, he returned to Harvard Divinity School after a successful gig in science. I once asked him why in the world he had decided to become a minister, after having been invested in science all his life. He said, very simply, “Science didn’t answer all my questions.”. I’ve never forgotten that, nor some of the brilliantly simplistic wisdom he dropped. One of the morsels I’ve munched on for while now is this: “To know you, I don’t need to know where you come from, or what you do, or the education you’ve received. Tell me your story, tell me what gives you awe and wonder. Then I’ll know who you are.”

Awe and wonder. I’ve contemplated for a while now what exactly gives me awe and wonder. Sometimes, I believe it to be the utmost respect that I have when encountering some exemplary and stellar human attribute, a talented musician or athlete, a brilliant artist, a breathtaking intellect or activist. Those are concerned with the bell curve of human attribution, and deserving of respect for sure, but I’m not entirely sure those are worthy of my wonder. Frequently, I am awe struck by the accomplishments of humans, and that’s appropriate. The young woman who read the jaw-dropping poetry at the Presidential inauguration this year was, in my opinion, deserving of something beyond simple respect. She got my attention and utmost respect, and I had no words to describe the emotion her poetry evoked. That’s rare, but I’m not sure it really captured awe for me. My response was still in the realm of human talent, comparison to my own feeble efforts, to the product of others in the genre. Very much concerned with the work that humans do.

Having no words to describe an emotional response is very close to what I describe as wonder, or awe. For me, though, actual wonder, awe, the inability to categorize or find words to describe sensory input…that childlike pinpoint of new experience that has no previous reference…it’s new…and there is the inability to describe it because you cannot compare it to anything else. And so you say nothing, but your body expresses what is generally … joy. That is awe and wonder for me. When I am struck stupid by something so over the top that my brain cannot respond, only my emotions, only my sense. When I have no words, no “this is like” or “this is the most” or even “this is so over the top”. The response is entirely visceral, and I will tend to feel it in my gut, and sometimes in my head. Mouth forms a perfect oval, shoulders rise in expectation, diaphragm drops, the body invites more pleasure. Pleasure, without the brain. An interesting concept.

When I am experiencing awe, or wonder, it is frequently by something in the natural world. Lightning, volcanoes, fire, earthquakes, raging seas, waterfalls…those all cause me to inhale deeply, pause, and become very humble. Those natural events speak to me of power, true power. The power humans claim is only accrued by agreement of other humans. No human being can evoke the power inherent in nature, and believing that we can is merely hubris. Seeing photos, or better yet video, of a volcanic eruption always provokes a state of humility. The power of the Earth to catapult boulders, some weighing tons, miles into the air is nearly beyond my comprehension. Melting rocks into molten syrup that burns for days is utterly phenomenal to my puny human brain. We cannot harness, nor reproduce, that kind of power. We just have to get out of the way and let Mother Nature do her thing.

Observing demonstrations of the power of the natural world lets me know that I have questions that can’t be answered by my brain, or anyone else’s brain. We can explain why volcanic eruptions occur, but we can’t control them. We understand how the planet’s tilted axis brings on tidal forces and governs the waters, but we can’t control that, either. We actually can’t control very much in the natural world, so one would think we’d learn to live with it a little better than we do, but…maybe we’re just not that bright. We believe everything in the natural world is here to serve us, here to make our lives easier. I’m not sure that’s the way it goes, because when our fragile bodies get too big for our britches, the planet bitch slaps us into reality. Enter novel corona viruses like Ebola, and COVID-19. Enter influenza, HIV, and others I haven’t heard of. Science has told us that destruction of other natural resources on the planet, like the rainforests, has allowed these microbes to flourish and spread into ecosytems where humans are more abundant. And viruses do what they do, they attempt to survive by any means necessary, including killing their hosts. So, we’re not entirely victims of some malevolent life form as we are harbingers of it; we’ve created an atmosphere where naturally mutating life forms can thrive. Just like we did when the primordial ooze was getting its act together back in the day.

Whenever I try controlling something that is not mine to control, things go badly. I have to work very hard to get anything done toward the goal of control (hey, that rhymes!), and that makes me irritable and tired. But, I continue to force the issue. When I was employed by the corporate capitalist fascist pigs (I’m sure they were very nice people, though), there was actually a performance goal that said “Drives for results”. Drives for results. Hm. Sometimes the results are untenable, or shortsighted, or unethical even. But your competence is assessed by how well you blindly drive for the results somebody else has derived, and truth be told, those results are beneficial only to them (and there’s a dollar underneath that for sure – bonus, bonus, bonus). If you’re really a good employee, you’ll buy into that punishment/reward scheme and “drive for results” like you’re told. I had problems with that, because sometimes those results weren’t what people needed. Those results weren’t what anyone needed. But, just follow orders. Or you’re going to be sorry. You just wait and see. I’m sure they think I’m sorry…and I was at first when they kicked me to the curb…but now I’m not sorry at all. I have at least a large part of my self respect back, and I’m not merely surviving. I don’t want to merely survive anymore…I’m too old for that now. I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of time just surviving and doing the obligatory things, so…fuck all y’all. There. That felt better.

Anyhow, I enjoy having awe. It takes me out of my head, it takes me out of the expectation that I should be happy all the time, that I’m entitled to that. It gives me the element of surprise, unexpected, but welcomed…and not something I engineered or manipulated. Seeing something that evokes a sensation of awe is like receiving an unexpected gift from an old friend, for no reason. Just because they were thinking of you, and thought it would make you happy. No other reason, not even sure it would, but here it is. Do with it what you will. It’s just a gift, not expecting anything in return. But it would be nice if you did return it, gave something back…somewhere, somehow. It’s more an energetic thing, not a score-keeping thing. Scores are for competitions, not for love. And I suppose that’s what gifts of awe and wonder are really about…love of the unexpected, love of self and the ability to wonder and dream and fancy.

When I experience wonder it causes the Muse to visit, it causes my creativity to spark like lightning, with no clue or expectation about where it might land. For others, it could be different, but that’s how it works for me. When I douse those sparks, I suffer. When I don’t allow the sparks to catch fire, they smolder underground, and damage roots and budding life forms. When I allow other people to throw water on my fire, I resemble the iconic scene from the Wizard of Oz and begin melting, and begin a swivel into oblivion. I don’t want to be oblivious. Living in oblivion sounds nice, because you figure you don’t have to worry about anything, but it’s an illusion. The worries are still there, and for me, those were the monsters under the bed that I figured would eventually consume me in some horrid fashion. Living in fear of your own life is kind of a drag. Being a victim of your own life is an even bigger drag, because then you have to hate yourself. Victimizing yourself would be kind of funny if it wasn’t so sad., I suppose…but let’s just not do that. Self-acceptance, though, can be a difficult thing, so bow down. We don’t all get here by the easiest of paths, and I have to respect that. I have to.

Awe. Wonder. The human body gives me awe and wonder, actually. Mine in particular. There are miles and miles of gastric tract, miles and miles of cellular connections, nerves, blood vessels, muscle fibers, bones. Personally, I think the human body has more than a couple of design flaws, but that’s just me…I mean, who ever would think of putting the anus THERE? Or the colon? And what the hell is the appendix doing in the first place? But, I digress…anyway, it amazes me that so much of bodily functions are entirely involuntary, entirely unconscious. It does what it does, and that’s all it does. Rivers flow, waterfalls drop, volcanos erupt…the planet does what it does, and that’s all that it does. I have SOME control over my body, but some things are immutable – like my skin color, my eye color, my height, how my demented brain works. Some other stuff, though, I can move around, like puzzle pieces. It’s definitely like a jigsaw puzzle, so it’s interesting to see how the picture comes out. Right now, I’m hoping that I’ve got the edge pieces in the right order, so I am gonna start moving the inside pieces around a bit. Trial and failure. One piece, or maybe a couple, at a time. Eventually, I have to believe it will all come together. I have to believe.

I think I may be done with grief for a bit. Recounting significant loss has drained me, brought me to some intuitive sense of closure, at least temporarily. I’m not entirely sure that one is ever done grieving a loss. As I keep saying about this pandemic recovery, we are innocently presuming, hoping in spite of our supposed adult posturing, that once we have the elusive herd immunity things will go back to the way they were before. Um, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but … no. Not gonna happen. We’ve gone another revolution around the Sun, and things have changed. We can’t rewrite the past, nor erase this past year’s growth, although I accept that we are prone to resort to both when dealing with uncomfortable things. But, I digress. Grief changes us, and we are not the same people any longer, so we can’t simply return to a previous state of being. We’ve aged, we’ve adapted, we’ve had loss, we’ve had gain, we’ve seen different things and seen things differently. We can’t go home again, not to the same place as before. Even if all we do is make cosmetic changes, call the late-night advertiser to give us a new bathroom in a day, get a new television…but something has to change. Something has to change because everything has changed. We can’t ignore the fact that we have figured out how to use technology to widen the circle, how to bring a large group of people together without travel to distant places. How to exchange ideas, support each other, produce innovations…all from the comfort of our lairs. We can’t forget that we know how to do this. To do so would be merely punitive. So. We need to grieve, and get on with it – not over it, not through it, but engaged in it. And moving with it.

Anyway, I watched the first episode of a PBS special, “The Black Church”. It’s a Henry Louis Gates exploration of the origin, evolution, significance of the Black Church experience. Just about everyone is cognizant of the tremendous role the Church played in the American Civil Rights movement. A large part of the movement was centered in the Church, namely the Baptist and AME sects. That was no surprise to me, because I had learned that churches were one of the few places Black people could gather during slavery. New Orleans history cites Congo Square, an area just outside the French Quarter where slaves were allowed to congregate on Sundays, as essential to the development of the eclectic musical tradition of the city. The PBS episode also brought out the repeated suppression of gathering places like Congo Square by slave owners and white government agents. There were actual laws passed in some places to limit the noise level of singers and instrumentalists, particularly drummers. They apparently feared the jubilation of the participants, even requiring a white person be present to “monitor” the gatherings to make sure there was no planning or organizing for possible revolt. Ain’t that somethin’?

The show also touched on some of the reasons Blacks in America embraced Christianity so frantically. I had learned a while back that while there was still a significant language barrier with newly immigrated African or South American slaves, the iconography of Christianity resembled some of their native figures. This likely comforted some of the new plantation residents, who were still trying to figure out what had happened to them and even where they were. Gates brought out an interesting twist on that, however, and said that some of the Christian iconography (slaves were not allowed to learn to read or write during those times) of things like the Egyptian slaves being freed and led out of Egypt by Moses were resonant with the new immigrants. They saw themselves, chained and forced into labor, but freed by following Moses. They saw Pharaoh drowned in the parting of the Red Sea. And they gained hope. They saw people like them who were eventually freed, and they embraced the depiction of a deity who manifested that outcome. So, the bond with Christianity was deep, and so it remains.

When I contemplate spirituality, the best I can do is…I don’t know. However, I know what I feel, what feels right, what clicks into place on some deep level. It doesn’t feel right to justify or rationalize separating immigrant families at our Southern border. It doesn’t feel right to dictate a woman’s choice to have, or not have, a baby. It doesn’t feel right to blame people for their own distress. It’s never felt right to do things like that. I understand that many people are convinced that some people are inherently lazy and want to take advantage of “the system”. I’m sure there are people who “get over” on the system, but I seriously believe they are not the majority of people who receive benefits. I refuse to plan systemic response that responds only to the small minority who do the wrong thing. If we did that, we’d all be in the gutter.

People are homeless, and hungry, and struggling to put together even the barest standards of rational living. That seems unreasonable to me, because it just doesn’t have to be that way. There is enough, we just allocate badly. Even though we allocate badly, there’s sitll enough. The reason we allocate badly is because we are focused on scarcity rather than abundance. Most of us believe this is all a zero-sum game, so if one of us passes GO and collects $200, that means the rest of us have to give up some of our holdings to make up for that. I don’t believe that’s true; that’s not the way the game works. Congress just approved nearly $3 TRILLION dollars in direct and systemic aid for COVID relief – direct stimulus, money for schools, money for families, unemployment benefits, and so on and so on. Capitalism is a tightly woven interdependent web, so the legislation attempts to address that. Simply providing aid to open the schools while ignoring the fact that parents are out of work and can’t feed them is not a solution. But where does the money come from?

When I worked in local government, I had a budget and a finite amount of money each year to carry out specified duties. It wasn’t simple, and unexpected circumstances always arose. The municpality overall was in bad shape economically, and so fiscal operations more closely resembled a circus juggling act. Money would sometimes disappear. But, we protested, the budget says that we have sufficient funds – why have our expenditure requests been rejected? A manager finally explained it to me, in an exceedingly simple way, and I’ve never forgotten it. He said, “You have numbers on a piece of paper. That is not money.” There is not $3 trillion in the coffers of the government, nor gold bars in the vaults of Fort Knox. There are numbers on pieces of paper that people agree to honor. It’s a shell game, and money is…numbers on pieces of paper. In our case, on greenish pieces of heavy paper that say things like “In God We Trust”. I suppose we are rather delusional, by agreement. There is no money, but there is power. That’s more the capital than anything – power, influence, talking the good game. Since that’s the case, I would imagine I come by my pauper’s status quite honestly.

Regardless, I suppose the contract we’ve all agreed to is that we’re gonna be vewwy vewwy kwiet, and we know there are no wabbits out there, but people will give us prizes for pretending, so that’s what we’re gonna do. Anybody that says there are no rabbits will be destroyed. Anybody that says they’ve captured a truckload of non-existent rabbits will be promoted and given a car. And a house. And some really good dope so they won’t have to think about the absurdity of the entire useless exercise. And they’ll be the trainers of hopeful sycophants who want to know how to duplicate that success. Yup. That’s the ticket. There are no rabbits, and there is definitely no money. There are numbers on pieces of paper. Big numbers, big pieces of paper, but for all practical purposes, we may as well be living in the Warner Bros. cartoons, or Wonderland, or The Matrix. Just play along, and we’ll all be fine.

Given my off-the-wall theory about our reality, I suppose I can’t condemn people for choosing to believe in their own unique versions of reality. Only problem, though, is I’m only talking about financial resources. They’re talking about terra firma and whether or not the sky is blue and wanting organic food in a jail house. Everybody knows you don’t’ get organic food in jail, Skippy. Of course, everybody also knows you don’t get taken seriously when you show up to a political protest with moose horns and a spear. But that guy DID get taken seriously, and he was trying to perpetrate a takeover of the U.S. government. So, not only is truth stranger than fiction, this was truth-lite. There was help on the inside that enabled this inept coup attempt to get as far as it did. There was denial and other agendas that were hidden from even Mr. Moose Horns (who actually believes he’s a shaman of something). This is the same energy that is creating our dependence on those numbers on pieces of paper…we’ve made an agreement about what those pieces of paper can do, and that is their only power. People made an agreement about believing some faceless person who claims to know things, but what they have is … letters on a computer screen. That’s it. They have nothing to back up that hype, and I don’t know that we have much to back up our hype, either.

I am thinking that how we walk our talk, and present an authentic face to the world, to each other even, is by figuring out what’s really important. By figuring out what is truth, and what’s a lie, and how we can stop doing so much damage to each other. By having the courage to listen to each other’s stories, witness the pain, even if we have no frame of reference for someone else’s experience. We claim to believe in truth, justice, and the American way but most of us have no real idea what that looks like. What is the American way? It seems to be different for people based on their ability to play the game. If I don’t believe there are rabbits out there, and better still if I don’t believe having the most rabbits of anyone makes me a better person, then I do I get voted off the island? Unfortunately, in many cases, that is exactly what it means.

I guess I’m thinking we need a do-over. We’ve got the perfect opportunity right now – we can emerge from the COVID shutdown all bright and shiny and new, having learned from our past mistakes and starting fresh. We can link arms and hold hands and sway together, singing old songs and gazing lovingly into each others’ eyes. All is well.

*<record scratch>* For the record, I have not been smoking or drinking anything, but I apparently did just have a psychotic break. Or I was asleep. Or something. We all now that can’t happen. We haven’t screwed this up nearly enough yet. We’ve still got plenty of time to run this right into the ground.

OK, one more on grief. When my mother died in 2017, my grief was a bit delayed. First, she died of advanced dementia, although the immediate cause was pneumonia. That, in itself, was difficult. I felt as though my mother had been dead for quite a few years, when she became irrational, delusional, no short term memory. When my great aunts went through this, a doctor examining one of them said it was “organic dementia”, and not Alzheimer’s Disease. At that point, it could have been called dirty socks and it wouldn’t have mattered. Whatever unique components make us who we are, as individuals, was fading away. She was becoming more and more a hollow shell, one that looked as it always had, but wasn’t her. Her core had seemingly dissolved, along with her brain function. They told me there would be a personality change, and fortunately for me (and everyone else) hers resolved to a really nice, sweet lady who tried really hard to be helpful. She had been such a roaring hell-fire before that, I felt as though I’d lucked out.

I had been watching the dementia start to take over several years before she became more or less incompetent. She couldn’t remember most things, appointments, obligations, directions. She wrote everything down on sticky notes, but as the decline progressed, the notes didn’t make any sense. They were stuck everywhere, in her car, on doors in the house, on walls, on the table, on the television screen. Still, there were forgotten appointments, but she was somehow able to compensate. She was still teaching at that point, at the school she’d been at for 30 years, and was still reasonably competent. Like me, she had always waited until the last minute to meet deadlines, even with months notice. That wasn’t new. What was new, though, was her gradual lack of enthusiasm in the work. That was attributed to the mind numbing changes in educational requirements that had come with the “no child left behind” effort. As far as I was concerned, that set of regulations meant EVERY child was left behind, as teachers had no choice but to “teach to the test” and spend most of their time writing meaningless performance plans and reports. Teaching came last. She was still functioning at a reasonable social level, though, and every teacher had the same complaints. The condition in her brain was worsening, though, and it was unstoppable.

By the time memory really got to be a problem for my mother, and her behavior had begun to be impacted, it was probably too late. I didn’t know that, however, and looking back on it there was probably some chance the process could have been slowed. But, this was MY mother we were dealing with, and she absolutely refused to consider medication. SHe had always been medication-resistant, unless it was for her hypertension. Her father had died of a cerebral hemorrhage while playing baseball, and it had been brought on by untreated hypertension. So, that medication was religiously taken. Anything else that she even thought would be mood altering or narcotic…nope. She just wouldn’t do it. Even before the dementia began settling, begged her to consider anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medication. She had become phobic about driving over inclines, and on the interstate. She’d have panic attacks if she even thought she was coming close to an on-ramp or a high-speed roadway, and just couldn’t do it. Because of that, she had begun to narrow her world to only a small part of town where she knew there would be no bridges or high-speed roads. Even then, she was more or less confined to driving to church, the pharmacy, the grocery store within about 10 miles of home. She absolutely refused to consider any medication to lower her anxiety level and probably help with the phobia. When I pressed, she got nasty, and once told me that she’d consider it when I was able to lose weight. HUH??? She said God would take care of it. Alrighty then. I didn’t ever bring that up again, and she never drove over another bridge or on the interstate ever again. At that point, she was in her late 50s.

As time went on, so did she, and I had made the move to North Carolina. In retrospect, it was a geographic cure they’d warned me about in recovery, but while you’re in the middle of that thought process it still doesn’t seem to be the case. I was somewhat convinced that I would find everything I’d been looking for in the mountains of NC, and so off I went. I had also figured a long time before that I had to somehow get away in order to become my own person, that if I stayed there I would only be her daughter. I feel guilt about that after the fact, but at the time, it seemed like the answer. She was still working, doing OK it seemed. We talked often, she made sense…or at least as much sense as she ever did. She appeared to be in touch with reality, at least. Still going to church, still working, still watching her beloved NBA games.

Things went on, like things always went on, until 2005. i had surgery in August, and she came bolting up here to take care of her baby girl. The surgery went just fine, she was satisfied that I was OK, and nobody died. We had one minor little confrontation, about a picture of my grandmother that I had found when inventorying one of my great-aunt’s houses. She saw it when she came to my apartment on that trip, and decided she was entitled to it because she was the daughter and it should be hers and rights of succession and some crazy illogical diatribe. I fell apart, and she tried to have the photo copied, but it didn’t turn out well because it was so old. When she was ready to leave, I was very dejected because she was taking it back to New Orleans with her, and I was heartbroken at losing it. I still had stiches from the surgery, and a friend drove us both to the airport when she was to leave, and on her way into the airport she leaned down to hug me and said, “I left something for you on your dresser, in a folder. Look and see.” And then she was off.

When I got back to my apartment, I obediently looked to the place she had referenced on my dresser, and there, in the folder, was…the original picture of my grandmother with my great-aunts, and the tiny little side picture of my mother and my aunt. I burst into tears, because she had thought better of taking it when she saw how upset I was. She knew how much I loved my grandmother, and how much my grandmother loved me. I was overjoyed and broken open at the same time. I called and left a message for her, and thanked her for leaving me the picture, and that it meant a lot to me that I had it. She made reference to that weeks later, and said that she heard my voice breaking and knew how important it was.

Less than three weeks after my mother had left here, after things were getting back to normal for me following surgery, hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. On the 27th, my cousins were evacuating, and my mother was calling me repeatedly to ask if she should go with them. She didn’t want to, they drove too fast, she would be trapped with people and would rather just be by herself, in a downtown hotel, and blah blah blah. I said just go. I wasn’t even concentrating on the storm forecast, I’m not even sure why I said it, but I told her over and over…just go. Thank goodness she went. She might have drowned in the debacle that overtook the city once the storm had passed. The hotel she was planning to use looked as though it had been in Beirut after the storm had passed, and the people staying there had been forced to seek shelter in the SuperDome. Watching the new footage of that horrific mess, I swallowed hard thinking she might have been squashed into that mad throng of people. She would not have been safe there, by any means, so going with my cousins was the absolute right thing to do.

It took me a few days to find her after the hurricane…you couldn’t get a call through down there because, well, the city was basically off the grid. No power, no sewer, no phone service. She finally called me, and said they wound up in Jackson Mississippi. Some friends of one of my cousins. They were there for nearly a week, and nobody could enter the city. She asked if she could come up here, and of course I said yes. Of course. So, here she comes, all 100 pounds of her, in an oversized t-shirt and sweat pants. She didn’t yet know the house had been all but destroyed, having nearly 8 feet of water standing in it for almost the whole time she was in Mississippi. It was hard to get news, hard to figure out what exactly was going on. I finally got some information from one of the news stations down there, and found out there was all that water in the house. She panicked, and wanted to leave immediately. We called my aunt, who was back home to her house that stood on slightly higher ground than my mother’s, and my aunt told me she had gone to see my mother’s house. She said the doors were wide open, and there was algae and mold growing on the walls. She said to me, “Ann, I have never seen anything like that in my life.”. When my mother heard that report, she began running around the apartment and demanded the phone so she could get a plane ticket to go and lock up the house, it couldn’t stay open like that, somebody would take all of her stuff. It took a while for her to get calmed down and realize there wasn’t anything she could do, and she cried and said, “I can’t believe I’m going to lose my house!”. I really didn’t know what to do, so I said I didn’t think she would lose it, but there was nothing we could do at the moment, so she was just going to have to sit tight. She was here for a little over a year.

When she went back to New Orleans, I thought I should go with her, but I just wasn’t sure. There was work, and I was still recovering from surgery, and she seemed to be on her own little mission from God, so…I let her go by herself. I regret that, although it was the sensible decision. Regardless, we lost everything in the house. Pictures, memorabilia, memories…everything. All of the other pictures of my grandmother, my family, me…all gone. She had hoarded all of it in that house, and it was all destroyed. My aunt had tried on several occasions to persuade my mother to store all of the family stuff there, since again, my aunt’s house was on higher ground, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. Now it was all gone. Even she admitted that had been a bad decision, and then said thank goodness she had left that photo of my grandmother with me when she’d been here a few weeks before. Otherwise…we’d have lost that as well. It’s the only picure I have of my grandmother, and wound up being the last picture my mother had of her as well.

I grieved the loss of all those photos, all those memories, a papal blessing for my parents’ wedding, the piano I learned how to play on. I grieved every splinter of wood, every scrap of paper, every picture frame, every book. We had tons of books in that house. I don’t think she knew how much I grieved all that stuff, and I didn’t really let her know that, because I remembered how my mother would sometimes use my emotional response against me. So, I kept that to myself. And there was really nobody else to tell. I wish I had been there when she had the house cleaned out, because I might have been able to save some mildewed piece of a photo or a book or something that meant something to me. But, she tossed it all. I supported that, because she had decided to rebuild, she had lived there and sweated to pay for that house, and it had been her home for 40 years, so I figured she had to right to do that. But it would have been nice if it had gone another way.

Anyway, she rebuilt, life went on as life goes on. The city struggled to recover, she struggled to recover. I had a nagging feeling that she might not bounce back from all of the trauma, and ultimately I was correct. She was furloughed from her job, since the schools were closed and there was no population to speak of. She focused on rebuilding her house, and her life I suppose, but she was doing it in her own slightly psychotic way. That was par usual, so, I thought nothing of it. She moved back into the rebuilt house, and seemed to be mostly ok, but the the dementia was still marching on. One day, our neighbor across the street called and said she needed to talk to me about my mother. Seemed she old owman was losing a lot of weight, and being a little more goofy than usual. I made a trip down not long thereafter, and my mother had lost at least thirty pounds from a 125-pound frame. She looked like a child. She wasn’t making all that much sense, and all she wanted to eat was bananas and vanilla wafers. I managed to drag her to see a doctor, and physically she was mostly OK, but the doctor was giving me that raised-eyebrow doctor look that said “What the hell am I supposed to do with this – she’s out of her mind!”. I started looking at assisted living places and started trying to convince my mother that it was time. That went over like a turd in a punch bowl. She wasn’t having any of it, but I figured I would just keep trying. Back to NC I came, and she seemed pretty stable when I left. But that was a fantasy.

Her finances were in a mess. The house was in a mess. I went down there again, and it was just not good. Miraculously, I managed to get her to sign a power-of-attorney with her trusted lawyer so that I could take over paying her bills. She had not paid property taxes, and the house was about to be auctioned. I straightened that out, but couldn’t get her retiree health insurance restored. I got her water turned back on, and got the power bill caught up. She had the money, just couldn’t get it together to pay the bills. She started calling me every 5 minutes, or sometimes as soon as she had hung up the phone from calling a minute before. I was working, and sometimes let the call just go to voice mail, and she would just call back over and over and over. When I finally answered, she would say that she was so glad she’d caught me on the first try. If I told her that we had just talked, she was incredulous. The neighbor across the street kept me posted and eyeballed her. Fortunately, the car had broken down so she wasn’t free wheeling all over town. There’s a murder a day in New Orleans, and I was sick thinking of the possibility that someone would kill her. I began marshalling my courage to go down and physically haul her out of that house to a facility. In the meantime, I hired some half-assed sitters to go in and sit with her for four hours a day, make sure the trash got put out, eyeball her and keep me posted.

Things went from bad to worse, but i went down for Christmas of 2015, as usual. She was not in good shape…I had begun staying in a hotel when I went down there, instead of the house, because she had started running the heat even when the weather was warm. I picked her up to have dinner, as we usually did, and noticed that her hair was somewhat matter. She had not been washing or combing it, but I let that pass. She wasn’t making much sense at all, but … I had made reservations at a decent restaurant and figured some food and a change of scenery would make it ok. Yeah, I was as delusional as she was, but this was hard and I had no earthly idea what I was doing. We got to the restaurant, and I went in with her and presented my name to the host. He looked at me as though I’d grown a second, or maybe a third, head. I asked him if this was the entrance to the restaurant, and he said the restaurant had been closed for a year. … … I said that can’t be – I made a reservation day before yesterday on your reservation website, and it even sent me a confirmation. He said, in typically nonchalant New Orleans fashion, “Girl, we been trying to get off that stupid thing since the place closed, and it just don’t work.”. Now what?

Now what, indeed. It was Christmas Day, and anything that might have been open was already booked and double-booked. Back to the car, with her following in what I imagine was a good-humored daze. But then, something shifted. I don’t know if it was lack of food, or dehydration, or fatigue, but she suddenly began hallucinating. She became convinced that she had to get back home immediately because Ann was waiting for her. And could be on the back porch waiting. And she had to get home immediately to let Ann into the house. I asked her who I was, and that confused her so dramatically that she began to get hostile. I thought she might try to jump out of the car or something, because she had gotten agitated. We drove up to the house, and she jumped out of the car and ran – RAN – across the street to the neighbor’s house and began banging violently on their front door. I know they were home, but I suspect they decided not to answer because she was looking so frantic and deranged, and I was there. I could not talk any sense into my mother at that point, and she had gotten very surly. Telling me go ahead and go on, she had to take care of this. So I did. I left. It was surreal.

Not long after I got back to NC after that bizarre Christmas visit, I knew I had to do something drastic, and I was just about to sign on with an assisted living facility. I figured I would have to fight and wrestle her into a place, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. So yes, I drug my feet a bit, because I was NOT looking forward to any of it. Then, seeming divine intervention kicked in, and I got a phone call from the sitters. I had just gotten them keys to the front door and the security gate, which my mother had refused to provide, and they said they were at the house but she didn’t come to the door when they knocked. She always came to the door, even when she was convinced the male half of the duo was there trying to sell her insurance (she even called the cops on him several times). They said they believed they could hear her faintly through a window, and they were goin’ in! THey found her on the floor in the bedroom, between the bed and the wall. It looked as though she had fallen, urinated on herself, but couldn’t quite right herself and stand up. They called the ambulance, which came pronto. She wasn’t bleeding, thank goodness, but it was as though whatever thin threads had been holding her in reality had broken. She was totally gone. The ambulance attendant got on the phone with me, and he said, “You de daughter? Mayam, this here lady’s in an alltudd reeality state!”. No shit, sherlock. He said they were going to transport her to the hospital, although it didn’t look as though she was physically injured, but just to have her checked out. OK, fine. The sitters went with her (which cost me a pretty penny after it was all said and done). The hospital admitted her for observation, but her purse couldn’t be found, so there was no insurance information. She had resisted giving it to me, so I had….nuttin’. I told them I had seen her Medicare card, but they couldn’t find any evidence of a Medicare account in her name. They wanted to discharge her before before breakfast the next morning, and I spoke to the social worker. I told him I was almost ready to contract with the assisted living facility, and he said…she’s beyond that. I could not understand what that meant, and he said she cannot function at the level of assisted living any longer. Where does that leave me, I asked. He said…nursing home. He was able to arrange for a place that would take her on the spot, and so…they rolled her out of the hospital and to the nursing home. It was not a pretty place, it was old but seemed quiet and the staff appeared competent. My cousin got there before I did, and said it was creepy and I needed to get her out of there as soon as I could. It took me a few days to get down there, and I thought it was creepy as well, but…it was reasonably clean, and everybody was dressed appropriately and seemed to be clean. The staff was doing the usual things. It didn’t smell badly.

This place was around $5200 a month, and she had enough money for that until I could do better. What I didn’t know was that $5200 a month was dirt cheap. Getting her into some place that was less creepy was going to be significantly more expensive. I would have done that except, my mother began to literally thrive there. She made friends, she gained weight, she was laughing and seemed happier than I had seen her in a while. So I left her there. For about two years, that was the new normal. She never once asked about her house, or about any of her possessions, or about neighbors or her sister. She. Had. Left. She was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. And that’s when she was mostly dead to me, even though she looked and sounded like she always had, whatever inside her made her who she was had vacated the premises. She had disconnected. I was already missing her, as though she was dead, so when her body began to fail nearly two years later, it was the second blow of a one-two punch sequence.

The nursing home left me a bizarre message on voice mail saying they had taken her to the hospital, suspecting pneumonia. When I was finally able to get more information, I spoke with the hospital and told them I was coming down there. So, I did. I rented a car and drove this time. It took me a minute to connect with the physician, but once I did, he told me something I wasn’t expecting. He said yes, she had pneumonia, but she also had a bad mitral valve in her heart, and that’s why the nursing home had been telling me she was declining and had reduced energy. They had put her in a wheelchair because she didn’t seem to be walking competently, like she couldn’t remember how to do it. We all thought it was just the dementia, but it was also the mitral valve. She had been sleeping a lot. The doctor said that was consistent with the bad valve. I asked him if that could be remediated, and he said it would take a heart transplant, and in her condition with the dementia, she wouldn’t make it onto a transplant list. All I could do was stare at the floor. I looked up at him, and he was matter of fact but not unsympathetic. I asked him, if this was your mother, what would you do? He looked me directly in the eyes, and said if it was my mother, in her condition, I would put her in hospice with a Do Not Resuscitate order, and let nature take its course. That sounded right to me. I didn’t like it, but it sounded right.

When I had put my dog down less than a year earlier, I learned a lot that prepared me for the moment of this decision. The dog had stomach cancer, and she had begun to suffer. I could tell by her breathing that she was in pain, and so when she stopped eating, I brought her in. The vet said the cancer had progressed, and started talking about quality of life. I stopped her and said just tell me if it’s time. I understand all that, but is it time? She looked at me with the same direct look the doctor had, and said yes, I would say it’s time. My only other question was could she do it now. I had made a deal with my dog that I would not let her suffer, and I did not want the pain to continue for another minute. I was very clear that any extra time would be for me, and not for her. She was not going to recover and go back to running and barking and being my dog again. So, as much as it hurt, I wanted the suffering to stop. And we did it right then. That experience helped me to understand that what the doctor was telling me was the right decision for my mother, because any extra time I might negotiate for her would have been for me, not for her. She would not have wanted to live like that, peeing on herself and having somebody wipe her butt, not knowing what the hell was going on and being afraid because she didn’t even know where she was. I felt like all I had left to offer my mother was her dignity, and so I signed the hospice admissions packet and the DNR. I did that by myself. I did all of it by myself, as I do most things. And that was that.

When I went to see my mother in the hospice unit, she was clean, the room was clean and bright, and she seemed comfortable. There was a morphine pump, just to keep her comfortable, which I thought was fine. She could no longer open her eyes, and she was motionless in the bed except for her chest rising and falling. The staff was friendly, and having visited dying friends in NC hospice, I knew they would take good care of her. It takes a special kind of caregiver to do hospice care, because you know the outcome. I knew the outcome as well, but I wasn’t dealing with that yet. After I saw that she was settled, I went back to NC, intending to do…I don’t quite know what. Wait? Make preparations? I have no real idea. I suppose i needed my dog (new dog, the one I have now). I needed my friends, I needed my support system, I needed the familiarity of all my stuff. And that’s what I got.

Hospice called, and said she was going downhill, so I needed to come. I got ready to go, got plane tickets, got a rental car, got time off from work, boarded the dog. Got ready to leave, the flight was a red-eye at the crack of dawn the next morning, August 29th. I was on time – had stayed up most of the night. Found a parking spot in long-term parking at the airport, turned off the engine, opened the door of the truck, and…the lights went out. At that very second, the light in the garage went out. I didn’t think all that much of it, maybe there was a timer that was screwing up. I got my carry on out of the truck, locked it, and went to the elevator. Pushed the button, waited…and waited. It never came. I started looking around, and realized everything was dark, even on the outside of the garage. I started walking down the ramps, and saw a few people walking around and looking as confused as me. When I got to ground level, an employee was walking toward me, and I told him all the lights had gone out and the elevator was broken. He said everything is out – there’s no power at the airport. That did not compute. When I got inside the terminal, it computed even less, because EVERYTHING was dead as a doornail – no computers, no ticket kiosk, no escalator, no lights. No. Nothing. Frantic ground crew were huddled together like a football team at the two-minute warning, and passengers were standing around looking befuddled, I among them. Finally, one of the ground crew shouted out – there were no loudspeakers working, of course – there’s been a power failure due to a traffic accident on the interstate nearby, and no flights are able to depart or land at this time. If you can rebook your flight, you might want to do that now, and here’s the number…”. OK, it’s 5:30 in the morning, so no reason to panic. Yet. The sun came up. More befuddled passengers arrived. More bellowing from the ground crew. I knew we were in trouble when they brought out a snack cart and offered us all a complimentary treat. They never give away anything free unless it’s bad. I called to rebook my flight, and after being on hold for more than 45 minutes, got a very nice lady who was eager to help me. I told her I needed a new flight, and gave her the flight I was originally booked on. She said, well ma’am, that makes no sense, because you flight hasn’t left yet. Can you not make it? I said, well ma’am, that flight isn’t GOING to leave, because me and 500 of my new friends are all sitting here in the dark airport, which is closed to inbound/outbound flights. She had no idea. She said nobody had told them anything, and they were the ticketing center. Oh, good grief. She couldn’t rebook me, though, because the computer said I had not missed the original flight. Oh, good grief and good night, Irene. I went back for another free snack. And hospice called for the second time that morning, letting me know her blood pressure was 80 over 60 and her secretions had increased.

Four hours later, after standing in an endless line of people trying to check in manually, and sobbing uncontrollable thinking my mother was going to die before I got there. By myself. All by myself. But I was on a plane, going to connect in Charlotte. Miraculously, I managed to make it to a connecting flight, and I was on my way. It was now 2pm and I was just getting out of NC. But I was on my way. I was trying to send telepathic messages to my mother, telling her I was coming. I got to the New Orleans airport, my back was killing me, I could barely walk after having stood in that check-in line, but I staggered to a car and got the hell out of dodge. I had to go to the bathroom, so I took a huge risk and went to the hotel, which was almost walking distance from the airport. I checked in quick, fast, in a hurry and went to the room…and the bathroom…and threw on a clean set of sweats. I was in and out of there in less than ten minutes, and on my way to hospice. I bolted in there, and a nurse intercepted me, with a look of concern, letting me know it was close. I went into the room, and it was still clean and seemed blindingly white. Everything was white. She was still lying there, in the clean white sheets, but her breathing was very laboured. She still could not open her eyes, but the nurse and I – a really funny male nurse – had a long talk. We talked about her, and not about her, and about her condition, and about the nursing home. We talked for a long time, because I needed human contact I suppose. I asked him to make sure she got Last Rites, and he told me the priest had already been in and did the Sacrament of the Sick, and it was all included. My old Catholic upbringing kicked in, and I said, nope – she needs Last Rites, so please call the priest back. He said that he would, and then he left. He left me there with her, alone. And the only sound was her struggling to breathe. I talked to her. We had the Last Talk. I felt like she could hear me, and I told her everything I could think of…that she had made me who I am. That I was OK. That she had done a lot for me, that I wouldn’t be where I was without her. All kinds of stuff. That she had taught me so much, and given me music, and was there when nobody else was. I told her I was sorry I had been mad at her at times. The last thing I said was that I did love her. That was really hard for me, but something told me I needed to say that. I almost choked me, not because I didn’t want to say it, but because I could not remember having said it before. We had never been a family that told each other that on the regular, but you did what you needed to do, just like I was doing. Then, I left…I told her I was going to get something to eat because I had not eaten since the day before, which was true. With all the ordeal of getting there – it had taken nearly twelve hours to get there by plane, and it occurred to me I could have driven in the same amount of time – I was actually hungry and definitely tired. Somewhere in my head, I was thinking I had tomorrow morning to be there, that I would just spend the day in hospice. I told the nurses I would be back, althoug in my head I was thinking I would get some sleep and be back in the morning. I got in the car, suddenly very, very tired, and started the engine. I was about 15 minutes away from there when the phone rang, and it was the funny male nurse, letting me know she had “expired”. She’s gone, I shouted??? Yes, he said. I told him I was coming back, and I did an illegal U-turn and headed back to hospice. He told me before I hung up that he was on the phone with the funeral home, making the arrangements for them to come and get the body. I had given him their card when I got there, just in case. When I arrived, he was at the desk, still on the phone, and he took my hand and held it. I went to the room, and there she was…silent…motionless. It was just…not right. Not right for that little body to have no sound coming from it. I was afraid to touch her, and I don’t know why. Maybe because I didn’t want to feel the unnatural chill I knew would be there, the absence of life, the stillness of the flesh without blood flowing through her veins. I don’t think I was quite ready to admit that it was done. I said to her, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll take care of everything.” And then I left, by myself. Truly, unequivocally this time, by myself.

I went to get something to eat. I smiled at the cashier, the wait staff. I went back to the hotel, laid down on the bed, and stared up at the ceiling. My mother is dead. I wasn’t so much number as resigned. She had been dying for more than two years, it’s just that now her body was gone. I was relieved, then immediately angry and guilty that I felt that. I was tired, but feared that I could not sleep, so I took some Advil PM and waited for merciful sleep to come. It didn’t. There was no tossing and turning, but I don’t think I was in my body. I finally drifted off, but it was not restful sleep. It was bodily restoration, but my spirit was working, I think. I didn’t so much think of her as not think of her. I will see her body in that bed for the rest of my life. I asked the nurse before I left it it had been peaceful. He said…more or less. From that, I figured that it wasn’t, but I remember her telling me about being there when my grandmother took her last breaths. She said there had been some struggling and flailing, and the doctor had said it wasn’t so much pain as the body reacting involuntarily. I’m figuring that’s what happened with my mother. I told the nurse she didn’t want me there, and he said oh, don’t feel that way. But she didn’t want me there, not because she was trying to exclude me, but she didn’t want me to have to go through waht she had gone through with her mother.

I posted things on FaceBook, and got all manner of great support from my friends. I called a couple of my friends in New Orleans, and they were very supportive. I went to the bank to let them know, and I told the lady who has been so helpful to us. She asked me if I needed money. I said that I understood that when my mother died, the power of attorney was no longer any good, and so I had just stopped in to let her know. She asked me if anybody else knew my mother was dead. I said no, I don’t believe so. She said hurry up, write a check and we’ll cash it. I made it out for $10k so that I could pay the funeral home and finish paying for the mausoleum crypt. She gave it to me in cash, so I walked around New Orleans for the next three days with $10k tucked into my bra. That was special. I was able to pay the funeral home, though, and when I got to the mausoleum in Lake Charles the day after the funeral – almost a week later – I was able to pay them in cash. I was counting out cash money like a drug dealer on the tailgate of the hearse. It was absolutely surreal, and no, you cannot make this shit up.

After the rest of the funeral activities was over, and I had made my peace with the city which, for the first time, did not have either of my parents holding a place for me, I came back to NC. I felt empty, like that same little kid that went to kindegarten at four and didn’t know how to ask to use the bathroom. Like I didn’t know what to do, or how to do the simplest things. Like maybe the dementia was contagious, because I could barely remember my name, and I didn’t really care. I walked, I talked, I smiled at people, I could drive, I could eat. But I wasn’t in there, I wasn’t in my body. I don’t know where I was. It was like being on auto-pilot at a really high altitude. Smooth ride, but just going though the motions. I didn’t sleep longer than three hours at a time, which was disconcerting and counterproductive.

I was trying to work, but it was kind of disconnected for me. I was already way behind, since before I left, and in trouble for that. Again, I really didn’t care at this point. It’s good that I really didn’t care, because less than six weeks after my mother’s funeral, I got laid off. I was pissed, because they had been after me for going on two years. The same two years I had been living for two people – me and my mother. The same two years I had been losing her, and they were wanting me to be worried about how long it took me to change somebody’s name display on a fucking telephone. Not whether or not I could make the change correctly, only how long it took me. Whatever, y’all. It was a harsh blow, though, and the timing sucked. There are not words for how bad that felt. I felt as though the Universe was reducing me to nothing. I wasn’t suicidal, but if I had ceased to be, I could have lived with that. (See what I did there? I could have lived with being dead. RIght.) Anyhow, I had that same bizarre sense of relief coupled with grief and then being angry that I felt the relief. My so-called career there had been trying to die for longer than my mother had been trying to die, and I definitely think both events were related. I was, and still am, just a bit frightened about how I will survive without the steady income, but I’ll just have to figure it out. My mother died on August 29, 2017 – the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I got my lay-off notice on October 15, 2017 and my last day at work was December 15, 2017. I don’t miss those assholes. I thought I couldn’t live without my mother, and I definitely thought I couldn’t live without that work. Neither has proven to be true. Imagine that.

I still grieve both of those mainstays of my life. That’s normal, I guess. What I’m hoping is that I can make a new beginning, re-create myself yet again. I get to do what the hell ever I want to do, and…so , now what? Where you go, that’s where you are, and so I am here. Sitting right here, beside myself. In my own little space. By myself. I need to move…need to be in motion, at least. I hope my mother was proud of me. I hope she WILL be proud of me. I need to be about something, and not about obligation. The funny thing about being free is that you’re not tethered to anything unless you want to be. That’s the good news. The bad news is…you’re not tethered to anything. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…. I hope I don’t have anything left to lose, ’cause that shit gets old.

Racism v3.2, the British patch. Not advised for anti-racists, or anyone of non-Caucasian heritage. No warranties express or implied. Proceed with caution.
It is my hope that nobody is truly surprised by the revelations shared by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, concerning their experience as members of the monarchy. There was much tittering when Prince Harry announced betrothal to Meghan Markle, because she was of mixed race. She is the daughter of an African-American woman and a white father, from CA. She and her parents have been involved in the film/television industry, with Meghan having been featured in a recurring television show. Prince Harry’s love for her seems to be rather profound, and since that’s what everyone wants to believe is the only requisite for marriage, they proceeded to the altar.

Unfortunately, despite Harry’s experience with his mother Princess Diana, neither he nor his new bride were entirely prepared for the insidiousness of the white supremacy culture of the monarchy. When Diana was killed in a horrific automobile accident, stories arose concerning her estrangement from the royal family. She had been divorced from her baby daddy, Prince Charles, for years and had begun dating Dodi Fayed. Dodi Fayed was Egyptian born, and no stranger to elite circles, being part of the Harrod’s lineage and a successful film producer. He was not a part of the sacred tradition of European royalty, however, and so tongues wagged. Some wondered aloud if the car accident was truly accidental, if Diana had been silenced and eliminated as an outsider who potentially brought non-European/non-white players into the family. At the time, those wonderings seemed to be much ado about nothing and were dismissed as conspiracy rumors.
Now that conspiracy rumors are the steady diet of many people, in the U.S. as well as Great Britain, some wonder if there is more to that story, especially given the parallels that the royal Sussex couple have brought forth.
Diana had complained of being purposely isolated, treated with something akin to disdain, having no freedom or agency as a member of the royal family. She was depressed, and stories were brought out that she had attempted suicide more than once. Her pleas for professional help were summarily denied, but her pubic image was carefully curated to yield a happy and serene demeanor. She was miserable while in residence at Buckingham Palace, and her husband was publicly carrying on with another woman. With the exception of the other woman, Meghan Markle describes a similar experience, including suicidal thoughts. She refers to the monarch as “the institution”.

The “institution” is beginning to sound much like the “family” in “The Godfather”. The Corleones were a business enterprise, and you didn’t cross them. If you did, someone might deliver a pair of your pants with a fish inside to your comrades, letting them know that “you slept with the fishes” now. Like the “family”, the “institution” has a public image to uphold. That is everything, and it’s the price for living the charmed life of a multi-billionaire on the public dole. The monarchy describes public service as a large part of their role, in exchange for being kept up by public coffers, but there is a price. They do not truly engage in legislative or policy functions; that is the job of the Prime Minister and Parliament. Their roles are largely ceremonial, and cultural.
A monarchy is dependent upon an uninterrupted genetic lineage, so Meghan Markle posed a dilemma for the continuity of the “institution”. The Duchess of Sussex did validate the validity of that in a much-publicized interview last night with Oprah Winfrey, when she revealed there had been discussion about her pregnancy. Specifically, there was anxiety about “what the baby might look like” after birth; what would be the child’s “tone”. They meant skin color. Would this child look “colored”? O.M.G. Meghan said they talked face-to-face with Harry about this, but he wouldn’t disclosed who did the talking. He later told Oprah Winfrey, off camera, that it was not either of his grandparents. My vote is on his father, Prince Charles, who is next in line for the throne.
All of this sadly explains Prince Harry’s decision to dump the royal family. He was protecting his wife, his son, and his yet unborn child. He believed, and saw for himself, the abuse Meghan suffered. He remembered and saw the parallels in his mother’s journey. He said that he felt trapped as well, and had it not been for Meghan, he might not have pulled up stakes. In a way, they saved each other, I surmise. It’s the very sad story of what white supremacy can do, and the cost. Perhaps Harry and Meghan have ended the cycle, at least for themselves and their children. The “institution” can never take from Harry what his mother gave to him, or what his genetics have provided for him and his children.
Any monarchy is the apex of a caste system. Here in America, this is our seminal root. This is where we came from, and initially rebelled against. This is how our country was formed, as anti-monarchical democratic republic. The United Kingdom has retained its monarchy, and that’s their choice, and they seem to operate more or less consistent with that choice. America, however, seems to have unofficial monarchy in many respects, because we have many informal castes in our society. We do not have a king, although some have feared we seemed destined for authoritarianism fairly recently.

Authoritarian rule would not be ceremonial, and would not separate ruling class from governing class, but that’s another story. The point is, we are still a representative democracy, if we’ll participate. The point is that attempting to mitigate the voice of the voting populus gives rise to authoritarianism, or monarchical tendencies. Monarchs do what they want to do. They are generally answerable to no citizen, and no citizen is capable of rising to the level of monarch. If the monarchy is authoritarian, there is little difference between that and dictatorship. This has been our fear for decades, and it is a healthy fear to have (at least in my opinion).

I don’t think being a dictator, a monarch, a supreme ruler is all that it’s cracked up to be. Yes, you get to do what you want to do, what you think should be done. Yes, you probably answer to noone. But…you are not free. You are not separated from stress and worry and resistance. You risk losing yourself entirely, becoming an iconic figure of an ancient tradition.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were not at the apex of the monarchy, but they were forced to choose their own happiness and survival over the money and the status. They have showed us there truly is no free lunch, whether it is served on Lennox china or paper plates. Pretense, obviously, does not lend itself to authenticity, and more and more it seems the Universe is calling us to authenticity rather than posturing. More and more, we are being called to collaboration and inclusion rather than hierarchy and exclusivity. More and more, we are called to demonstrate our humanness, and the truth of that, in all its imperfection. Money changes everything, including us, if we let it.

So another writing prompt about grief asks what have I gained through loss. Hm. Sardonically, I suppose I’ve gained the knowledge that I can withstand it, that it won’t kill me. That’s so bittersweet, because when the arc of pain is at its apex, you don’t care if you survive it because you’d rather not be alive to have that experience. When I have been so inconsolably lost and buried in the avalanche of emotion, I truly wanted to die. I didn’t want to actually kill myself, but I did not want to be alive. I needed the pain to stop, and it seemed that it never would. Breathing hurt. My hair growing hurt. Thinking hurt. There was no escape, and I felt very much like I was trapped inside an ever-tightening skin suit, a diver’s suit. I had gone done beneath the waves for the final time, but I was stuck in the state of constantly gasping for breath but never taking in enough to fully exhale. The burden of shallowness. Since I was a child, my breathing has always been rather shallow. I have to concentrate and be very intentional about breathing so that my diaphragm shifts. Looking back on that, I attribute that to anxiety. Hypervigilance. Always on alert. Maybe that’s why drinking was such a welcome relief…it relaxed that edge-of-the-seat state just enough to release inhibitions and tension. Self-medication, if ever there was any.

When I have been the deepest in grief, the trigger is irrelevant. I feel everything deeply, in exaggerated fashion. I feel both sadness and joy, anger and ebullience, to the tips of my toes. It’s an overpowering wave, and it threatens to drown me. When the emotion is pleasurable, there’s just a feeling of fulfillment, or content, or satisfaction. When the emotion is negative, there’s just the feeling of drowning. Just the feeling of entrapment, confinement, pressure and plea for release. Feeling overwhelmed, breathing is difficult and survival does not feel assured. There is so much noise, so much cacophony, innumerable pairs of cymbals crash in rapid succession, each one louder than the last. To the world around me, I am sitting motionless and seemingly quiet, and calm. Nobody understands the storm that is raging inside me. There is a sadistic killer draining the spirit from me, drop by drop, but unseen by anyone else. It’s a private hell that most do cannot comprehend.

When I’m dying in plain sight, yet unseen by anyone else, I rarely have the ability to describe the experience. One of the only things to help is the writing. Sometimes music, but mostly the writing. I’ve always been able to scratch out a few words to more or less vomit up the toxic drivel that burns my throat, makes the inside of my brain hot. If I can get a couple of pages down, and describe what I am feeling and what has happened to trigger that, I can usually take the edge off. Every once in a while, that doesn’t work, but I’ve learned to keep at it. I haven’t saved all that many examples of that, because it feels so torturous, like bile roiling up from deep within.

So, I suppose I’ve gained some degree of confidence that I can survive even the most horrific of grieving spells, but also developed some degree of confidence in using writing as a coping skill. When my grandmother died, I don’t think I was using that tool yet…I just shut down and held it all inside. I also didn’t feel that I had enough privacy to bare my soul on paper and feel that it could be hidden from view. My mother had the boundaries of a wolverine, and would prowl through my room and search through papers and books and diaries whenever she pleased. That went on until I moved onto campus in my second year of college, and she managed to betray my diary several times while I lived there. I did not like that AT ALL. After she did it the last time, and uncovered some really private reflections, I didn’t write in a journal for a few years. I just couldn’t trust any place to be safe. She was everywhere.

I would like to believe that losing what I have lost and grieving the way I have gives me a way to empathize with other people. That’s probably true, although I feel like I was empathic from the start. I just had no boundaries. It was difficult for me to discern where I stopped and started, and where someone else stopped and started. Sometimes it still is, but it’s gotten a lot better over the past decade or so. Regardless, I’m not entirely sure that’s a blessing, or a curse. I’ve said many times before that I feel as though I give out far more than I get in return. I’m not a score keeper or anything, but when I realize things are a bit lopsided on the give-take platform, I get a tad disenchanted. When I feel there’s intentional use and abuse, I am irate. So, maybe the empathy isn’t all that great a thing, because once I feel what someone else is going through, I feel compelled to at least try to make it better. On my good days, I realize that’s really not my job, but once again, it’s a default button that auto-activates. Trying to remove that mechanism feels as though I have to set the auto-destruct sequence. I’ve got to think about that, because I also feel as though I need to accept that as part of who I am. I can do that, but it just doesn’t work all that well for me. And so it goes.

So, loss is part of life, and I can live with that. I do live with that. It’s just not pleasant, but nobody said everything in my life would be pleasant. I suppose one must have the unpleasant to realize and appreciate the pleasant. Or something like that. I suppose the point is that my as-built schematics are clear, and this device is working as designed. I’m a little confused about whether I can re-design, modify, upgrade, retrofit, or change the design scheme at this point. In the past, I believed that re-creating myself was a sign of failure, an indication that my product was simply inadequate, and not working. That view has changed along the way, and I see re-creating oneself as a necessary part of living. It’s the journey, not the destination, blah blah blah. Seriously, though, it seems that loss has triggered re-creation on several occasions. When I have felt despair at losing someone, or a dream, or some part of my outlook, I have re-arranged the playing board and somehow managed to roll the dice again. I’m not sure if that was sans damage, though, and it seems as though perhaps the new creation may begin a few steps behind the starting block. I’m not sure about that, but will have to figure that out I think.

So, loss may trigger growth, or at least a major change at the deepest level. That’s fine. When I have core meltdowns, perhaps that is what is happening, my core is reorienting, reconstituting, reforming with additional elements, different combinations of elements, more information. Maybe. I simply find it difficult to abandon the feeling of failure, or not measuring up to expectations, to having dreams wither and die on the vine. There were so many hopes and dreams when I was younger, when I didn’t know how the world functioned, when I had not seen the worst of what people had to offer. Before I had my heart broken and shattered into so many pieces that it can’t ever be entirely whole again. Yes, the light shines in through the missing pieces, but just once – just once – I’d like to get what I set out to get, get the brass ring, succeed at something I set my sights on. Maybe that’s only in reference to matters of the heart…I’m not sure. Sometimes it’s hard to separate my wants from other folks’ needs, and until 2017 I was reasonably successful at work and maintaining a reasonable standard of living. Romance, love, relationships (with a capital R) … not so much. Maybe loss is enmeshed with that, braided, entwine with that, I believe. With every loss, I grow less and less enthusiastic about showing myself, about taking the risk to be vulnerable.

At this point, I’m going to need a nap.

It has been 56 years since Bloody Sunday. Where have we gone? Has there been progress, or merely change? This is the first anniversary of the day that John Lewis is not with us. This is a new day, but not a new fight. Freedom is a constant struggle, as Angela Davis’ book of the same name states. We fight, and we struggle, and we are tired. Let’s remember to take care of ourselves, and each other, because this IS the revolution, happening in slow motion, inch by inch. We can’t forget where we came from, and we can’t lose sight of where we’re going. Suit up, and show up, and never forget your wing man/woman/person.

I posted the above blurb to FaceBook a short time ago, just to commemorate the day. We have to remember John Lewis getting his skull broken open on that bridge in Selma, and we have to remember all the rest of those who sacrificed that day, and who are no longer here to see what has transpired since then. John Lewis is gone, Martin Luther King, Jr. is gone. The Rev. James Reeb, a white Unitarian Universalist minister who answered the call for clergy to stand with the protesters, was killed that Sunday night by a band of white vigilantes. They happened upon Reeb and two other white ministers, in the “colored” part of town, and decided to educate them about proper behavior for white people. The ministers were beaten with clubs and chains, and Reeb was struck in the head, near his temple. He became increasingly disoriented over the course of a few hours, as getting him to a hospital on the wrong side of town proved daunting. He died a day or so later, and Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his eulogy. There were other attacks, of course. Many survived, as did the movement, but the wounds remain palpable. We are still bleeding. We cannot heal until we acknowledge the wrongs of that day, and all the others, and the circumstances that made those days necessary. We cannot move beyond any of this until we collectively pledge, “Never again.”. We can’t keep whining about “does everything have to be about race?” and “can’t we just get past this?”. No, we can’t just get over this, because we’ve never gotten TO it. We’re still IN it. It’s not the past as long as it’s till our present. As long as we’re still enduring the killing of unarmed Black men by law enforcement, as long as thugs are tackling frail Asian-American senior citizens as revenge against a microscopic virus that knows no ethnicity, as long as random subway riders are spraying Febreze on Asian-American passengers…no, we can’t just get over it. We have to get THROUGH it.

The President’s COVID relief bill squeaked through a Senate vote yesterday, by one vote. Seven Democrats voted against it. No Republicans voted for it. The only way it was able to get to a vote was by removing the $15/hour wage hike amendment, and because it only needed 50 votes rather than 60 to pass. The 50-vote majority was a function of the reconciliation process in the Senate; if 60 votes had been required, it would have failed. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why that is the case. Those who opposed the bill claim they certainly wanted to help the American people get through this pandemic recovery, but…. I don’t quite get the resistance, actually. There was some talk of socialist agenda and the price tag and…stuff. But there was no viable counter-proposal offered, just “not this”. I just don’t get it. The GOP claimed they had no voice in the legislation, but it seemed to me they shut down, pushed back from the table, folded their arms, and pouted. They pouted because they couldn’t get their way, even though concessions – like withdrawing the $15/hr wage increase – were made. Saying they had no input is a lie. A flat out lie. They voted along party lines, and then accused the other side of not attempting to make a bi-partisan solution. OK, logic is not one of their strong suits, I suppose. Neither is ethics, but that’s another topic entirely.

I’m thinking about revolutions, and movements, and change. I’m thinking about human nature and culture. I’m thinking about social order. When this nation was formed, we were a ragged collection of British colonies. A bunch of adventurers, explorers, idealists, convicts, and malcontents survived a harrowing trip across the ocean and staggered onto the shores of the New World. Only problem was, it wasn’t new to the people already here, but whatever. They stuck a flagpole in the ground and “claimed” the land for the homeland of Great Britain. Kind of like the way we stick a flag in the pock-marked surface of the Moon. Kind of. We haven’t established a colony, but we’re definitely leaving our territorial mark, even if there’s no breeze for it to gallantly stream. But, as usual, I digress.

Colonialism is a nasty business. First, you have to figure out where the hell you are, and then you have to figure out how the hell to survive. There was no tea and crumpets laid out for the colonists, and some of them were not in very good shape after the ordeal of the voyage. History generally assigns 1620 as the date for the landing at Plymouth Rock, but more recent studies show the first Africans were imported in 1619. Whatever is the actual date of the Pilgrim’s landing in Massachusetts, Africans were not far behind. Histories of African-Americans and European-Americans has been inextricably linked sine then. From that perspective, segregation is rather amusing. There has been change….grudging, hard-fought, but there has been change. There is the physical integration of educational institutions, workplaces, retail establishments. There has not, however, been real integration of perspectives, of core values, of mindsets, of theologies (as though theology should have any form of racial segregation at all). In a way, that’s normative, because we all have to filter our reactions and responses to stimulus through our individual experiences and filters, but when it comes to public accommodations, that’s different. We still find it necessary to enact our own separate but equal environments, mostly due to the extreme effort it takes to do otherwise. And there are fine people, many fine people, on both sides of that fence.

There have been examples of slavery throughout human history – in Africa (Egypt in particular), throughout the MIddle East, the Vikings. A lot of that was dominance of one culture over another, by means of invading armies conquering each other. America escalated slavery to an art form, and established the peculiar institution of chattel slavery, specifically for the involuntary immigrants from Africa. The darker skinned people. From the Dark Continent, or the Southern hemisphere. Others were relegated to the status of indentured servitude, also an oppressed social caste. Indentured servants, however, were not considered property. Just poor and enjoying far less privilege than ruling class members. The Africans, in particular, were treated differently from the very beginning, and it has never changed. It seems to be part of our DNA at this point.

African-Americans were not only considered property, citizenship was not extended to them. Therefore, they had no civil or legal rights. They were not allowed to be incorporated to the evolving culture of the new nation, and could not be educated. So, we had not even progressed to the level of separate but equal yet, and African-Americans were considered legally resident aliens in a sense, with emphasis on the “alien” part. They were not native English speakers, and they were not taught English, so the only valid form of communication was reward and punishment. They were trained like domesticated animals, and their mental capacity was considered similarly. It amuses me to consider the high expectations set for slave obedience, with brutal punishment for non-compliance, when there was an obvious language barrier. In today’s world, a great many people disparage the Spanish-speaking immigrants for continuing to speak their native language, chiding them to learn English, because this is America and we speak English here. Perhaps that is progress? But, even a dog can be taught to understand they are supposed to poop outside, and the Africans were not considered much higher status than a dog, so…no excuse for disobedience. The whip came down early and often to outline the rules, the expectations, and the dominance structure. Black folks learned early on how to pick cotton and tobacco, how to serve their masters food and drink, how to wet nurse other womens’ babies, how to do what they were told. They also learned, way back then, how to keep their hands on the plough where the overseers could see them, how not to make eye contact with authority figures, how to answer yessir and nossir, and how to keep their hands off white women. That’s generational now. Failure to comply has always carried a risk of being killed.

When marchers tried crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, they knew the risk they faced. They understood that law enforcement was not their to protect and serve them. Courage is not the absence of fear, it’s acting in spite of the fear. And in spite of the fear, they did act. Many are still acting. There is still a movement, there is still a revolution. The current resistance is contiguous, though, happening at the same time and in the same place. The resistance that characterized the American Revolution had a bit of lag time, since they were largely based thousands of miles away. American colonies were evolving on their own, and British culture was becoming more and more distant. By the time British armies arrived in the New World to enforce order, the “order” was obsolete. Marching in straight lines and bright red coats didn’t cut it any longer, and sort of like the Capitol Police on January 6 of this year, they were unprepared for the resistance.

So, what brings countrymen to fight against each other? Is it merely political ideology, or is it something deeper? At the very beginning, most conflicts seemed to arise out a battle for resources. When the British attempted to resist American independence, that was about money. There was supposed to be gold here, more money for the Crown. They did the same thing invading the Orient, looking to fill their coffers. Color was really secondary at that point. We’re territorial, and so if you have water over there, and I have none over here, I want your water. There’s actually enough water for us all, but humans – with our superior brains – get into some kind of warped dominance thing (capitalism) where one of us wants ALL the water, and wants to charge you to have some (even if it was yours to star with). And it goes downhill from there. This is the same dynamic of drug cartels and organized crime, and that part know no color, or ethnicity. It’s about dominance and control, but not about color or country. Just power. America has somehow made dominance all about color, from the very beginning of things, and that’s very curious. Poor whites have been treated differently than Black and Brown people in this country, and everyone understands that pecking order. The mantra of “At least you’re not Black” was a real thing, and for some, it still is.

Over the centuries, there have been all kinds of supposedly scientific justifications and rationalizations for relegating darker skinned people to lower classes of citizenship. There has been a concerted effort in America to define Blacks, in particular, to a nearly sub-species categorization, that involves non-standard physical, mental, and even character attributes. Most of that categorization is entirely non-scientific, and entirely subjective. Everybody knows that Black people are lazy. Everybody knows they can dance and play sports better, but they’re not highly intelligent. And of course, everybody knows Black men’s genitals are well endowed, and they spend all their waking hours lusting after white women. Everybody knows that. So, precautions have to be taken, got to protect our women, boys. Our other property…our women. The whole notion of planting one’s flag, literally or proverbially, and claiming ownership of a person, place, or thing strikes me as the stuff of inferiority complexes. It is the stuff of the little kid who gets bullied by the bigger kids and vows to exact revenge.

After watching footage of the insurrection on Jan. 6, and the footage of protest over the summer that followed video footage of the death of George Floyd, I really began to fear that we have lost our collective mind, and soul. Some of what is shown is simply nuts, not the behavior of rational people. Seriously – moose horns and a spear on the floor of the U.S. Senate? You can’t make this shit up. Regardless, I keep reminding myself that yeah, we are nuts, but the first settlers on this supposedly New World were not the best and brightest of Great Britain at the time. They were malcontents and insurgents, criminals, mentally ill, grifters. These were people who had an axe to grind with the monarchy and wanted to get out from under government they said denied them religious freedom, and liberty to live as they wished. They felt oppressed, and when they landed on Plymouth Rock, they said – quite literally – we have arrived. Bow down. And so it was.

Malcolm X once said that WE didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us. Since it’s now been proven that Africans were part of this deal from the very beginning, but never woven into the fabric of the new society, that seems to be literally the case. Looking back on the greatest accomplishments of this nation, however, Blacks were not only present but foundational. Black labor quite literally built the seat of the national government, and that of many states and municipalities. That does not mean there were not white laborers, or other immigrants who participated, but it does mean that Blacks were the group that immigrated first, and remains not fully integrated into the fabric of this country. Plymouth Rock is still atop the apex of the Black community. I was once in a workshop on anti-Blackness, and was part of a small group breakout comprised entirely of African-Americans. We were given a question to discuss – do you think African-Americans in this country have acquired freedom? I was ready to answer yes, of course, because we have case law and slavery was abolished and segregation has been outlawed and we can become educated and live anywhere we’d like (money notwithstanding). The other members of the small group, however, said no, they did not feel as though freedom was a reality. We are still serving a master, but we can leave the plantation, they said. I was somewhat disoriented, but I listened, and the prevailing sentiment was that so many barriers to equal opportunity and equal treatment still exist that make our success dependent on charity, or the kindness of strangers in many cases. When left to their own devices, the ruling class – the master class – is not going to do the right thing, with few exceptions. They have to be forced, or make errors, that allow progress…but then we have to fight to maintain it. The mentality of what is referred to as the 1% remains anti-Black, and that does not equate to Black freedom. Well, damn. Set me straight. I’ve never forgotten that day, and have begun to see things a lot differently since then. And that was before Trayvon Martin, before Michael Brown, before George Floyd.

So. Freedom is indeed a constant struggle. I find myself often in the position of being “the bad Negro” in very liberal leaning crowds, mainly because I can’t keep my mouth shut. My mother always said that my mouth was going to get me killed. Oh, well. I have a t-shirt that says “I’m a Capricorn woman, That means I wear my heart on my sleeve, have a fire in my soul, and a mouth I can’t control”. No truer words were ever spoken. The older I get, the less inclined I am to control my mouth. I try not to purposely hurt people, and sometimes I still lack the courage to say what I really want to say. But more often than not, especially in writing, I have to let it rip. Bottling that stuff up inside is what makes hypertension, and cortisol, and rage. None of that is healthy, none of that is good for me, so…I am rejecting it. Lock, stock, and barrel (although I do not own a rifle). Revolution is messy work, even when you have real-time news. You still don’t know who to believe, and sometimes it feels as though you can’t trust anyone. We’re all scared to death, but we don’t want to die like this. I certainly don’t. In the musical “Hamilton”, after Hamilton is shot by Burr, as his life is beginning to slip away, Hamilton goes into a time-stopping soliloquoy. He says, “America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me”. I would suppose that America sent for all of us who are here, and that we are all the composers of this great piece, that we all have a series of notes to play, and that it will never be finished. We keep looking for an ending, but there will never be one, as long as there is time for one more note, one more reverberation. I suppose the question for each of us will be … will we add harmony, or discord. Will we accidentally sound out on a rest, when there should be silence, or offer no sound when there should be a crescendo? Will we attempt to inappropriately claim the piece as our own, before it is complete? We subscribe to an erroneous concept that everything should have an ending. I contend that is a falsehood. There is a spirituality and immense value in remaining unfinished. That is not a new concept…unfinished symphonies have been performed before, to great acclaim.

Heavens. People are just running this whole Dr. Seuss thing into the ground, hollering about “cancel culture” when they have no idea what “cancel culture” really means. Dr. Seuss is not being cancelled. His work is not being cancelled. A total of six books that he wrote, back when Jesus was still a baby, have been removed from publication. His estate initiated that request, not activists, not Black Lives Matter, not Asian-Pacific Islanders. His estate found it incongruent with his legacy that images viewed as insensitive racial stereotypes in some of his works would continue to be published without modification. There is no change or withdrawal of the remaining voluminous portfolio of his work. Horton will still hear a Who, the Cat in the Hat will still wreak havoc with Thing 1 and Thing 2, and the Grinch will remain the minority leader of the U.S. Senate. Dr. Seuss himself modified a few of the troubling images from other works long before he died, acknowledging changing public mores and simply, having more information.

People have been looking for energy vents to let go of excess lockdown energy for a while. The mass temper tantrum of January 6 was as much a vent as anything else. We’ve been locked down and restricted in many ways for a solid year. We’re grieving…we had no (or seriously muted) Thanksgiving, no Christmas, no New Year’s Eve, no Mardi Gras, and now the sun is coming out and we’re back to looking down the double barrel of beaches and beer. I believe there is actually some despair brewing in people, and having a vaccine rodeo is not really helping. People, some who should know better, are more than willing to call this a wrap, crisis is over, throw off your masks and hit the restaurants, the bars, the beaches, the pool. Thank God almighty, we’re free at last!

Well, it will be interesting to see how this premature unshackling of the masses will pan out. Most health gurus are predicting unwelcome spikes in infection rates, although hopefully the vaccines will stave off increased hospitalization and death rates. I’ve become somewhat of a cynic about public information, so my jury is out on all of it. I’ll get the vaccine when I’m allowed, and then – like with anything else – will take it a day at a time. I’m perfectly fine with continuing this inner sanctum thing for a while longer, ’cause as I’ve been saying from the beginning of this, it’s not the virus that scares me, it’s the poor judgement of my fellow human beings.

So, we’re chomping at the bit, like kids waiting for the school bell on the last day of class before summer break. We’re ready to roll, so until then, we’re going to make use of any distraction possible, by any means necessary. OK, let’s discuss Dr. Seuss a bit more, and whether or not he was being malicious or not, and whether or not all his books should be banned. Banned? Who said anything about banning anything? Six books will not be published any longer. Period. Get a grip, people.

Aside from analyzing Dr. Seuss and cancel culture to death, let’s go to Prince Harry and Megan Markle, and the monarchy of a country that’s not even ours. Let’s talk about Mr. Moose Horns and his organic jail food, and the insurrection, and whether or not the guy with his feet on Nacy Pelosi’s desk should remain in jail. Let’s rake the governor of NY over the coals and try him in the court of public opinion for alleged sexual harassment…is it textbook, or just generic harassment? Compare and contrast, and discuss. And by all means, let’s talk about whether or not the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is not “the best” and should be avoided because it is based on the stem cells of aborted fetuses. Oh, and let’s not forget to accuse the new President of failing to fulfill campaign promises that Congress refused to support – we knew the $15/hour labor rate was doomed in this effort weeks ago. That’s not news. By all means, though, let’s totally avoid getting relief checks into the hands of the people who are desperate for them – Congress people can mentally masturbate for days turning the relief effort upside down and inside out, reading a 680+ page text out loud and gleefully cackling over how far they can go to obstruct the agenda of the President. That’s helpful. Remember, folks – it’s public SERVICE not public HINDRANCE. Who is served by the flexing of tiny muscles over status-quo procedural fluff? Short-sightedness and self-aggrandizement is in the eye of the beholder, apparently.

If we’re going to get out of this deep, dark hole we’re going to have to stay focused, and on point. Yes, I understand many of us are ADD, ADHD, focus-challenged, whatever…but stay with me, people. The point is – the only point is – pandemic response. That’s square zero. It’s not the only square, and yes, there are a lot of other squares to be concerned with, but…if we can’t get clear of this one, we’re not going to get anywhere. I’m very hopeful that death rates from COVID will decline, but if we can’t get vaccines into people, that’s not going to happen. What is nauseating about all of this is the politics. It’s a health crisis, not a political crisis, but it’s been made into serial showdowns of partisan firepower. Stupid. Nobody can vote for you if they’re dead. Nobody is GOING to vote for you if you prevent them from voting at all. Again…get a grip. As my mother would have said, catch a hold of yourself.

There are things on the horizon that need attention, once we can point our eyes in the same direction. Voter suppression is still a reality, and various states are putting forward legislation to further, or at least better, suppress voting. They are trying to eliminate mail-in voting entirely, and refuse to consider automatic voter registration. The effort is concentrated on making voting more difficult, not easier. The will of all the people is not the goal, apparently. The will of the powerful is more the desired outcome. This is not democracy, but then it never was. The Continental Congress was not enabling the will of the people, but of white, male, monied land owners. That’s fine, it’s just part of our history. The point is, though, representative democracy was an aspiration. It was anti-monarchy. I don’t believe the effort to enable the people to speak was supposed to end there. And it hasn’t. The problem is that some are trying to reign in that effort, and it’s not their place to do that. The white, mostly male, monied, land owners are still trying very hard to drive the bus, but that only works if it’s a movie. This is real life, and people have needs, and they don’t all have to agree with the bus driver. Again, public service in a representative democracy would imply that our representatives attempted to honestly sort out and balance the will of ALL the people. It’s not easy. It may be functionally impossible, but there should be a credible attempt. Too many of us have evidence that our voices are ont heard, that we are virtually invisible to our government. Not good.

So what’s a beleaguered elected official to do?
— First, they must toss of selfish aims. They have to understand, pledge, vow their duty to represent the constituency, not themselves, and not their party affiliation.
— Second, they have to form relationships with the constituency so they understand and know the issues that affect people’s lives. The knowledge of how lives are affected shouldn’t come from lobbyists, or academes, or associates. If someone needs help, you don’t help them in the manner YOU are most comfortable with, you help them in the manner they need, at least to the best of your ability. When the house falls down, you can’t send thoughts and prayers and say you didn’t know the builder wasn’t licensed and did a bad job.
— Third, and not necessarily finally, they have to be able to re-evaluate and re-start. Even the NFL does that…”after further review, the call is reversed”. Things change. Say you made a mistake, or it looks different now, or this isn’t working and we need to try something else.

Damn – why is that so hard? We are not supposed to be electing demagogues, or demigods. We’re supposed to be electing human beings who want to help us share a common good. Good. That’s the goal – the common good. Or so I think. I’ve been wrong before. But regardless…we can’t go back and have a re-do on the last 400 years. I do think, however, we can maybe stop the missteps. Admit they are missteps, and let’s pause a moment. Like when babies learn how to walk. They have to take a second and get their balance, then make another hesitating step, not quite sure of how it’s going to turn out. That’s about where we are, although we are toddlers with checkbooks, cars, alcohol, and firearms. Scary. I just hope our aim is a little better than the average 2-year old.

Grief is a terrible and wonderful force of transformation,. It is terrible and wonderful for the one we’ve lost, and it is terrible and wonderful for the one who remains. So far, nature willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ve only had the experience of being the one who remains. Left to tell, I am left to tell. Left To Tell is a book I read a while ago, by a survivor of the Ruwandan holocaust, Imaculee’ Ilibagiza. It’s an unbelievable story of the author’s incredible fight to survive, hidden in a small bathroom with seven other women while rebels searched for them outside. Her ordeal lasted eight months, during which time nearly a million of her fellow citizens were brutally killed, including her family. The rebels knew she was nearby, and she could hear them calling her name as they searched. It was a miracle that she wasn’t found. When she was finally able to get out of the country, she weighed 89 pounds.

Imaculee’ did not end her story with her exit from the torn land of her birth; she goes on to describe the aftermath, the underlying causes, and the reconciliation. In recovery, we are encourage to tell our stories using the simple formula of how it was, what happened, and what it is like now. This is more or less the mechanism utilized in the book, as Imaculee’ describes life prior to the holocaust, her parents, her brothers, her neighbors. Political events changed everything, and nearly took her life. But she was left to tell, and tell she did. Her grief is terrifyingly immense. And still, she continues. She takes being left to tell as a responsibility, as an honor. I am more than sure her recovery is ongoing, but she is going. Her life goes on.

When I have lost people who mattered to me, and even a couple I didn’t think mattered, I have been lost for a minute. I’ve felt that I had to recreate myself in some way, to reorient myself to the rest of the world, minus the energy of the one no longer here. I suppose the first truly significant loss that made a deep impact was my grandmother. I’ve recalled many times my early childhood as the only grandchild, on the maternal side at least, and the fairy-tale world of a princess that I lived. It didn’t look the same way a Disney princess looked, but I was a princess nonetheless. I had 100% of my grandmother’s attention, and I thought she was my mother for a time. My mother was quite ill following my birth and shortly thereafter, so Grandmother did all the necessary things for me. She taught me how to put together jigsaw puzzles, she taught me how to play records on my first record player, she gave me the unconditional love and safety that a child requires. She took me to kindergarten, got me dressed and drove me there. It was an adventure every morning. When I was a little older, she taught me how to tie my shoes and she combed my hair. She gave me my first books. I am sure my mother did things as well, but my memory is overflowing with my grandmother. I understood very well that I was loved. I understood very well that I was valued, and that she would never let anything happen to me. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that, in that way, since.

My grandmother died when I was eleven. We had long since moved away from that safe haven, because that’s what my parents believed they were supposed to do. My father had finally gotten a decent job teaching, and my mother was doing…my mother. She was anxiety ridden, but she had a small child, so motherhood was her gig. It was always a really big deal when my grandmother and my great-aunts came to visit, usually for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. Christmas meant my birthday, too, so I was always ecstatic. She had this little photo book with pictures of me, and it had the words “Grandma’s Brag Book” printed on the outside. It was blue, and well worn. It was just a normal thing that was part of her, it was kind of always nearby when she was nearby. On one trip, we all went to a favorite restaurant to eat, and I noticed that she had something weird looking about her hand. I said something about it while we were sitting at the table, and she said not to worry, it was just where her purse strap had pressed into the skin and it would be fine. I didn’t think anything more of it, and we went on laughing and everything WAS fine.

A couple of months later, my mother got a phone call, on that huge rotary dial phone we had that weighed a couple of pounds. It was my great-aunt, who lived with my grandmother, and she told my mother that my grandmother had been taken to the hospital. I didn’t get the whole story at that moment, but later I learned that my great-aunt, who was a registered nurse, had come home to find my grandmother slumped in a chair with a bloated and painful belly, running a fever, and very weak. She got my grandmother to the hospital, and they immediately scheduled an exploratory surgery. Once inside the abdomen, doctors discovered advanced ovarian cancer. She had had one ovary removed many years before that, but the other seemed to have gone south. The cancer had metastasized, and her colon was severely affected. They removed the uterus and the remaining ovary, but…the prognosis was terminal. They gave her less than six months. She went through some chemotherapy, but she suffered. She was a beautiful woman, and by the time she died, she wasn’t so much, except to me. My mother was beside herself. I felt like an afterthought, except to my grandmother. I didn’t know what to do.

My grandmother lasted a little longer than six months, I believe…maybe closer to nine, but it was hell for all involved. I was in the sixth grade, and had just gone to a new school, so I was already off balance. My mother was understandably preoccupied with her mother, and she was away tending to my grandmother a lot, so it was me and my father. That part went surprisingly well – my father and I really did just fine. We didn’t have my mother intervening and telling us how we should be acting and relating to each other. One morning, when I was waking up and still in bed, my father came in and just stood in the doorway, silently. That really wasn’t very unusual, he was usually a man of few words. I guess I was feeling like something wasn’t right, because I looked up, and he said, “Your grandmother is dead, baby.” I said nothing. I just nodded, and he faded away. I rolled over, not knowing if I was supposed to cry or what the hell I was supposed to do. I think I did shed a few tears, but I distinctly remember feeling nothing. Absolutely nothing. There was no sound, no light, there was just nothingness. I thought it had been weird that the day before, at the end of the school day, the nun had said “Let’s pray for Ann’s grandmother when we do our closing prayer.”. I thought that was a little weird, but didn’t think all that much of it. I had been offering up my grandmother for the closing prayer over the months she had been ill, so, it was only a little odd that the sister would do it for me. What I found out much later was that when the good sister said that, my grandmother had just died. It was a bit after 3pm, and my grandmother died at 3:10 or something that day, so my father or mother must have called the school to let them know. That was usually the way it went with me, a kid wasn’t told things until later, because either we didn’t need to know or we couldn’t handle it.

I remember during the time of my grandmother’s illness, nobody had told me that she had cancer, until one of my great-aunts told me directly when I was stressing a bit about when my grandmother was going to come home and be well and do fun stuff again. I knew something bad was happening, but didn’t understand what. My great-aunt told me about how people got upset when it was cancer, but there was medicine and she could get better. When I confronted my mother about that, and why I didn’t know that it was cancer, my mother was livid. She was angry with my great-aunt for telling me. I was glad she had told me, because I felt a lot more like part of the damned family once I knew why everybody was losing their minds for no apparent reason. There was a reason. And I started grieving then, because somewhere in there, I knew there was no hope. I didn’t exactly know what death really meant but I knew it was not something I was going to like very much.

So, my grandmother died in October of 1971. I grieved. I not only missed her, I missed the way life had been while she was alive. I missed going to visit her and going to sleep at the kitchen table late into the night while she and my mother talked, and talked, and talked. My mother was … my mother when they were together. She was nurturing, and peaceful, and she felt safe…which meant I felt safe. My father and my mother were OK during those visits. No fighting, no accusations, no big whoop. It felt like a normal family. When my grandmother died, all of that went away. Christmas and my birthday was just a couple of months later, and I knew it wasn’t going to be anything to really look forward to, as I usually did. I was very sad, and not just because everyone else was sad. I realized that I loved my grandmother more than life itself, and that she had given me some kind of purpose in my short life. I didn’t quite know what the hell I was supposed to be doing any longer, and I definitely didn’t feel as though I had any reason to be doing it. When my mother discussed her, I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to remember anything. I think I may have been a little angry that she was gone, but I felt that I didn’t have any right to feel that because again, my grief and my feelings were more or less an afterthought to my mother’s, to my great-aunts’, to just about everyone else. I don’t remember dealing with my aunt, my mother’s sister, or really my father very much during that time, but I imagine they had their own grieving to deal with. I hid my feelings, for the most part, because I didn’t feel they were valid. There seemed to be some kind of script for how you were supposed to act and when you were supposed to cry and when you were supposed to be quiet and stay out of the way. I stayed out of the way quite a bit.

I tried for a number of years to keep my grandmother’s memory alive…I had a bracelet of hers that I wore for a time. I lost it in the mall, at the arcade, when I was in college. I am still angry with myself about that. We had pictures of her, and I had stories my mother told me, but not much in the way of material things. My mother and her sister eventually sold the house after my great-aunt died years later, and so now…my grandmother and those memories and that feeling of being special and valued and safe exist only in my mind. I have one very special picture of her, and my great-aunts, that my mother tried to take from me when she was here with me after my surgery in 2005. Fortunately, she thought better of it and left it with me, and I still have it. Good thing, too, because had she taken it, it would have been destroyed along with everything else in that house when Hurricane Katrina struck a few months later. It’s a picture of my grandmother and her two sisters, my great-aunts, and in a little picture tucked away on a side table, is a picture of my mother and my aunt as a seven-year-old and a two-year-old. That’s what I grieve. Another world, another time, but all essential to me being here right here and right now. Why did it have to be so hard?

So. That’s the first big grief I can remember. I sometimes believe that everything else after that struck a discordant tone on an out of tune instrument that didn’t so much resonate but was absorbed. When a piano key hammer comes down on a string that is in tune, stretched taughtly against the sound board, it resonates. The string vibrates, the wood resonates, and there is vibration at a frequency that registers in our senses as tone. Same with the human voice, and the vocal chords, or any stringed instrument. When the string is too loose, or has lost its ability to vibrate, it doesn’t resonate with anything, and we don’t hear it. Any low frequency oscillation is merely deadened by the surrounding wood. That’s what I imagine emotional numbness looks like in the world of vibration. Deadened, muted tone where there was once resonance. When this happens with a stringed instrument, it’s time to tighten the strings or replace them. I’m a little unsure of how to replace the strings of the heart, so that vibration and resonance is returned. I don’t think cardiac bypass is concerned with any of that functioning, but perhaps I’ll begin using the visual analogy of a musical instrument to depict the music of the heart. I can see tuning as a possibility, but replacing the strings may be a bigger deal. I’ve got to give that some thought. It’s important, apparently, because I’ve been left to tell.