Your Mother Is Hurting

True -or- False?

Things that are not living cannot change.

“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving. In my thoughts, I have seen rings of smoke through the trees, and the voices of those who stand looking. It makes me wonder… it really makes me wonder.”

Your mother is hurting.

I guess I was lucky that I didn’t fall tumbling down an almost sheer granite cliff like a rag doll after climbing up nearly to the top in leather-soled cowboy boots en route to Sonora Pass in the Sierras along CA 108 in October ’08. Mom & Dad would’ve been very saddened. Instead, I got to see them die. Well, almost. They were both “on their death bed” when I last kissed them both — Daddy died a few years before Mother. I saw to it that Dad was honored for his sacrifice to the nation that gave him so much in return for a couple years of his life on the high seas at war. I ordered him incinerated, and our Uncle Sam paid for it. The Stars and Stripes are all that remain of him, save the ashes in the National Cemetery’s columbarium. Thanks for your service. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to say?

Mom bled out subsequent to an unattended fall at home. But with numerous transfusions of PRBCs, whole blood, plasma, and other fluids, several EGDs, staples, and the magic of intubation and ventilators, she was kept alive, and cognizant, long enough to reply to her ICU Nurse who asked her “Who is that man?,” saying that “He’s my first-born son!,” which was how I introduced myself to her. GI bleeds are fucking weird-ass things. Her little 80+ year old body just couldn’t take any more insults. The mortician, hair dresser & makeup artist did a good job on her corpse. “She looks so peaceful,” said every relative with whom I shared her post mortem photo. She’s been in the cold, cold ground less than a year.

One needn’t “be on something” in order to see beyond the here-and-now. Like prophets of old, our science fiction writers foretold the future. Buck Rogers free-floating in space has been reality for several decades. Dick Tracy’s wrist communicator is now the Apple Watch. And cooking with radio waves at the speed of light is now considered passé, and taken for granted. But we’re still not utilizing the most abundant, ultimate renewable fuel — hydrogen, in fuel cells — and instead watch silently as our Black brothers die in landslides and collapses as they scrape the Earth for cobalt to make batteries for EVs for the wealthy and privileged.

In 1960, Clive Staples Lewis wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

Whether there are, or not, such places is beside the point, which is that love is a vitalizing preservative, and alienation is a sure-fire way to deteriorate. Love is the only thing that multiplies the more it’s given away. And right now, it’s all about how much material goods and wealth one can amass, being enabled & empowered by legislation. Remember how Walt Heisenberg in Breaking Bad, all alone in New Hampshire, thousands of miles from home, burned his money just to keep warm?

But, there are more of us, than there are of them, and We The People have the last say in how this place is run, not just 5 black-robed jurists. It’s time for change.