No rest for the weary. Not today.

I'm bone tired, for personal, professional, and political reasons. I’m angry, and not a little afraid. 

But I'm not giving up.

If the Continental Army had taken a negative attitude, we'd all be British. If the Union Army had hopelessly laid down their arms, we'd be living in the Confederate States of America. If the Allies had cowered and thrown up their hands as the Nazis encroached, well, God only knows...but, from the history I've studied, and the stories my Greatest Generation parents told me, going to war was the only option, if we were to destroy Hitler's dream of world domination.

They didn't have social media on which to debate and denigrate and complain with ugly rhetoric and fatuous memes. They weren't bombarded with conflicting, confusing 24-hour cable news commentary designed to manipulate minds and grab ratings rather than inform and educate. My father was drafted, and gladly served as an intercept operator in the U.S. Army, even though it meant putting his lucrative career on hold. My mother, a young and beautiful woman who was just starting to find her way in the world, stepped into coveralls and stuffed shells with gunpowder for the U.S. Navy. They, and millions of other citizens, did their duty as proud and loyal Americans. These people suffered and sacrificed in ways the current culture seems to forget in this Age of Entitlement.

In the words of Sean Connery’s Jim Malone, when Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness was charged with taking down Robert De Niro’s Al Capone, “What are you prepared to do?”

We are facing (no, we're smack in the middle of) a terrifying Trumpublican coup, orchestrated by the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, delivered by a lying, cheating, narcissistic reality show host, and bolstered by a sycophantic Congress filled with old white Republican men and righteously indignant Democrats. There are good, decent, hardworking humans in the U.S. Capitol right now...but in this climate, even the best of them are looking like neutered buffoons.

Like our forefathers and foremothers, it's up to us to fight in whatever ways are available to us to preserve, protect and defend our country. I'm not advocating the bearing and discharging of arms, mind you. I'm saying we show up in the real world with our real voices however we can: protest, march, call, write, and (most important of all) gather our friends and neighbors of all stripes to VOTE OUT THE EVIL MEN AND WOMEN WHO PRETEND TO REPRESENT US, in favor of those who represent the best interests of ALL Americans. We must reject the wealthy, xenophobic, homophobic, racist misogynists who currently occupy our White House and every state house and city hall in our country, every one of them who feeds garbage to the masses in a perverse, and deadly, power play.

As President Obama first said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention (and repeated many times after), "Don't boo. Vote." To those who didn’t listen to him, and are complaining now: you helped get us where we are.

Are you listening now?

Don’t whine. VOTE.

My Valiant Mom

She screams herself out of her sleep. Sometimes, it’s pain from the phantom limb, sometimes it’s pain in the existing limb; sometimes, it’s both.

And sometimes, it’s from the nightmares. She’s in pure terror. I don’t know if it’s the memory of being beaten by her mother when she was a girl, or the memory of being raped by two men when she was 91, and I don’t ask. But she’s clearly trying to get away, and she’s screaming.

I run to her every time, in the middle of the day, or the middle of the night. I find her leaping out of bed in her sleep, and I get there just in time to keep her from falling. I bring her a heating pad to calm the nerves in her leg, I talk her down from the physical pain, or the psychological disturbance, or both. Mostly, I just say, "You're okay, Mom. You're here." And she sleeps.

She has started to thank me profusely. She says, “I don’t know how you got to be such a good person,” or “You do so many nice things for me,” or "You're so sweet." Things she's rarely, if ever, said to me in my lifetime. I think it has taken her this long to learn how to express her love, to realize that she is loved, that she deserves love. I think her defenses have been stripped bare.

Her mind is still active and relatively clear, but she’s barely eaten in months. Chocolate Ensure and whole milk, and maybe a bite or two of food a day, have kept her alive all this time. We can still talk and laugh, we can still discuss our memories of Dad and our remarkable life with him. But her hearing is less than half of what it was, so she can't listen to his recordings, the music that has sustained her for over 70 years.

She is quite literally skin and bones. She barely bumps her leg on her wheelchair and bleeds, and I dress the wounds on her limb that used to have a twin, that ran after me when I was little, that walked every inch of Manhattan and Paris, that climbed tree branches, and played golf. When I change her pajama top, I see her protruding spine, looking like that of a starving child in a third world country, or the cautionary photos of anorexic women here in the first world. Her body is failing, and she mentions it occasionally. New for a woman who, as many times as she's faced it, really doesn't like to talk about death.

“I’m drying up,” she says softly. “Am I floating away?” She’s never before expressed this, and I don’t have the words to respond. I just hug her gently, tell her I love her, roll her to the bathroom because she’s becoming too weak to do it on her own. I replace the pee pads on her bed, and give her fresh protective underwear (“Don’t call them diapers!” she warns) when she doesn’t make it. She’s embarrassed, she apologizes to me, and I say she doesn’t need to. This is life, this is love, this is sacred service. “You did this for me when I was little,” I say. “It’s my turn to do it for you.” And she thanks me, like a shy child.

"I don't feel old. Do I seem old?"
"Well, Mom, your body is 94. But your mind isn't old."
"Oh, well, that's all that counts."
We smile at each other, knowing.

Bit by bit, moment by moment, I’m losing my brilliant, witty, proud, fiercely independent mother, my best friend, my chief confidante, the person with whom I’ve experienced and endured so much, the one person in my life who knows the most about me, who’s known me the longest. And it feels like I’m losing part of myself.

I don't cry in front of her. I save it for others, for later.

I'm in pain, too, physically and emotionally, and I'm exhausted; but I move through it. I depend on the Eastern philosophies that have gotten me this far. I'm grateful to have many years of sobriety. My closest friends know I'll need them to draw me a little closer after Mom departs. They also know I'll need space and time.

I hope I'll have at least as much time as Mom has had, and at least half her incredible will. I don't have a child to care for me, so it would be best if my elder years were easier than hers. But there's no way of knowing. There's only this moment, in which I'm too busy to think about how much I'll miss her when she's no longer here.

Sometimes, when Mom’s abandoned Southern Baptist teachings surface, she says philosophically, “It’s the Plan.” I like to think that comforts her somewhere deep, where no one but God can see.

Anything that comforts her, comforts me.