I have recently been listening to Barack Obama’s A Promised Land on Audible, read by the author. In a couple of places he refers to the “Obama Death Panel” rumors that according to Wikipedia and a quick google search were initiated by you in 2009. As a quick reminder, I give you this quote from your facebook post dated August 7, 2009: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
Each time he mentioned these alleged death panels I found myself crying, needing to stop listening, to step away from the book for a bit. I am a slow learner, so it’s taken me a few years (ok, a decade-ish) to piece together a timeline that leads back to your Facebook post.
I am not certain why you chose to perpetuate these lies, but I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know that your words had a very direct consequence in my life and on the lives of others in my family and my community.
My mother was born in 1943 in western Massachusetts, the child of a staunchly Republican Anglo-Saxon family. It would not surprise me in the least to discover that members of my mother’s family were involved with the local KKK. Yes, we have local white supremacist groups. One would think that with cows and tobacco and maple syrup, they would have been too busy to organize around fear of anyone not white and Christian, but they made the time.
Pris as a teenager
But she was a productive member of society. She birthed and reared a daughter (who went on to have two children of her own, author three knitting books, become a bleeding-heart liberal, and work against everything her mother believed she stood for). She worked hard, tirelessly it seemed, sometimes as many as 80 hours a week. She was a loving (and possibly I might argue excessively) doting grandmother to her own grandchildren, her great-granddaughter, and the children of anyone with whom she came into close contact. “The Nana”. It was probably her most beloved role. She gave when she could, what she could, to those she cared for. She had at her core a soft heart, although at times she was very clearly what she had been reared to be - a paranoid, defensive politically conservative racist.
Nana with her great-granddaughter, and the author
Her life was not an easy one. Mental illness is relentless. Underfunded, under diagnosed, under treated and deeply misunderstood. Sometimes loops would play in her mind, driving her behavior, spinning her out into paranoia. She attempted suicide more than once. She engaged in self-abuse with razor blades, and was treated with a range of pharmaceuticals and talk therapy, including a 20+ year relationship with one shrink characterized by so much transference it would have made an exceptional case study for someone.
Nana rolling eggs in the grass in happier times
It was into this damaged and struggling mind that a thought was delivered in 2009, first made public by you in your Facebook post, then picked up and amplified by conservative media and legislators. “They”, Obama and his …evil henchpersons? Death squad? Who the hell did you think was coming?…were coming for grandma. Grandma, and all the kids with Down Syndrome and, by inference, all the other white people deemed unfit in the new world order.
My aunt could not stop whispering it, primed for fear and hate as she was by her own childhood, marked by the paranoia of WWII. And my mother could not stop listening, clenching her round white hands, looking at me with her brown child eyes, just this side of a sob as she whispered “They will get rid of me first, Melissa. I am useless, and a burden. It will be like the Jews all over again, only they will be coming for ME.”
Sometimes it takes me a while to put things together, time-wise. I would like to think that this is because I exist out of the temporal, so time lacks meaning because it has no beginning and no end. Really it just means I am slow on the uptake. Summer of 2009. Remember that, it’s important.
I struggled to convince her that this wasn’t real. That it was a lie, that it did not reflect what I knew of HR3200, not that I had read the whole thing mind you, but as a result of this nonsense I had read the section alleged to contain this infamous death panel crap - and it was indeed crap. All I saw was good. Exactly the kind of thing my mother, had she not been filled with conspiracy theories and paranoia, would have championed - a change in payment systems that would allow physicians to be compensated for having important end of life discussions with their patients, rather than a brief “you have this, and it’s terminal, and there’s nothing I can do. Goodbye”.
She did not believe me, and began to plan accordingly.
At first she asked me to draw up all of her insulin on hand into a few syringes, or maybe I could get her a bigger syringe and she could just use one, in case she passed out before getting to inject the remainder.
I declined. I encouraged her to reach out to her doctor for help. I encouraged her to make contact with the mental health professional she had been referred to after the death of her own psychologist. I called her doctor myself and reported her suicidal ideation, her various plans. I let the carers at the assisted living facility where she resided know. Both contacted her, she denied her plans, dismissed me to them as having “misunderstood her", and on we struggled.
Months passed, and the plan changed with the seasons, my attempts to change the course she had set were undeterred both within the system and without. Maybe an overdose of narcotics or anti-anxiety medication would work? I told her she didn’t have enough on hand to be lethal. Maybe she could stop taking her insulin and over-eat or starve herself to death? I told her how painful that would be.
Every day she was fearful. Some days I chided her for being paranoid. Some days I reminded her of her great-granddaughter, then living in Texas with her parents on a military base. I reminded her of her grandchildren, grown but still present. None of them, she said, needed her. They had me, after all, and would be fine. She didn’t want to be here any more. She didn’t want someone else controlling the manner of her demise. She wanted to control it herself. The idea of a death panel was imbedded. Impossible to shift.
I tried the medical route again, reaching out to her primary care physician to let them know that regardless of what she claimed, she did indeed have a plan to end her own life, although it shifted sometimes daily. Once during an emergency room visit I let the staff know that she had suicidal ideation, and a plan (or, depending on the day, many plans)… They called in a psychologist who interviewed her - and once again she dismissed me as having misunderstood her. In the hall, the woman told me she believed me, but that if my mother would not talk, she couldn’t make her. I was advised that she was, on paper anyway, competent. Any attempt I made to intervene legally would very likely fail and I risked destroying whatever warped relationship we had remaining. She was, in short, too good at gaming the system.
She verbally contracted with her physician and with me to replace the Prozac she was on with another anti-depressant. Maybe, it was thought, a change in her medication regimen would snap her brain chemistry out of whatever hole it had fallen into. Maybe then we could get her into some kind of a place where she could get the help she so desperately needed.
At the end of her Prozac taper sometime in 2010, she was presented with a prescription for a new antidepressant - I don’t remember which, and really it is irrelevant, because she simply refused to take it. That, and all of her other meds except Premarin. No insulin. No anti-depressants. No Neurontin for the painful diabetic neuralgia. Nothing.
She confided in me that although this plan was not her first choice, it would have to do if she wanted to avoid the Obama Death Panels. And I was to be consoled, she insisted, by her $25,000 life insurance policy. $25,000. She valued her life that cheaply.
I won’t go into the details of her ultimate demise - it was a fiasco, a horrible mess to witness, that ultimately ended in November of 2011 when she died, much less peacefully than she might have desired.
And this is where I put things together in a time line that somehow leads back to you, Sarah. Not that you are the only cause, not the you are the prime suspect in a death that took the universe 68 years to accomplish, but that you were a cause.
Your words, your lies, amplified by divisive politics and a media unbalanced by the impending repeal of the fairness doctrine, had very direct consequences for very real people. My mother is dead. I watched her kill herself slowly. Her granddaughter watched. Her grandson watched. Her friends, her family…they all had to watch this unnecessary story play out before their eyes all because you allowed ignorance and fear to rule your mind and your tongue.
Like I said, I do not hold you personally responsible for my mother’s death. Clearly she was unbalanced, and struggled against the demons of mental illness for all of her adult life. Something, I am sure, would ultimately have triggered her to end her life…there is a percentage of mental illness that ends in suicide, and the probability that she would be in that number was always pretty real in my world.
But I do hold you, and everyone who amplified you, accountable for your words and the impact they have in the mind of the susceptible - the poor, the ignorant, the fearful, the damaged. You weren’t, as it were, the shooter. But you did sell the gun, with no background check.
Nana in a box, with the ironic distribution device
And I thought you should know.
