Wounds

To say that I have avoided this moment for over a year would be an understatement. I do not enjoy this part of Halloween. Painting wounds and gore makes me extremely uncomfortable, no matter how unrealistic. 

I believe I’ve got a good reason.

My mother was “a cutter” in the vernacular of the day. I don’t know what the term is now. For a while it was self abuse. She would use various tools to cut into the skin of her arms, thighs, abdomen and breasts. 

I’m not telling tales out of school - this is information that she willingly (at times almost bragging) shared with people who asked about her scars (including my very small children - without my consent or knowledge - for which I harbor a grudge that cannot be resolved).

I don’t get what you all see in gore, and I think it’s because I saw it myself, regularly, over a half a decade. I think I was around 15 the first time she cut that I knew of it. I do not think it was the first time. 

We argued over my getting a ride to driver’s ed with the mom of another student. My mother insisted that we didn’t “know” these people, an I insisted that it was a MOM driving her KID to driver’s ed, a mom with enough resources to have her child enrolled in a private girl’s school in Springfield, and likely kidnapping an additional teenager from a socially disadvantaged situation wouldn’t be high on her list of priorities. 

There was a lot of screaming. Me insisting my father had paid for the class and I was going if I had to walk, and her insisting I was not getting in the car with “a stranger”. 

I won when Debbie’s mom pulled up in a beat down brown Rabbit, and I climbed in the back. My mother threw her dinner plate at me as I exited. I heard it hit the door. I think Debbie drove, and I was so jealous. I was only allowed to drive with my father in his huge work vehicles. 

The Boston and Maine railroad would not have approved.

When I returned home it was extremely quiet in the apartment. Extremely, eerily quiet.

I found my mother in the little powder room, blood in Dixie cups in a row on the sink, a shard of broken china nearby. My mother stirred when I shook her. I thought she was dead, she was so pale. There was so much blood - in the row of tiny cups, on the wall, the floor, the toilet, all over her. A string of horizontal slashes went up her forearm.

Her eyes fluttered and she slurred “Lissa. Look what you made me do. Why do you make me do things like this? You need to clean it up.”

I do not remember crying or responding. I don’t remember how I got her wrapped up and into bed - I was about 95# and she was closer to 200#. I do not remember cleaning up.

I do remember that on the morning she asked me how many cups there were, and where I had put the plate shard.

Later the weapon of choice shifted to single edge razors, and the area expanded from the arms onto anyplace she could reach. Later I would learn not to clean up after her. I would be asked not to help her. I would eventually learn to call her shrink and rat her out and let him “handle it”. This often involved midnight taxi rides to the ER, with me loading her into the cab and him paying the bill. I did have to help with dressing changes at times, and I almost always cleaned up because I just couldn’t let it sit there.

He, the shrink, said it was not my responsibility. But I never got over part where I believed it was my fault. I still believe it, deep down. She would remind me that I had “started it” that night I went to driver’s ed. 

As I painted these scratches a voice deep in my memory slurred “Lissa. Why do you make me do these things?” Well, one and done my friends. One. And. Done.  

So face painters of the world, and the Connecticut River valley in particular, enjoy your gore. I’ll be over here painting cute ghosts and unicorns in witch hats, grinning candy corn, and a skull or two. 

Recently Discovered

 I just found this, written when I was early in (undiagnosed, because they said I was "too young") peri-menopause, life was a cascading cluster of craziness, and I often felt very out of control. I typed it up and am sharing it now, almost 40 years after the original event and 20 after the second event recounted in this missive. 

Enjoy!

When I was a very young mother (18), my grandmother, who I am certain was convinced that I was inadequate as a mother would appear at my door with food products in unusually large quantities.

She was a member of a local food program that served the elderly, gifting its members with bulk quantities of common standard American grocery items: a #10 can of peanut butter, for example. At the end of the program day, large quantities of food remained unclaimed, as local seniors struggled to get their heads around uses for such large amounts of food. At this point, Gram would step forward and say “My granddaughter can use that.” 

Maybe she thought I had some skills after all.

The following morning she would appear on my doorstep with things like 5 pound boxes of elbow macaroni, or giant uncut logs of American cheese food, or - my favorite - the #10 can of grape juice concentrate. Often included in these deliveries would be a large box of powdered milk, clearly labeled “USDA FOOD PROGRAM” on the side. The boxes stood nearly 18” high. 

I was skeptical about some of these food gifts. A #10 can of peanut butter for example…that is a lot of sandwiches. I made cookies, I made more sandwiches, it was the can that had no end. This was long before I knew the value of peanut butter in, say, an African stew or Asian sauce. But I did my best to use what was given to me. A penny saved is a penny earned. Waste not, want not. And so forth.

I found uses for the pasta and cheese - endless mac and cheese, but it freezes in a pinch. I even managed to make enough grape jelly (from concentrate!) to outlast the peanut butter. 

But the milk. The milk posed a problem for me. I am fundamentally opposed to “just add water” food. I let the grape juice slide, this was the era of juice from concentrate. I am also opposed to foods that refuse to do what the label says they will do - that is to say, dissolve in water. 

I tried everything. 

Shaking, whisking, cold water, hot water, warm water. I tried starting with a low water-to-milk ratio to make a paste that I could then thin into something resembling milk. In the end I had, every single time, I had thin milky water topped with curd-like clumps of undissolved bits that were mostly fine in a recipe, but wholly unacceptable when poured over my toddler’s morning cereal. 

Once, in a final attempt to make the milk obey it’s own directive, I placed the requisite amounts of powder and water into my blender. This was long ago, when my blender was a department store model. Nothing powerful, just a 1980’s household blender. I put the cap on, turned the knob to the highest number, and hit “blend”.

Within seconds my counter was awash in a slippery mess, a raging tidal wave of foam, perched delicately atop a thin layer of milky water. 

It was everywhere. I grabbed containers of every size and shape, and with my hands I scooped the offending slurry into what would hold it. A 5-quart stock pot seemed a good choice. 

Unwilling to accept defeat, I carefully cleaned the counter and pondered with to do with the products of my endeavor. Taking a funnel I poured most of the liquid product into the one-quart glass bottle my grandmother had generously provided for such purpose. I held back that foam with my hand.

The foam. So much foam. Slimy, dense…there was no choice. Down the drain it went. 

Time passes, years go slowly (or quickly) by, and hopefully we live and learn.

Or maybe we do not.

Around 2008, with no kids at home to speak of, I had returned to powdered milk as a stand-by. Not the cheap kind in the 18” tall USDA box, oh no. Bob’s Red Mill Organic Nonfat Milk Powder is what you would find in my cupboard. Neither of us drank fluid milk. so it made no sense to have it on hand. A container in the cupboard of powder, however, can be a lovely stand-in. 

Some things never change, and powdered milk is one of those things. Using a recycled glass bottle obtained from a local dairy, I combined 1/2 cup of powder and 3.5 cups of water, per package instructions, and shock them up. I shook and I shook and I shook, to no avail. There, perched atop the thin, watery, whitish liquid sat those unhappy curds in my “whey”.

Usually I can let things like this go. It isn’t, after all, “real” milk, right? It is a facsimile. I was not going to drink it. I may put some over salt pork, onion and clams in a stock pot. I may pour some over chicken and mushrooms in a crock pot. I may make my favorite rhubarb tapioca. The lumps should, I told myself, should not matter.

Except on this day, for some reason, they did. When everything feels chaotic and dramatic, the soft flow of smooth, un-lumpy milk is soothing. No lumps means something has gone right, for a change. 

Have I mentioned that I am a slow learner?

Frustrated by the lumps, I poured the mixture into the smaller of my two Vita-mix (1380 watts!) containers. I told myself that a quick whiz on low would solve the problem. “Just variable speed 1 or 2.” I told to myself.

The next thing you know I am at variable speed 9, holding the lid firmly on with one hand, insisting in my head that this time, just this one time, there will be NO LUMPS in my stupid powdered milk. “So what” I thought “if there’s a little foam?”

Removing the container from the base of the Vita-mix, hand still clamped on the lid, I noted that the foam had completely filled the container, bottom to top, and was oozing a bit from the lid.

Undeterred, right there on my counter top I brazenly removed the lid. 

And I watched, feeling a bit stunned by the sheer quantity of cascading foam and thin milk pouring across my counter, precisely as it had 20 years earlier. 

I grabbed towels. I grabbed the other Vita-mix jug and the one quart glass milk jug and a funnel and quickly distributed the mess as evenly as possible between them. 

As I cleaned up my mess I thought a lot about irony and the timing of this minor kitchen disaster. This was, indeed, a chaotic season of my life. Hot flashes, brain fog, kids gone…and we were back to cascades of foamy powdered milk.

I wondered as I scooped the slimy mess remaining on the counter into any available container if I were, indeed, capable of learning.

The fluid milk quickly sank to the bottom of each vessel, just as it had in 1987, leaving behind towers of useless foam. Or maybe not useless. Maybe THIS time I would find a use for the foam.

I glanced around the kitchen and spied my coffee maker, half empty pot in place, still warm from breakfast. 

I grabbed mugs, very one I could find, and did the only thing I could think of.

I made lattes. No matter that I was the only person home to drink them, I made them anyway. 

A row of coffee cups, each with a perfectly delightful, cinnamon-dusted tower of foam on top.

I lifted the first one to my lips and drank. 

Yes, I can learn. It may take a while, a really long while, and it may be a damned ugly process, but in the end, when life hands you foam? 

Make lattes.

Thinking Trad Wife? Things to Consider

Purely anecdotal thoughts from someone who's now a grandmother, who lived the life you are aspiring to.

First this - I believed in the family structure practiced by my ancestors, with god at the head, the husband over the wife, the wife under the husband and the kids under that. Umbrella of authority, as it were. It sounds pretty simple and logical right? I mean, in all areas of life, or most anyway, we seem to have a hierarchy of power. Someone is at the top. Someone is in the middle. Someone does the dishes. And so on.

I did not interrogate it. It simply was the space I inhabited. My mother mostly stayed home, my father worked. Most of my friends mothers stayed home as well, or had part time work scheduled around their kids, who generally took center stage. The home was where children were reared. If my own home was not particularly effective, that was a failing of my mother's mental status, and bore no reflection on the system as a whole. It must work, and we had just stepped away and needed to get back to it.

Then I became a single mother of two. Because life happens. I had no job skills, and no prospects, and no choice but to find a way to feed my kids. Their father, who previously had agreed with this lifestyle in which I remained under his authority, suddenly decided that I was a mercenary bitch bent on his destruction, and refused to pay support. 

I went to college. I got a boyfriend who had more stability and commitment in his little toe than my ex had in his whole body. 

I got a degree (and became an RN), and "earned" myself a second MRS. I went to work, but part time with a schedule fit around my kids. I got written up for missing a pop-up meeting to do my daughter's hair before a school event (which I missed, because I was at work). Inhumane work, no work life balance.

Home seemed so far away. I missed long mornings with coffee and dishes and kids, no endless stress, no mountain of work at home and work at work, and juggling schedules. It never occurred to me to expect my partner to do anything to assist with the home. If he did something I took it as a romantic gesture. He did laundry, and occasionally on a Sunday morning he would get really weird about the vacuum and work until there was not a shred of pet hair in any crevice anywhere in the house - I just stayed out of the way, and said thank you a lot, hoping he would do that more often (he did not). It never occurred to me to demand more humane work conditions.

And I had started having panic attacks that I perceived as convictions of the wrongness of my choice to leave my kids in the hands of others. What was I doing, going to work every day when we could make it work with one income...surrendering my kids to who knows what, unable to protect them from the big bad world while I toiled away at a job for some nameless, heartless corporate entity. Big giant panic attacks that made me stop on the way to work and vomit out the side of my car, shaking and pale and pasty. And still, I did not ask my partner to take on a larger load. It did not occur to me. His job was to work and bring home the bigger bacon. Mine was to work and do everything else, bedsheets, toilets, dishes, meals, schedules, shopping, garden. I am not saying that he did not "help". He did. But it was just that - occasional help, not expected contribution. And I certainly still had no expectation the the system should change.

After much soul searching (and some digging into the utterly lacking mental health benefits of our insurance), I returned home. My kids left private school and we began homeschooling. There are many memories of that time that I hold tender reminiscence of. In reality, it was hard. Unpaid, unappreciated, but I was doing The Most Important Thing - I was raising my kids. And the panic attacks subsided some, so I must be doing the right thing, right? I was less stressed. I could focus fully on one thing and not feel endlessly divided between many, doing all of the things, usually badly. 

I sewed a little for money on the side. I baby sat. I gardened and canned and gleaned to keep food costs low. I bargain shopped. We did not have real vacations. But everyone was fed and clean, and the house was mass chaos but full of furry things and dirty feet, and later yarn and chicken poop. I am sure - and I know because you only need to read this blog to discover - that I spun that into a delightful romantic fairy tale. I tried some entrepreneurial ventures, but lacked the education or internal resources to push to real success in any. I do know why, now. I did not appreciate why then.

This is where the catch begins to reveal itself.

Those fun little side gigs. odd jobs, and all that unpaid labor, both physical and emotional? Unless you are lucky, or have previous education or a wide base of resources and connections on which to draw, they don't fill your retirement account, or give you any sort of stability or long-term safety or control. 

You are trading immediate comfort, sacrificing your future, for an illusion. You may believe your kids will rise up and call you blessed. Maybe they will. You may believe that your chosen life partner is committed to you deeply in a "whats mine is yours for life no matter what" sort of way, and maybe he will. You certainly do have it much much easier than your peers, who struggle to keep up with school hours and play dates and work obligations and family obligations and housework. You have all that....you just never get paid, never build any personal wealth or personal power, and that matters. A lot.

So let's fast forward a bit, shall we, from the sunny vision of the "Trad Wife", dutifully grateful (and I was!) for her loving spouse who makes it all possible, for her darling babies growing at her knee - she's made the "hard choices", she sacrificed her goals and dreams and visions. It has been, she is deeply aware and always humbly reminds herself, a privilege to have this opportunity to sacrifice herself for the greater good. And now, why she must be beloved? Cherished? Etc?

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Maybe little Sleeping Beauty wakes up to realize she has no financial security heading into retirement, and if her husband drops dead tomorrow she better hope he had a plan. She better hope she can find a job when the kids go off into the world. She better hope that her thin grasp on co-opted patriarchal power doesn't slip. She better hope those panic attacks don't return with firey vengeance because she certainly does not have the financial resources to pay for therapy. 

Here's what I did:

I made cheese, baked bread, gardened, schooled kids, sold eggs. I sewed and knitted and crocheted and wove. It made for pretty pictures and non-reimbursed content, just like this post. I asked nothing of that dog eat dog 'man's world' beyond the chance to not be starved to death at the end of my usefulness. 

Which I have begun to reach. 

I have no higher education, no savings, no retirement, and am mostly unemployable. You would not believe the numbers of resumes and applications I have filled out in the last six years. I could paper a house, inside and out. I can't get hired. No idea why. I mean, really? So I push onward. 

I have a couple of side gigs - quilting and face painting - but they are gigs, not consistent income that will feed me if Mr. W drops dead tomorrow. I better hope he had a plan. Because mine? Turns out it was built on a bunch of bullshit spun up from a big pile of lies and misrepresentations, both sociocultural and religious. 

So stay home if you want, but understand fully and clearly the choices you are making. I know it's hard. I know you've been reared to believe that those strident, angry first and second wave feminists just didn't understand and need to stop being so....loud. I thought the same. I thought my gift to the universe was quietly rearing my kids and caring for my home and living the lifestyle of white patriarchal privilege, which simultaneously helped me managed CPTSD with no therapy or mental health support. I guess I saved a lot of money that way. Hell of a cost though. 

I was taking the easy way out. It was easier to go home and shut my mouth than to buck a system that dumps the majority of the load on women. 

I know it's hard. I mean I KNOW it's hard. 

But hard isn't wrong. It's just hard. You hand over the money, you hand over the power. You give up your earning potential, you are handing over your place at the table, your voice, your input. You are surrendering all of that to an authority which may be benevolent... or may be malevolent. Maybe you will get lucky. Most do not.

You need to understand completely and fully the choice you are making. It will be easier now, for absolute certain. Much. 

Later? Well. The odds are not in your favor. 

Wishes

 I wish I had always been who I am instead of who I tried to be.

I wish I had a mini van because the girls would fit better than they do in a car.

I wish the supreme court was made up of progressive women in a rainbow of skin tones.

I wish that when my daughter told me I was a feminist I’d realized she was right.

Mostly I wish I could express boundaries in a healthy manner rather than tolerating bullshit and trying to Be Nice and Please People before going all duck and run when I max out on being kicked around.

Oh. And I wish to leave New England again, but I haven’t decided where for just yet.

Meantime?

Dogs. 

I think this is what the kiddies call a cluster f&^k.

I remember the first time I heard that phrase. B came home from college with a t-shirt he adored but had gotten a grease stain on - dead center, very obvious. For a fastidious boy, unacceptable. It had a logo and the words 'Greco Roman Cluster Fuck' on it. The phrase appealed to me. I kept it.

The other day my indigestion (you'd have to go way back here to get that reference...) asked if it was ok if he outed me as agnostic. I told him it was fine. Although I am not advertising, and I am not aggressively promoting anti-religion I have come to a solid and comfortable place of anti-religion in my personal life. 

I think I have always been in a state of reasonable unbelief. But at the same time guilt ridden and struggling to be "faithful" to a 2,000 year old book written by a bunch of white guys. I'm over it. 

The beginning of the end was subtle. The mother died, so the need for a structured system of belief to make sense of the anguish of life diminished. No need for a rigid structure to make sense of the world around me that felt like endlessly slipping sand. One of the last things my father and I discussed more deeply was his failure to read the christian bible through at some point in his life. By that point I was on round 2 I think, beginning in Genesis and going through to Revelation. He was impressed with that accomplishment. At that point I was still forcing belief but it was getting harder.

Two things struck home and ended the charade for good. First, Marcus Borg. Non-literal biblical interpretation makes the most - the ONLY sense. Allegory, metaphor, moral lessons. Jesus speaks endlessly in metaphor. The biblical stories work if they are moral lessons, not literal fact. Not "seven days or bust, the earth is only 6,000 years old, science isn't real" nonsense. And if it isn't literal, and there's other texts that easily pre-date it, then you're really up against it to prove that your one book is the only right one. And you are really seriously arrogant. Second, the moment when I bought a book that explained how to explain away all the inconsistencies in the book. If you need a book to explain all the things that don't make sense...if you need apologetics to explain away everything sensical, rational, logical, touchable, REAL then there has to be a problem with the system. Possibly with the foundation. Probably white guys.

Maybe three things. Hospice, though purely anecdotal. I watched a lot of people die. The most tormented were usually the most faithful. OK, four things. Feminism. Although I have denied, struggled against, resisted with siren call of feminism I simply cannot get away from "...the radical notion" that, as Marie Shear said, "...women are people". Any tome that tries to tell me otherwise is going to have an uphill battle, because I am damn sick a tired of believing that I am chattel or a second class citizen, obliged to submit to a man just because he has a dick and somehow managed to twist history to his benefit.

So there you have it. 

And it feels really good to say all that out loud. But it feels really really bad to know that I should have gotten here DECADES ago. Talk about guilt. (sorry, kids....maturity is the radical notion that parents are people).

So here's my cluster fuck. Gaining credibility when you've proven yourself to be an idiot is hard. Eating crow is hard. Moving forward when you can't fix what's done is hard.

I do this thing I love now. I give natural history museum tours or I fill up a minivan with native wildlife and I travel hither and yon talking about adaptations, evolution, earth history, facts. And you know what? The truth is that the science is so amazing, so incredibly and endlessly fascinating...I love it so much. I feel like - like hospice, it's a thing I was always meant to do. 

Dear Sarah Palin

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. 

Move over, Gerber Baby

At some point during my mother’s earliest years, she was traumatized in ways that left her scarred for life, and as a result she was plagued by mental illness from her adolescence until her premature death in 2011. She was, in many ways, a product of her generation - raised in a culture steeped in white supremacy, with air raid drills, “duck and cover” in her sibling’s classrooms, the all too white corpses of Jews in Nazi hands (although anti-Semitic by upbringing, that particular set of “those people” looked too much like her to be ignored)…toss in a child predator or two, and it’s a recipe for mental health disaster. And so it was with her. 

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.

Nana's Last Beach Trip

That Moment

I never wanted a cell phone, a computer, or the internet. I never even wanted cable TV. I remember when my ex bought our first vcr. Didn't want that either. I remember every step along the way the same way I remember the compromises I made about food...I wanted to be vegan. No one else did. So I gave in, made the deal to keep the peace.

What I should have done was pack my shit and my kids and go find like-minded people in the woods, but then I probably would have become a dangerous conspiracy theorist with lots of guns. 

Oops.

So now it's the plant based revolution online, and Brittany Kaiser's book Targeted, and the Center for Humane Technology...and still this tiny computer in my hand (and an iPad so handy for painting off of, and a MacBook to write museum articles, and the cloud to store my photos.)

Is it too late to throw my phone in the river? Too late to go back to paper and pens?

Probably. There has to be a middle ground in which I'm not feeding the data machine, and the data machine isn't controlling me.

How did we get here? 9/11? Patriot act, hand over any stitch of privacy we ever thought we had...and we nearly landed ourselves in the same fascist setting that killed millions of Jews? Or did it begin long before that?

And we aren't out of the woods by a long shot. 

Just how many choices have I made in the last two decades that were really and truly my own? Specifically the last ten years...I feel like they've been stolen.

Choices. Delusional belief that we are actually free. 

We're not. We've been sold to psy-ops. We just have to figure out how to buy ourselves back. How hard can that be. Right?