Turn your skills, your craft, your art into a weapon.
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Was it a lark; did I do it for class credit; was it some misguided show of patriotism? I have no idea.
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The right to vote is not about politicians or policy or propositions. It is about exercising a right, embracing a responsibility. My mother has felt this way as long as I've known her. I don't think she has ever missed voting in an election.
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How do you tell your teenage children that their father has died?
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Death?

Perhaps I’ve seen plenty of death, although we can never get enough. We’re not allowed to; the damned thing just keeps on comin’. And I doubt that we are morbid by nature; we simply have no control over the end of life beyond the magic and ministrations of good medicine from CAT scans to ayahuasca.

I can’t measure cause and effect versus coincidence here, but the deaths of parents, friends, loved ones, important figures in my life don’t bring me to wonder at the great beyond.

I didn’t wonder where my father, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my childhood friends and my musician pals went. I’ve thought I was going to die, right then, right there. I reeled under blows of abandonment and empathized with sickness. I ached with sadness as deep and natural as a river’s flow. And I cringe from the regret that comes from loss: I’ve only I’d… I coulda… woulda… shoulda…

But I survive and shelter my memories in fond real-life recollections that can evoke tears, smiles, or great loneliness. But loneliness and loss, even rage at abandonment is human, very here-and-now. It’s a life thing, death, and it does not for me, evoke a stairway to the great beyond.

Perception?

I’ve never been able so see or hear ghosts, despite the fact that everyone in my San Francisco household heard the angry expletives and useless thumping in the upstairs bedroom closet. I never had a clue, despite my comrades’ testimony.

When we were mining for silver in a Colorado mineshaft, we were all on the lookout for a ghost who was supposed to hang out in the dank gloom of the abandoned stopes, or side tunnels. Nobody ever heard or saw that guy either.

I’ve always had a hard time with reincarnation, where, ostensibly, beings die, travel to the great beyond, and return in another form. I once thought I might be the reincarnation of a soldier who died on a barren Russian steppe, but I’d probably just seen a photo. The folks I did know always seemed to reappear from former lives as Egyptian princesses or brilliant musicians. That didn’t make sense.

After the demise of trillions of bugs, slaves, eels, serfs, overanxious merchants, intestinal bacteria, and downtrodden whores, why did my friends come back with memories of life in grand palaces, royal sarcophagi or thrilled audiences? I don’t seem to have the facility to reincarnate, not even as a cutworm.

My own private beyond?

My personal great beyond began in childhood with a set of closet-door mirrors. I could close the mirrors around me and watch my body disappear down a curving corridor of a million reflections, each image becoming murkier until I disappeared into the subsequent loss of light. Then I’d imagine that, no matter how fast I changed my expression in that mirror, my new grimace would reverberate into the distance at 186,000 miles per second, quicker than I could ever catch it.

My great beyond-edness burgeoned thanks to early exposure to astronomy, via my old man. After I plagued him nightly to describe the distances of intergalactic space, I would scamper off to bed. I had painted the far wall of my bedroom an inky, deep-space blue and glued stars to it — a launch pad into my great beyond.

Then, as I drifted off to sleep, I taught myself how to transport myself from my bedroom wall to the farthest point I could imagine in our galaxy. If I travelled at 186,000 miles in a second, how far would I travel in a minute? An hour? A day, a year, a million years? Wow!

I would grok myself to that distant place and start again, imagining a deeper, farther, more distant galaxy and then I’d leap to other galaxies until I reached the edge of the Universe. Then I’d try to picture what lay beyond that. Jeez!

For a while, my old man worked at M.I.T. with “Papa Flash,” Dr. Harold Edgerton, a high-speed photographer who developed the stroboscope (my old man helped perfect the exactly timed electronic flash for Papa Flash’s image captures).

I would stare at Edgerton’s photos of a light bulb shattering with a projectile suspended in the dissembling glow, of milk drops suspended in a perfect crown above a flat surface, imaging the strobe light splitting time down and down and down to microseconds.

Later, as quantum physics emerged, I peered deeper into the micro beyond, down to a yanctosecond equaling one second divided by 10 x 10 x 100 to the twenty-fourth power, one septillionth of a second, watching scientists hover over monstrous magical-mystery colliders, seeking to establish the elapsed time for a quark to decay.

Today, I like to imagine the great beyond as cartoon expansion and contraction of the Universe. Bwoop! The Universe explodes. Bweep! The Universe contracts, bwoop, bweep, like chewed bubblegum or warm silly putty squeezed and released and squeezed again between the infinite thumb and finger of an ethereal hand. From this perspective, the great beyond elicits laughter. That’s good enough for me.

A final mystery

I did learn to the great beyond of death one more time, when I held my mother’s hand and felt her breathing slow in hospice. After one long, last, calm, quiet breath, her heartbeat stopped and her body collapsed. A diminutive casper ghost-spirit squiggled brightly out of her fourth chakra and rose into the room above her bed. I knew that what I’d seen was real, connected to the great energy of the Universe but I had no idea where my mother’s tiny casper spirit went. Once again, the great beyond showed me its mysteries but not its truths.

#  #  #

 

 

It is an auspicious day for a cremation
There will be no tears today
Tears would drag your spirit back to earth

Your pallbearers wear earrings and black shirts
Sporting logos of Harley-Davidson, Heavy Metal;
On your wreath, a banner
Advertises the Sheraton Nusa Dua

The cremation tower, sunny white and yellow,
Adorned with your photo, bespectacled, wise,
Makes three revolutions around the crossroads
So your spirit will not find its way home

The villagers bear you to the cemetery
Tourists follow, taking snapshots
Vendors sell cold drinks

The tower flames quickly, but
The formaldehyde that preserved your body resists
They turn up the propane

Wide-eyed, a small boy approaches the pyre
You witnessed many cremations in your ninety years
But perhaps it is his first

 

My mother was a proud FDR Democrat and preached it at home. My father’s family grew up quiet Republicans, transplanted to Detroit from St. Louis. We never got him to admit who he voted for in 1960, but he became more liberal as he aged.

I was not quite four years old during the 1956 election, but my older brother and I held a mock election. We carefully laid out a ballot for each state (I’m sure my brother, then almost nine, did all this, since I couldn’t write yet), marked a vote for each state and tallied the score. In our household, Adlai Stephenson won. We quite admired the erudite senator from our neighboring state.

I was unabashedly in love with JFK. I watched his inaugural address on my lunch break (we still came home for lunch from elementary school), sitting on the arm of our sofa on the black and white TV in our den. I have the Life magazine with the Kennedy’s motorcade on the cover and his speech inside. They were the epitome of elegance and grace as far as I was concerned, and his death, three years later, just shattered me.

On June 6, 1968, my clock radio awoke me with the news of RFK’s assassination and I lay under the covers, weeping. My mother came to see why I hadn’t gotten up. I muttered, “They got Bobby too”. I was in high school, too young to vote, caught up in my own life, paying attention to world affairs, but not politics, per se.

I attended Brandeis University, a hotbed of liberal politics. A year before I arrived, it had been the headquarters for the Student National Strike Center, when campuses across the country went out on strike to protest the U.S.’ bombing of Cambodia. A few months earlier, four students at Kent State were gunned down by the National Guard. Mine was a closely-screened in-coming class. Yet, a few weeks after I arrived, Brandeis again made news, as three of their students landed on the FBI 10 Most Wanted List for robbing a local bank which resulted in the murder of a police officer. Years later I would sit next to one of those students at an event on campus. She was now out of prison. She had repented of her ways and was seeking reconciliation. We had a short, but fascinating talk. Google Katherine Ann Power.

I was never politically engaged in that way. At my Northwestern interview, the recruiter kept asking me if I would burn my bra. I was interested in their Theater Department. After graduating high school, I did stop wearing a bra, but was mocked by my roommate for continuing to wear mascara.

I found my political identity at the end of freshman year, in 1971. Always a liberal and interested in social justice, this was before the Supreme Court had passed Roe v. Wade and I came home to Michigan late for my period. Very late. My father saw how gloomy I was and we took the dog out for a walk one night. I confessed what was ailing me and that I didn’t know how to handle it. At the time, abortion was legal only in New York and New Mexico. I told him I thought of suicide. He chided me. He told me to see his golf partner who happened to be an OB/GYN. If the news was bad, he would try to get me a therapeutic abortion in Michigan. If he couldn’t, he would take me to New York. All this went on without my mother’s knowledge. I had first obtained birth control at a Planned Parenthood office while visiting a friend in NYC over intersession the previous Feburary, but nothing is fool-proof.

The  pregnancy test was negative and the doctor gave me a shot of progesterone to bring on my period, but he also discovered that I had a class III Pap smear (pre-cancerous) at the age of 18, and did a simple procedure a few weeks later to clear that up. Days later, I slipped my father a note when my period arrived. I found it in his papers when he died. My father was one of the all-time good guys.

But my passion for a woman’s right to choose, and access to health care was born that summer. I will ALWAYS vote for those who stand up for that cause.

My first vote was cast for McGovern in 1972. Though I was voting absentee at college from Michigan, I was proud to be in Massachusetts, the one state that went for McGovern. I have never voted for a Republican and cannot imagine a scenario when I would. Their party values are abhorrent to me.

This election season has been particularly troubling, watching the Orange Monster, a man who proudly disrespects women, minorities and other disenfranchised groups, get away with outright lies on national TV and his followers just don’t care, or are completely ignorant. I understand they also may be voting one issue, but how can they vote to put that man in charge of this country? There is no sense of decency, social justice, understanding of the issues. Only rage. It frightens me to my very core. Having lost relatives in the Holocaust, this reminds me too much of 1930s Germany.

 

 

My first experience with death was my grandfather’s, when I was eleven years old. Both of my maternal grandparents (Nana and Papa) lived with us in our big brick house in New Jersey, and had for as long as I can remember — possibly since before I was born. My grandmother had one of the four bedrooms on the second floor. My grandfather, for reasons unknown to me, lived in the finished bedroom up in the attic for many years. After he had his first heart attack, we turned the den on the first floor into his bedroom, adding an accordion-pleat door, because he could no longer manage the two flights of stairs to the attic.

I loved my grandfather more than anyone else in the world, even more than my mother. He was kind, and patient, and so loving. He never criticized, and was interested in everything. He told fascinating stories about “the old country” and of his escape over the border in the bottom of a wagon, covered with hay. I always thought I was his favorite grandchild. Many years later I discovered that every one of his five granddaughters believed herself to be his favorite. That just shows how amazing he was, that he could make each girl think he loved her the best — although of course I am sure that the other four were mistaken and I was the real favorite!

Papa used to make breakfast for me every weekday morning while my mother slept in. On rainy or snowy days, or if I was going to be late, he would drive me to my elementary school. which was about half a mile away. Right after I turned eleven I started seventh grade at a six-year high school which was in another town, and carpooled with the one other girl from my town who went to that school. Her mother drove us in the morning, and my mother picked us up in the afternoon. Papa still made breakfast for me, and then walked out to the curb with me to wait for my ride.

One morning we were standing at the curb, as usual. I think we were holding hands. Suddenly, I felt a jerk on my hand and turned to see Papa falling to the ground. I didn’t know what he was doing. I wondered if it was some kind of joke, but it wasn’t funny. I said, “Papa, Papa, get up, what are you doing?” but there was no response. I wanted to run inside to wake up my parents, but I didn’t want to leave him there alone on the sidewalk. I stood there, frantic. Then my ride arrived and pulled into the driveway. I pointed to Papa and said to them, “wait here, I’ll be right back.” I tore into the house, screaming for my parents. My father, who was a doctor, grabbed his medical bag and went outside with me, then told me to go to school, everything would be okay. So I went to school. At lunchtime, I called home from the pay phone at school, and my father answered, which was surprising. (What was he doing home?) I asked “how’s Papa?” He replied “Who is this?” That was even more surprising. I said “It’s Suzy!” He said “Papa’s doing as well as can be expected.”

When I got home after school, I learned that Papa had died. I never got to see him to say goodbye. I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. I don’t even know where he is buried. And I was haunted for years about that couple of minutes between the time he fell down and the time my ride arrived for school. If I had run to get my father sooner, would that have made the difference? My father reassured me that it would not have, but I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

I still miss him.

Oh, those candies with the toxic red dyes!
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