Monday, July 15, 2024
1973, My mother died at age 51
Lights out at 9:30, ps at 12:30, another and up at 2:30. Right hip pain persists. Great difficulty standing up straight at 4:30 for a ps. I'm semi-confined to my chair.
Prednisone, day 64. 10 mg., day? I took 15 mg. at 4:35 a.m. followed by a breakfast of Skyr Icelandic yogurt w/o berries. Borscht at 9:30. 1,000 mg. of Tylenol around 10:30.
My Mom. On this date and on her April 15th birthdate, I honor her and subordinate all entries to remembrances of her, her heroic strength and resilience, her loving heart, and the care she bestowed on all around her, especially me and my sister. I devoted a long section of my memoir to her. Here are opening and closing portions (addressed to my children):
My mother was a hero and a saint. You may have heard me say that we are surrounded by saints and miracles, that the world is full of them. I believe that and I should add heroes to that short list. It was my mother who first introduced me to real world saintliness and heroism. . . . .
My mother’s early life reads like a melodrama. Born of poor immigrant parents, she was motherless by age 5, left the only female in her family. She was 7 years old when the market crashed in 1929 and a child and adolescent throughout the Great Depression. Her father was almost certainly an alcoholic during her childhood and there were times (I know this from her) when the Salvation Army left baskets of food at the Healy doorstep. She left high school before graduation to get a job either to support herself or to help with the expenses of the family, or more likely, both. (It’s uncertain whether she lived with a couple of aunts for a time before she married. My Aunt Monica says yes, my father thinks not.) She became a bride at 18, a mother at 19, a victim of a brutal sexual assault at 25. Her husband was drafted before she turned 22, leaving her with a 2½ year old son and a daughter on the way. For support she had $22 each month from my father’s $50 private’s pay and an $80 military dependents’ allotment from the government. Her father was 64 years old and probably an out-of-control drinker by the time her husband was drafted and all three of her brothers were away in the services. Her husband fought in the worst slaughterhouse battle in the Pacific theater, with Marine casualties so horrific that William Randolph Hearst wrote an editorial calling for a change of top command in the Pacific theater of operations and TIME magazine wrote about the furor over the editorial. When the war ended and her husband came home, he was one of the thousands of hidden casualties with no missing limbs but with a hole inside him where his heart and soul had been and with a mind full of horrors that, like the Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima, crept out of hidden recesses to terrorize him.
My mother suffered greatly in her too short life. She suffered from the absence of a mother, she suffered with an alcoholic father and alcoholic brothers, and, after the war, she suffered with an alcoholic husband with a terrible case of long-term PTSD. She suffered from James Hartmann’s vicious attack on her in her own home. These were in addition to the “ordinary” sufferings that life brings to each of us.
I would create an altogether inaccurate picture of your grandmother, however, if I were to paint her as some sort of long-suffering victim and martyr. Of all of us in the family, it was she who was the strongest and the most life-loving, the least self-pitying and least blaming, the most aware of life as a blessing and a gift, the most religious and Catholic, and the most grateful for all that she had, especially her children. She was the most loving and the most loyal, even to those who did not return the love or loyalty. She was no whiner or sniveler. She sang and she danced. She laughed. She liked people and people liked her. She was not naïve or Pollyannaish, but she was optimistic and hopeful. She saw goodness and promise and dignity in people who were down and out after the Depression and the war, (including her husband, her father, and her oldest brother.)
Ironically, I believe your grandmother was the happiest person in our family. It is clear to me as I look backwards that my paternal grandparents and Grandpa Dennis were unhappy people. My poor Aunt Monica was terribly burdened and not a happy person. Uncles Jim and Bud were heavy drinkers, as was Bim until Aunt Marie straightened him out. Kitty and I were also unhappy because of what we lived with. My mother hated my father’s drinking and withdrawal (and wasn’t averse to letting him know about it) but she was grateful for what she had. She had ‘the attitude of gratitude,’ a sure mark of a basically happy person. She was most grateful for her children and she let us know how much she loved us and how much we meant to her. She rejoiced in us.
Her not wallowing in self-pity, her not worrying about what she didn’t have, her seeing positives in what were to most observers totally bleak situations are as much proof as I need of her saintliness. She had Faith, Hope and Charity, not just as the so-called theological virtues, but as practical day-to-day living virtues. Paul wrote to the Hebrews that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” My mother had a firm belief in the “things not seen.” She, like T. S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday, knew that
. . . . time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
She never lost sight of the fact that there is more to life than the troubles of the moment.
She had Hope in abundance, witness her sticking with my father, witness her support for her children’s success in school and other endeavors, witness her own stick-to-it-iveness in moving up from “the Greeks” to The Old Barn, from the factory floor to the Quality Control Lab.
Her Charity or loving kindness towards other was abundant, towards my father during the terrible years, towards her father, towards her brother James, towards her in-laws, towards her children and towards herself. Unlike so many of the other adults around her, she never sank into self-destructive behavior (except for the then commonplace habit of smoking cigarettes and a fondness for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that were to play a role in her death.)
I want to close this terribly inadequate portrait of my mother by repeating my central point, that she was my first, best, and most lasting model of a saint and a hero in a world that I eventually came to see as full of saints and heroes and miracles. Through strength of will and strength of character, she was a happy person despite all of the obstacles, all of the excuses for unhappiness. If Kitty and I had not had her model for happiness in adversity, had we only had our father, our grandparents, my uncles and my aunt as models, I don’t know that we would have known any happiness in our lives or that we could have transmitted any sense of happiness to our own children. It took effort, it took strength, it took heroism for my mother, not to feign happiness, but to be happy in spite of everything.
She was also a circle-breaker. Her father, her brothers, her husband, her in-laws, all were unhappy people for one reason or another. It is easy enough to say that they ‘had every right to be unhappy’ and to wallow in the ‘slough of despond.’ But no one had any greater ‘right to be unhappy’ than my mother. If she had chosen to live a life of self-pity, however, she would transmitted an attitude of self-pity to her children, and to her husband, and to all around her. Attitudes are contagious. Your grandmother’s attitude was one of courage, of continued engagement with life, of not giving in to despondency. She transmitted that attitude to Kitty and to me and although we have faltered along life’s road, it is her attitude that still sustains us. It is her attitude that we have tried to transmit to you. I hope you can from this wholly inadequate word portrait garner some idea of why your grandmother is, for your father and for your Aunt Kitty our patron saint, our guardian angel, and our hero.
I'm grateful for the VA Health Service. Yesterday was the 3rd day of persistent, crippling hip pain with me ignorant of its cause, whether it be a recurrence of the PMR, osteoarthritis, or something else. The 24-hour availability of the Triage Nurse at the VA Zablocki Medical Center provided me a medical professional to speak with about whether I should be seeking help at the Emergency Department. The 24-hour availability of the Emergency Department provided knowledgeable professional assistance plus blood tests, an x-ray and a CT scan of the hip, a 5 mg. tab of oxycodone, to rule out infection and fractures as the cause of the pain. Moreover, the Emergency Department physicians had ready access to all my medical records and history for the last six or seven years since I was enrolled in the VA system. The oxycodone was unavailing in terms of pain relief and the tests were all negative in terms of diagnoses, but at least they ruled out some causes and narrowed the range of options for other doctors to consider, most notably a recurrence of the PMR. First thing this morning, I received a telephone call from KIm, Dr. Chatt's nurse, offering help. "One-stop shopping" proved valuable again. All of this is available to me at no out-of-pocket cost because of my disability rating from exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, my diabetes and its related problems. And again, I am profoundly grateful to my dear friend, Ed Felsenthal for persistently urging and helping me to enroll in the program.
Biden's Oval Office Address; 'Happy horseshit.' (1) "We may disagree, but we are not enemies. We're neighbors, we are friends . . ." Is this a straight-out lie or simply what Professor Harry Frankfurt called 'bullshit' in his famous 1986 essay "On Bullshit"? Biden knows that in our deeply divided polity, we are not friends, but increasingly enemies. Frankfurt argues that a person who communicates bullshit is not interested in whether what they say is true or false, only in its suitability for their purpose. Biden knows that "Donald," as he referred to him earlier in the day, is not his friend. "Donald" wants to put hm in prison, along with James Comey, Hilary Clinton, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, and many others. He knows that the angry people at the Michigan rally vigorously thrusting their middle fingers at the television cameras, the media, and at him, are not his friends. His purpose in saying 'we are friends' was hortatory and aspirational. He was urging that we should be friends, even though we are not.
(2) Referring to the many threats and attacks on members of Congress, , the violent mob on January 6, 2021, the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband, and the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, he said " there is no place in America for this kind of violence or any violence ever, period, no exceptions." This is the purest bullshit insofar as he illustrated the falsity of his concluding statement by its introductory predicates, i.e., the reference to a great many politically violent acts in America. As H. Rap Brown said many years ago, during the violent 1960s, "Violence is a part of America's culture. It is as American as cherry pie." Indeed, isn't America probably the most violent of all modern, industrialized, 'developed' nations, especially with our gun violence, our military troops stationed all over the world, and our long history of violence against racial minorities?
(3) "We are blessed to live in the greatest country on earth . . ." By what measures? GDP? Nuclear arsenal? The size of our military budget? Liberté, égalité, fraternité? Our tax code? Pure bullshit.
(4) "From the beginning, our founders understood the power of passion, so they created democracy. That gave reason and balance a chance to prevail over brute force." The most powerful of our founders were slaveowners who saw to it that their wealth, in terms of land and human slave capital, was protected by law. This is to say that the 'rule of law' is in large measure the rule of property, or the rule of wealth, or the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Democracy was for males who owned property: real property, chattel property, and human enslaved property. Pure bullshit, this seemingly required turning to our revered founders.
(5) "God bless you all. And may God protect our troops." Doesn't that "God protect our troops" sign-off that Biden loves so much speak volumes about America? We have nearly 170,000 American troops stationed overseas in nearly 170 territories, on every continent. During the Cold War the number of troops stationed overseas was about 400,000. I was one of those troops for 4 years, one of them in Vietnam. Why? Why does our government sacrifice domestic spending on education, child care, health care, etc., to support our bloated military budget and huge military establishment, the "military-industrial complex" that Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his Farewell Address? Why does Biden call attention to this so regularly? Lets get over it.
(6) Peter Wehner writes in this morning's The Atlantic online: "America is a seething cauldron of invective and antipathy; the forces that are dividing it are enormously powerful, and they have been building for decades. It would be difficult for any political figure, even the best America has to offer, to repair the breach. Even when he was at the top of his game, Biden wasn’t up to that challenge. This version of Biden certainly isn’t." A seething cauldron of invective and antipathy. I fully suspect that we will see this on display in Milwaukee all week at the Republican National Convention. It might be helpful, though perhaps it is too late, if national leaders like Biden started talking about America's realities rather than fantasies, myths, and clichés.
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