Breaking A Promise

Laughing at the news November 2017

Before my mother's diagnosis of Alzheimer's in January 2017, she told me that she knew that she would not be around forever and that she wanted me to keep her informed even after her death. She knew I kept a journal that I started back in 1992 when my father was approaching his final days. I wrote in it all the time to tell him the stories of our family, our country, our world. My mom wanted me to do the same for her. When I wrote in the journal for the past 26 years, the pages always started "Dear Dad." Now they start, "Dear Parents..." I love keeping this promise and it keeping their hearts alive in my own. (When my sibs and I were teenagers we began referring to our parents in the collective noun "parents" rather than mom and dad. It stuck!)

My mother loved reading the news. For all the years she lived in southern California she had the LA Times delivered to her house and then to the assisted living facility. She always started the day with a newspaper. When she lived here with us for four months she got the NY Times delivered, and then when she moved back to southern California, she resumed her LA Times subscription. She never watched news on TV. She read it, absorbed it, talked about it, laughed and grieved about it.

Now for the first time, I feel like not sharing the news with my parents. I can't bear to tell them the stories of what's happening in our country. A week of pipe bombs sent to people my mother absolutely appreciated, and then eleven people shot at a synagogue in Pittsburgh at a Briss. They would find all of this as unbearable and horrific, as we do. They would be afraid for our country and really the world, as we are. There is no making sense of the senseless. Our country has become a place of crazy gun owners who still resent the outcome of the Civil War and who seem to have forgotten that World War II was fought to end the reign of Nazis. We have a President who stokes the these flames with his astonishing ignorance and narcissism. He is so utterly unworthy of his position that the world is watching us aghast at what is unfolding here.

A paragraph from Howard Fineman's op-ed in the New York Times sums up the status of things right now:

My response is grief, of course, and the immediate realization that this horror is part of a larger pattern of mayhem and hatred in America and around the world. Churches, minority communities, gay nightclubs, politicians and journalists are threatened. We live in an age of assault rifles, pipe bombs and bone saws.

So I am going to renege a bit on my promise to my mom. I'm keeping the latest news cycle a secret. I want to share much better news after the midterms. We are hoping for a blue wave because truly what's left of our sanity depends on it.

How are you doing?