Big, Beautiful Lies

My mother died at 3:37am on a Tuesday morning in December, 2021. I’m not going to write too much about what happened in the moments and hours after she exhaled for the final time, what happened when the doctor took the breathing apparatus away - or how many different ways I feel like I failed her in that hospital room the hour after it was just her body in the bed.

I try to dwell on all the ways I showed up for her before that happened, advocated for her, stroked her hair and held her hand and told her not to be afraid, all the way till the end. All the months before that last day when I did everything I could, all the hours in the ICU those last weeks of her life. If I didn’t know exactly what to do in the immediate moments and hours right after she left her body, if I wasn’t prepared for that, I know it wasn’t for lack of love or caring. I just didn’t know. Still, it hurts like hell and I wish I could go back and do it again, for her sake, and for mine.

If someone said this to me, I’d tell them we can only know what we know. I’d say, hey, you did the best anyone could have done, truly. Try to forgive yourself for the things you couldn’t have seen coming.

It’s easy to see this stuff for other people.

About seven hours later, I stood in front of her closet, her main closet in the bedroom she shared with my stepdad. My mom and I lived in the apartment before she met him. We lived there with my dad, and we lived there together after my dad left. She met my stepdad when I was seven, he moved into the apartment about six months later, and they got married the next year. Forty-three years is a long time to spend with someone, and grief is a storm, whether you know that before it hits or not.

It hits everyone differently. For him, he couldn’t bear the thought of waking up and being surrounded by all of her things, everywhere he looked. I hated to tell him that after 50 years in an apartment, he was going to find her in every drawer, shelf, wall, cupboard - and around every corner. But I could take care of her bedroom closet for him, and her dresser.

My brother and I went to Staples and bought boxes. I put them together, and started sorting things - one box to ship to myself in California, one to donate to a women’s shelter, one for a local organization that helps the unhoused. I wasn’t expecting to be doing this kind of thing so fast, I had a flight back to Los Angeles later that day, but in a way it was good to have something to do. In another way, it killed me to be hit in the face with her smell, knowing it would fade. My mother. My mom. Mom.

My mother was always put together. Her hair was as curly as mine, but you’d never know it because she had it blown out twice a week. She never left the house without her makeup done, jewelry, purse, shoes, perfume. You could hear her heels clack, clack, clacking down the street. She didn’t own sweats, and the jeans she owned had a crease down the middle. She didn’t like to break a sweat, she’d rather starve than exercise. Once she came to Costa Rica with me when I was leading a yoga retreat. My son was fifteen months old, and she came to watch him while I taught. She brought a hair straightener to the jungle. We went hiking to see the sloths, and my mother held her cell phone up to get a signal. I’m laughing as I write.

Photo by Claire Finch on Unsplash

So it was no great surprise to me to find three black sweaters hanging in her closet. They were expensive, made by designers with names you’d recognize. They were similar in cut and weight and style. It broke me. It was the thing that did me in, standing there - the thought of her at the store, knowing she had the one sweater at home, convincing herself the second sweater was different enough it made sense to buy it. Thinking of her at the store again, with two black sweaters at home, telling herself maybe the third one would do it, maybe it would fill the hole in her heart.

I tried hard not to think of where she was right then, or what she was wearing. I tried, but I didn’t succeed. You don’t take the black sweaters with you. Not even one of them. Things will never fill the hole in your heart - not money, not sweaters, not houses, not rockets. You’re at peace, or you’re at war. If you’re at peace, you’ll notice all the beauty in your life. If you’re at war, you’ll destroy everything around you whether you mean to or not.

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My mother has been gone almost three-and-a-half years now. I just got back from New York and I have been feeling bereft. I’m the person who unpacks right away - and by that I mean everything goes directly into the washing machine whether I wore it or I didn’t - because I have some weird idea that even inside a suitcase, traveling back and forth from LAX to JFK - germs have entered my carry-on. I shower right away because I have to “get the plane off me.” I am my mother’s daughter in some ways. I like to tell myself the ways are quirky and endearing, and if this were a sitcom we’d tape live and there wouldn’t be a need for a laugh track. The alternative is that I have a teeny tiny touch of OCD.

I did all those things when I got home Saturday night. I taught my class Sunday morning. I caught up on mail and unanswered emails and a weeks’ worth of accounting on Monday. No matter how much I’ve tried to get everything rolling and “back on track,” I haven’t totally found my groove yet. Maybe it’s that my heart is still in New Jersey with my aunt, or maybe it’s the state of the country. Maybe it’s the big, beautiful bill that makes me want to go to sleep for a very long time. It all just feels like a lot, but I’m trying. We’re all trying.

I worry about hyper-normalization - this thing that happens when nothing at all is normal, but so much is wrong, people just kind of give up and do the thing in front of them. Get up, brush their teeth, go to work, buy the groceries they can’t afford. There’s only so much each of us can take - it’s understandable there’s a tendency to put one foot in front of the other and numb out. Pretty sure that’s what they’re counting on, so I try to pace myself. I don’t want to bury my head in the sand and I don’t want to fall into so much despair I’m useless to myself and everyone else.

It’s hard because ICE is showing up at elementary schools here in Los Angeles. That means they’re showing up to take children who are somewhere between 6 and 12 years old, without a family member there to reassure them, advocate for them, hold their hand or tell them it’s going to be okay.

I genuinely wonder what has to happen to make a person say - Good! I want little kids to be traumatized, I voted for that. If their parents aren’t here legally, too bad for them, and if they are here legally, I don’t really care about that, either. If they’re Brown or Black, basically I don’t care. So far ICE has been stopped at the door, but I don’t understand what they’re doing at schools in the first place. When I think about it, when I close my eyes and actually think about some little kid having to manage that kind of fear alone, it’s hard to breathe.

I thought the idea was we were going to deport hardened criminals, isn’t that what everyone said, including the guy eating McDonald’s in the Oval Office? I don’t recall that he ever said he was going to deport four-year-olds with metastatic cancer without their medication - or any time for their mothers to consult with their doctors. I feel like I would have remembered that.

Now the POTUS wants to deport another gravely ill four-year-old who is here legally. She was granted entry in 2023 on humanitarian grounds by former President Biden, but our current president wants to revoke her family’s legal status because…why, exactly? Because they pose some threat to someone? Or because cruelty is the point?

I can almost hear the people who voted for this saying we don’t have money to take care of everyone, but if that’s what you think, I really need you to stay with me for a few minutes. You know the Maya Angelou quote by now - “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” It’s too late for that, but believing them the four hundredth time counts for something, too.

Sometimes people hide who they are in the beginning of a relationship, and sometimes who they are is so obvious, there isn’t any hiding it, but you just don’t want to see the truth. Happens to the best of us. Sometimes people say one thing, but do another. A person’s dating profile is probably going to be a “positive spin” - we all know this. Chances are they won’t lead with their fear of intimacy, or their tendency to go for the jugular during a fight. You find that shit out the hard way, after you’ve invested time and energy, and that’s okay - you can’t really expect people to put that in their dating profile. What I’m saying is, some people are easy to read, and others, not so much.

When you’re lucky, someone will be pretty forthright about who they are and what they want. That’s gold when it happens, because you don’t have to bang your head against the wall trying to understand what’s happening, what someone really wants, what it is they’re after, or what life will be like if you stick with them. That just happened for all of us with the big, beautiful bill, and you might not know that.

It would be totally reasonable if you thought it was just some heinous budget stuff all about cutting programs for the people who need them most, and making rich people a lot richer - but actually, they telegraphed all the really ugly stuff they want the most, and it’s good for us to know what that is.

There are ten very telling and terrible provisions that are hidden inside, and they are stunning, but not in a good way. If this bill were a person, you would definitely not want to date them. You would be like, oh hell no - swipe left. I’m not going to talk about all ten, because you can just go back and click on that link later (and I hope you do), but there are a few I think you really need to know, like this one:

No funds may be used to carry out court orders holding executive branch officials in contempt. Um, wait. What?? So the courts can say, your tariff on-again/off-again games are a huge overreach and they are unconstitutional, and you need to cut that shit out. And we can all get excited and say, yay, finally, someone is telling him no! Then he and Pam Bondi can be like, so fucking what? What are you going to do about it? And there won’t be anything anyone can do about it - and that goes for anything they do that isn’t constitutional, like more “off-duty presidential pay-to-play million-dollar-dinners-for-pardons” or whatever. So what can we surmise? They’re planning on doing a lot of unconstitutional shit, and they want to make it so they have unlimited power. That’s not a democracy.

Instead of Medicaid and SNAP, or free lunches for kids at school, they want $45 billion to build immigration jails where immigrant children can be held indefinitely. Gosh, y’all, we are getting greater by the minute. So they want to increase ICE’s budget 13 times over, but they don’t care that people can’t afford groceries. Got it.

Furthermore, in this same provision it states that people seeking asylum will now have to pay $1000 to apply. It occurs to me someone will have to update the Emma Lazarus poem inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty! I’ll take a crack at it:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Payment options include Venmo, PayPal, Visa or Mastercard. No cash.”

How’s that? The provision goes on to say it will now cost families $3500 to reunite with children sent to the border alone. Basically, don’t come here is the new motto.

Do you run a nonprofit? Welp, better read these provisions, because there’s one that gives the administration the power to declare you a “terrorist-supporting organization” and expedite the revocation of your tax-exempt status. Ouch! There goes free speech and activism in one blow. We already lost due process, so…

This next one is special. Hey, Siri? Alexa! Gather ‘round. They want to block the state regulation of AI for the next ten years. They also want to repeal any laws already on the books. REPRESENTATIVE!

I don’t think there’s an end to their AI fantasies, that’s why they don’t want regulations. It’s not just about firing human beings and letting AI run health insurance companies and the IRS and every other thing. It’s not just “narrow AI” these guys want. They want some kind of Stepford wives/sex dolls/robots situation. You know, a lady in the street but a freak in the bed. Or maybe they like a certain kind of real woman, the kind who vote for men like this - but I bet they imagine a day where they send their robot Jeeves in to do the annoying dating. Go on in, Jeeves, ask the questions, get her measurements, report back. Who has time to date when you’re trying to plunder the earth?

There’s a provision you want to understand if you’re covered by the Affordable Care Act, like me. The bill allows tax credits that subsidize ACA premiums to expire at the end of 2025. So out-of-pocket costs will go through the roof, premium costs will skyrocket, and I probably won’t be able to afford to get sick. I’ll just pray I don’t get breast cancer or skin cancer, I’m sure it will be fine. Maybe there’s a supplement I can take.

Oh, hey now. This last one I want to tell you about is fucking perfect. You know what we need? I’m sorry, did you say sane gun legislation? Nah, we don’t need that! We need silencers! We need to repeal the $200 excise tax on gun silencers so people can fucking kill each other without anyone knowing or calling the police or whatever. I mean, thoughts and prayers, right? But let’s keep it all a little quieter, and all that domestic violence, no need to wake the neighbors when you shoot your pregnant wife, man.

Anyway, yeah, I’m out of sorts. I’m sick to death of the people who keep supporting this bullshit pretending it’s okay on any level. It’s not okay, and those of us who are struggling to be okay are sane. We are people who are still having normal human emotion. We are not fucking robots yet. We are not powered by AI or greed or cruelty, so rejoice in that. Take comfort in that, because it matters.

I wrote about two four-year-olds above, maybe you remember. One has already been deported, and I hope with my whole heart that he’s okay. The other, Sofia, is still here. Her family is fighting deportation efforts and could use some help.

This popped up in my Facebook memories yesterday. This was a conversation I had with my daughter when she was four, in case you forgot what four-year-olds are like, or in case you need to remember that there’s so much that’s beautiful in this world. So many reasons to fight for better than this. So many reasons to dig for your own humanity if it’s been covered over by rage and disappointment.

Let’s lay some eggs before we die. Let’s remember all the black sweaters in the world won’t fix it if we aren’t okay, and that maybe the best thing we can do is figure out where we’re at war within ourselves. Where we can be a little more forgiving and compassionate. Maybe I’ll start with myself. I did the best I could, I’m not confused about that. I miss my mom so much it hurts. I would have done better if I’d known what was coming.

We know what’s coming. Let’s fight for something better. Don’t give up.

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This is a great week to call your senators. You can let them know how you feel about the hidden provisions. There are scripts here if you feel uncomfortable or aren’t sure what to say, along with the phone numbers to call. Hang in there. See you in the comments <3

https://5calls.org/