The Speed of Untethering

I’ve been giving this some thought and I’m pretty sure when it comes down to it, there are two ways to ride this ride. You can recognize the fragility and impermanence of the whole experience - and in response open your heart, your mind and your hands.

You can walk through the world gently, listen to people with the desire to understand, learn things you didn’t know, and realize there’s no such thing as other people’s children. You can love people with your whole entire heart, hold hands, make art.

You can look up at the sky and be amazed whether it’s pouring rain, or the sun is shining, or the moon is so big and bright it looks like you could drive toward it and maybe get there this time. You can give it everything you’ve got while you’re here. You might even get to love some great dogs.

Photo by Luca on Unsplash

Or, you can feel the fragility and impermanence and respond with fear. You can try to own the place, plant your flag, control the people around you, and pound your chest. You can buy everything - social media platforms, rockets, the government of the country where you’ve been naturalized. You can decide earth is already doomed, people are expendable, and other planets are the key. Universal domination, dominion over Mars, that’s the way to win. You can believe that so deeply you already have the legalese written about who rules over Martians.

You won’t be able to buy love even if you have fourteen kids, but you can try.

Here’s a thing you might not like to think about: you’re gonna die at the end either way. You’ll have a better ride if you respond with the eyes of a child and let yourself be astonished. When I look at things through this lens, I can see the people wreaking havoc are always the people trying to own the place. Trying to exert some power so they don’t feel scared and meaningless.

Funny thing, we always remember the people who create and contribute - we celebrate them, we cherish them. The people who are malignant, destructive and remorseless go down in history, too, but not in a good way.

I’m dealing with a thing, I have been for a while. It’s a mess - not of my own making, but it affects someone close to me, so it affects me. There have been times I’ve wondered if I should have seen this coming but missed the warning signs.

You know how that happens, right? Maybe you hear the phrase “sandwich generation” over the years, and don’t pay attention until you’re taking a bite out of it, because it’s the only thing available to you on the menu. Kind of like that. Or maybe if you’re a guy, you hear snippets of conversation about prostate stuff - that it gets hard to pee when you’re older - but think that won’t happen to you until you’re standing over the commode with your dick in your hand and it isn’t cooperating. I wouldn’t know, but I try to think about how things might be for other people.

I called Letitia James’ office last week. It turns out when you want to report fraud-related abuse, you call the Attorney General’s office in the state where it’s happening. I can’t share all the details, but what I can say is that people who prey on senior citizens are the worst bottom feeders there are, and in a crazy turn of events, a bottom feeder has been feeding on someone I am very close to, someone I have been trying to protect for over two years.

Imagine draining someone’s bank accounts toward the end of their life because you know you can. Taking advantage of their grief or their trusting nature or maybe their confusion, dangling carrots in front of them any time they start to question the validity of what you’re saying. Making them wonder if the people closest to them are the ones not to trust.

Last week this person went a step too far. I am patient, but even I have my limits. Also, patience is the wrong tool to bring to a knife fight. The thing with me is I will try to work it out by communicating openly and directly if possible, but if you plunge your knife into the back of someone I love, I will channel my mother. It’s a thing I’ve discovered I can do, and it might be a superpower. There were some very good things about her. She did not take shit from anyone, and god help you if you crossed her.

I filed that complaint and if there’s any justice in this world (and who can say anymore), the person in question will be contemplating her life choices from some white-collar facility in upstate New York in the very near future. I’m not looking for anything inhumane. I wouldn’t want this person grabbed off the street and flown to El Salvador without a day in court. Even with a day in court, I wouldn’t want her to end up in a mega-prison like CECOT or whatever weird slam poetry Alcatraz fantasy the potus is having, because I’m not a vengeful lunatic. I just want it to stop, and I don’t want this to happen to anyone else’s fill-in-the-blank with any senior you care about.

We aren’t here for long, and it’s hard to imagine being so without a moral compass you decide to take advantage of elderly people who might not have anyone to advocate for them. There are so many people like that in our country, single older people living alone. It’s one of the reasons I don’t understand why there hasn’t been more outrage about threats to Medicaid and SNAP benefits since so many of our most vulnerable seniors rely on them (along with children, uniquely abled people, and those barely making it in this country), but there is so much to be outraged about. There are times I hope Karma is the biggest bitch in the world, but she must be on a long vacation with really spotty cell service. Or maybe she’s thrown in the towel.

The signs are everywhere, and I don’t say that in a New Age-y way. I mean literal signs, or in this case, emails. The people who want to profit off of every last thing are already doing so much damage. I’m heading to New York in a couple of weeks, or at least, I bought tickets to go, but then I got a bizarre email from JetBlue saying, “Hey, why don’t you go ahead and travel a couple of days earlier, like maybe plus-or-minus four days on either end of your trip? Because we’re having some trouble due to a shortage of Air Traffic Controllers, and also our equipment hasn’t been working too well, and it’s really likely your flights are going to be delayed. It’s so likely that if you change your flights we won’t charge you any change fees, and if you want to cancel your trip we’ll refund your original payment method.”

My response to that is…wait. What?? What in the fuckity fuck is even happening anymore? Terrific job electing this absolute horror show who thought it was a Solid Gold idea to bring along a bunch of unqualified pick-me’s and an unethical, unstable, Martian-wannabe billionaire to gouge our government agencies and form a tech oligarchy. Clearly the FAA is doing great now. So great. Got rid of all those DEI hires, huh? Cut all the waste and fraud.

Anyway, I am probably going to take the refund and switch to a different airport because y’know, I’d like to live through the trip, I’m funny like that. I’d like to fly and land, see people, and then fly and land back home in one piece. That would be fantastic. I’ll be traveling with my passport, of course, even though this is a domestic flight, because that’s how we do things now.

When I write that, it occurs to me that’s also how women will be voting soon, which is a poll tax on women. If you notice, men don’t have to worry about the SAVE Act or bringing a passport when they register to vote, because the vast majority of men don’t change their last names when they get married. Why? Oh. Well, in the history of our country men were never treated like the property of their fathers, to be handed off as property to their husbands when they got married.

When laws are passed so it costs money for a certain segment of the electorate to vote, that is called a poll tax, which is illegal. Last time I checked, passports were not free, so the SAVE Act is unconstitutional according to the 24th Amendment. It would be so cool if any senator would say that.

I’ve had this thing on my mind and I’m dancing around it because heading for the center of it hurts. It’s painful in a way that aches, but you can’t avoid it, and there’s no point trying. I don’t like to dwell on all the loss because it doesn’t help, but I’ll tell you something - when you lose a lot of very important people in your life in a short amount of time, it does something to you.

I’m not the same person I was five years ago, before my mother got diagnosed with ALS during Covid lockdowns, before she died from ALS at the end of 2021, and blamed me for it in between. She stopped doing that the last three weeks of her life and a lot of healing happened, almost a lifetime’s worth, but god was it hard-won. I was hollowed-out for a year during her illness and a year after, and the only thing that moved through me was grief, love and panic. I couldn’t tell you how much of each or in what order, or how I kept my head above water. I didn’t, always.

My half-sister died five months later, and it’s not that we were close, we’d only just grown close the last couple of years - it’s that when she died suddenly of a stroke, it meant both the loss of her, and the immediate need to move our dad across the country so I could take care of him. It was also that she was alive and laughing her throaty laugh one day, and gone the next. She was the person I would have talked to about grappling with what I owed a man who fathered me, but also taught me at his knee that my job was to take care of him, thus turning me into a tiny therapist at four years old. He was a real taker, our dad, and not an easy man to have as your father. She understood that in a way no one else could. He died in July of 2023.

My firstborn went to college in September of 2024 which might sound like an odd thing to include here unless you’ve been through it, or know what it’s like to have your child with you, under your roof for almost eighteen years, and then to drop him off at school, help him get set up, and drive away, leaving him somewhere else to begin a new chapter where he will start to live with you only during breaks. It’s okay, you adjust, but it’s a huge shifting of the ground underneath your feet.

And our dog died at the very end of October, and I realize that’s as much as I can write about that right now.

It is a profound and dizzying experience to witness the speed of untethering. I think we tend to believe we are more solidly planted here than we are. We see someone full of life, and think it can’t be otherwise, certainly not in an instant, but we’re wrong about that. To be in a room with your mother, to feel her there with you, and to feel the moment when it’s just her body there with you, just the hand you’ve known your whole life, still in your hand, even though you can sense she’s left her body - feels both real and not possible.

You can feel it like you can feel the rain on your face or wind whipping through your hair, you don’t need the doctor to tell you the time of death. You will miss your mother every second of the day after that. You’ll have your first panic attack twelve hours later when you realize she’s gone and you don’t know where she is.

It was less awful with my dad, maybe because he hurt everyone who loved him, maybe especially me, maybe not. Or maybe because he was ninety-six and didn’t suffer like my mother did. I arrived at his room when it was just his body left in the bed. I wasn’t there when it happened at 2:30am, but the hospice nurse was. I took the wedding band off his finger and left a note even though I didn’t have a lot to say. I cried, I said I love you, and I guess I did, but I don’t miss him which makes me feel sad sometimes. His love was about him, it was suffocating, and his lack of awareness was legendary. Still, he was my dad, which means something.

Maybe all that loss so close together is why it hurts so much for me to watch my country dying. It was here and now it has a terrible disease and the disease has a name and many faces and they’re crawling all over The Capitol and they’re in the Congress and the Senate and on the House floor, they’re in the Oval Office and the White House they’re on the television and all over social media.

They go right for the heart of the country and all its essential organs - the Constitution, the rule of law, the checks and balances. The guy behind the Resolute Desk can’t even tell you what the Declaration of Independence is about. He hates immigrants except the ones he marries, I guess. The disease he carries unleashes the same in everyone around him - an illness that was dormant, no doubt, and just needed a little encouragement. His lackeys become pathogens carrying the disease through the bloodstream of our country, through its veins and arteries, all the way to the borders they love so much.

It is wild and horrible to see it spread, this disease of cruelty and smugness. It leaves a trail of fear and suffering behind it, but the people who suffer are the ones who are disease-free. The afflicted people have soul-sickness which is asymptomatic now, but the worst pain there is in the long run. It’s the kind that tortures you in your bed at the end of your life when you finally realize you don’t get to take anything with you, even if you make it to Mars. And all that will remain of you are the memories of the people you’re leaving behind. If their memories are of a person who cared only for himself, they probably aren’t going to miss you.

Meanwhile the cure is free. It kills you to be able to do nothing but beg people to have some compassion and common sense.

I watch every day as people who have this soul-sickness are emboldened to feed the worst in themselves. No one hides their bigotry anymore, there isn’t any reason to be shy about it. If you have not heard about Shiloh Hendrix I genuinely hate to be the one to introduce you, but she is the white woman from Minnesota who was at the playground with her 18-month old when a 5-year old Black boy on the autism spectrum went into her child’s diaper bag.

She chased this little boy around the playground and called him the N-word multiple times. I know this because a man witnessed what was happening and started filming her on his phone, asking her why she was going after a small child that way, calling him such a horrible word. She doubled-down and said she was just “calling him what he is” and then hurled the same slur at the man filming. While holding her baby, and within earshot of other children at the park.

The video went viral, and then Shiloh started receiving backlash. In the biggest example of taking zero responsibility for your own despicable racist actions, and making yourself the victim when you are the perpetrator, she started a fundraiser to relocate her family. She has raised over $700,000 thanks to the support of white supremacists. I have to tell you some of the things people are saying under the video are so disturbing they made me physically ill.

If you think we do not have a serious and very real racism problem in this country, you are kidding yourself. All you have to do is look at the amount of money this woman has raised, and the comments being left with these donations to cure yourself of that delusion. The NAACP branch in Rochester started a GoFundMe for the little boy and his family and they raised $341,594. The family has asked to turn the donations off now. It’s still worth looking at the page if you want to see the full story. They just want their privacy. I’m sure they’d also like to be able to go to the playground in peace, or not worry about their son every day of his life as he gets older and walks out the door by himself.

There is no such thing as other people’s children.

So, yes, life is strange and people can be strange and sometimes you find yourself in a situation you never would have imagined. That is always the case, but in the states it feels even more true these days. Your mother who always seemed invincible gets a disease that ravages her until she is nothing but bones in a bed, and she blames you for it and you don’t know how to survive the heartbreak of that accusation, or the more horrific heartbreak of losing her - but you do, somehow. She’s here and then she’s not here anymore and the loss is so profound it robs you of breath sometimes.

Two nasty men stand up in front of microphones for months and months and say exactly what it is they think and what it is they want to do, and those things are awful. One of them has already had four years to do awful things, along with all the other years of his life, so it’s not a surprise. Millions of people vote for them, and then you watch them do exactly what they said they were going to do, and your heart breaks from that, too.

Someone slippery slithers her way into your circle and tries to take advantage of someone close to you, and you find yourself on the phone with the Attorney General’s Office in the state where you grew up.

But - this next part is key. There are also the best and kindest people. People you can laugh with until there are tears coming out the corners of your eyes. People you can talk to without holding a single thing back because you know you’re safe. People you check on because you know they won’t ask for help even if they’re drowning, and people who check on you because they know you’re the same way. People who make art and write poetry even as the world is burning, people who would never leave you behind, people you would fight for with everything you’ve got. They matter, they keep you in the light when the despair gets too heavy. They are the gold here - the meaning is in the connection, the memories, the laughter and the love.

Let me tell you something else in case you’re scared - there are more of us. There are more of us who want the world to be gentle. I know this like I know the faces of my children.

Things are one way, and then they’re another. There’s nothing to count on except the fact that everything will keep changing, and things are always less solid than you think. The only real power you have is what you do in the face of all that change, how you respond to the sand slipping through your fingers, what it is you’re willing to fight for, and what it is you’re willing to lose. You’re going to lose a lot no matter what. People you don’t know how to live without, dogs who come and head-butt your hands until you pet them, sweet chapters in your life you’ll remember forever - like when your kids were little and you used to fall asleep with their limbs thrown over you.

But if you keep your heart open, the joy will keep flowing, too. It will flow through your veins and feed your essential organs and especially your heart, and it will flow right out of you and toward everyone you love. No one can take that away from you, or them.

Time is going to be short whichever way you ride the ride. I know how I’m doing it.

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom, and all the moms, and all of you who mother, whether you do that as friends, aunties, stepmoms. There’s no such thing as other people’s children xo