The Dead - Spring Equinox 2021

 

In the midst of a global pandemic that has claimed over half a million Americans lives, I have been thinking a lot about the dead. One of whom at least peripherally is mine.

 

Nearly nine years ago, I sat listening as my father died. Two days earlier, I had received a call. He needed me to come over right away. Hospice was on site and they wanted someone there to help take care of his wife until her son could arrive when the inevitable happened. My stepsister-in-law had assumed that duty until she had suddenly departed a few weeks earlier for reasons I wouldn’t learn until I had a chance to speak with her after she came back with my stepbrother.

 

A few hours after I got there, my father slipped into unconsciousness, to return only once and only briefly. The hospice nurse said this was pretty typical. He was waiting for someone to take over responsibility so he could let go. I only had a couple hours to talk to him and confirm his arrangements and final wishes, which included cancelling my sister’s longstanding debt to the estate at my request. It didn’t benefit me (in fact it cost me), but did make life easier for my stepbrother. He would have had to enforce it, which would have been less than pleasant.

 

Over the intervening two days, I spent a great deal of time on the phone updating distant family. My aunt had already said her goodbyes to my father months before, and sadly parted on less than perfect terms, although not as bad as my stepsister-in-law. I talked to my stepsister-in-law and got increasingly evasive answers about the timing of their arrival which I only later understood.

 

I stressed to my sister that if she wanted to see our father before he died, she didn’t have much time. I was being told days at most. Theirs was yet another in a string of dysfunctional relationships within my immediate family. And yet, if she’d said the word, I would have moved heaven and earth to make sure she would have gotten to see him. I knew how to make that happen. I knew it might be important to her later. She declined to come, a decision I think she would later regret.

 

The next two days were kind of surreal. I had never witnessed anyone die before. Hospice told us exactly what to expect, down to the physical changes to look for that said the end was imminent. But they stressed that these were only indicators; they didn’t provide an absolute timeline. There are no hard and fast rules with dying, just strongly coincident trends. So, we waited as we listened to my father’s breathing change and watched his fingernails turn increasingly blue.

 

Because of the layout of the condo, hospice had set up his hospital bed in the living room, just by the sliding glass door that looked out onto the lagoon. Between that and having at least one and sometimes two hospice nurses there, along with my stepmother plus the two of us, his dying felt public, like he was on display. I am certain he felt that, too, from our final, brief conversation.

 

To give my stepmother as much privacy as possible, my wife and I spent most of our time either in the breakfast nook off the kitchen, where I reviewed a proposal for adapting a story of mine, or in my father’s spare bedroom office sorting and arranging all the documents my stepbrother might need later. He was the primary executor on the will and on the trust. He would be responsible for what happened to his mother, although she and my father had come to an agreement on what that would be. Because of her own long-term health conditions, she was unable to take care of herself so was unable to stay in the condo. She would die in a facility in Missouri less than three months after my father.

 

None of which really mattered when his final moments came. The previous evening, the night nurse had given us the heads up that the end was very near, under twenty-four hours. She would wake us if he began to change. He didn’t before the next morning when the day shift nurse took over and the unit supervisor showed up. They both reaffirmed the night nurse’s assessment. He wouldn’t be among the living much longer.

 

By nine that morning, all we could do was watch, wait and listen. My stepmother in her recliner, facing my father’s bed. My wife and I on a couch along the opposite wall, facing her. The hospice staff at the bar by the kitchen, trying to be discrete and give us what distance they could while staying close enough to witness and log his death when it happened.

 

The TV wasn’t on, which was unusual for my stepmother. It was May in Florida which meant the windows were shut because it was by then AC weather. Off and on my stepmother would get up and walk over to peer down at my father without saying anything, then return to her chair. For a short time, I sat by him and whispered reassurances that it was ok if he wanted to let go, and other words I will not share. The hospice nurses told us that he may or may not be able to hear us, even in unconsciousness. Near death experiences indicate hearing lasts until the very end, even after all other senses fail. I don’t think I was the right person to comfort him, but I was the one there.

 

For a long time, no one spoke. There was nothing to be said and really nothing to be done. We were all waiting for the next phase of the process which we knew couldn’t happen until after he was dead. Then we knew there would be a flurry of activity, the official parts of which, like contacting the mortician for pickup and assisting in getting a death notice in the paper, the hospice workers would handle. I knew I had a number of phone calls to make and had to plot out the proper order of who to call first, and who to ask to pass the information to who else down the chain to avoid as many hurt feelings as I could.

 

But that would come later. At that moment, we sat in an eerie silence broken only by one of us occasionally shifting position and my father’s increasingly ragged breath. At some point, I realized that we were all purposefully still, frozen, anticipating. Somewhere in those final minutes, I started counting the seconds between his breaths, which got longer and longer as time wore on. First a second, then two, then five, then ten. Each intervening pause of silence eventually interrupted by another sometimes sharp, sometimes struggling, sometimes almost startled intake of breath. I think the last pause I counted was twenty before the hospice supervisor called his death. By then, her words came as a relief.

 

Because I had been beside him when that moment of transition came, I never had any trouble accepting my father’s death. While I had some unresolved issues, as most people do, I understood he’d had his time to say anything he wanted to say to me. He never did. But I didn’t dwell on it as we both had our opportunity. In the end, of his own two kids, and his wife’s two, I was the one he called to take responsibility. The youngest of the four. The one he knew would go to bat for his wife with anyone against anything no matter what happened. I guess to me, while that didn’t say everything, it said enough. As I talked about in “Dead? Dead.” it took my stepmother a little longer to process his death, which, while completely surreal at the time, was not abnormal, especially for someone in her situation.

 

All of which came into sharp relief last spring.

 

Just before my wife’s birthday, I received a phone call from my sister. My mother was dead. She had been dead for an indeterminate period of time, which turned out to be just over two days as the hospital searched their records for any point of contact. Neither my mother nor her caregivers had given one when she’d been admitted to the hospital. No one had called to let either my sister or I know. No one had called any of her local friends.

 

Two months earlier, my mother had stopped answering my calls. I suspect because she mistook my concern for her well-being and my inquires as to whether she was getting everything she needed during the pandemic lock-down as “checking up on her”, an accusation she’d leveled during another health crisis eight years earlier, at the same time my father was dying, when she was in and out of the hospital and rehab on a bi-monthly basis. Our relationship had always been complicated. By this point, I would categorize it as somewhat estranged.

 

With the pandemic, as well as for other reasons, I didn’t help clear out her apartment. So, I didn’t have that stark marker as a confirmation of her death. I only had the initial silence followed by a series of increasingly agitated and recriminatory phone calls from my sister. Another complicated and strained familial relationship.

 

Three years earlier my sister had fought tooth and nail to become the executor of my mother’s estate to the point of subverting even the people who tried to help her make that happen. When the time came, she refused to take it up. By then I was in no position to. But I went out of my way to share all the information I had with her, and guide her as best I could, and then legally resigned any interest in my mother’s estate in favor of her. When things had started to slip sideways with my father’s estate, I had offered to do the same with my stepbrother so my sister would get a full share. Which in hindsight strikes me as equal parts misplaced loyalty and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.

 

Or maybe it was just part of my unique grieving process, in both cases for something more than just losing a parent, some of which had happened decades earlier. The loss of a childhood, the loss of a family, the loss of any possibility of salvaging any of that, the loss of any possibility of acknowledgement of who I was or what I’d become. The loss of any and all illusion. All the remained was the present slipping moment by moment into a troubled, murky past.

 

Either way, when my sister became so upset by having my mother’s ashes physically near her because she thought they were cursed or possessed and couldn’t deal with them, I told her to mail them to me. Not exactly what I wanted, but not new territory for me either. My stepbrother had sent me my father’s and my stepmother’s ashes eight years before because he and his brother didn’t know what to do with them, and thought I might. So, I knew how to handle it.

 

Accordingly, as we’d done with the other two before, my wife and I scattered my mother’s ashes in an appropriate spot and wrote up a description of what we had done for my sister, my aunt and cousins, and my mother’s few remaining friends, and took a couple of pictures. By then, stealth burials had become a tradition in my family. It seems like that should have laid the matter to rest for me.

 

But it didn’t.

 

I have spent a great deal of the intervening time convincing myself that my mother was really dead. Some of that faded briefly when I scattered her ashes. Watching what remains of a cremated human body pour out from a container is a visceral experience. But it is also abstract. A couple pounds of certified and tagged ash and pulverized bone fragments do not have the same gravity as a body. Intellectually, I knew they were her, that there was no vast conspiracy in which she could still be alive. And yet, below the surface, my mind wasn’t quite ready to accept that my situation had changed. That something I had dreaded for many years had come to pass, and that everything would be ok. In that moment, I wasn’t sure it would be, for reasons that would take a great deal of mental energy to sort out. Energy, which at that moment, I just didn’t have.

 

And due to the very strange nature of that act during the pandemic lock-down, that niggling feeling didn’t fully go away. I still found myself having to reiterate in an internal monologue that she was dead. I don’t think that’s because I was closer to her than my father. I wouldn’t say I was by the end. I don’t even think that it was fully because I was still afraid of her, though that certainly played a part. I think more it had to do with having witnessed my father die where my mother’s death was more remote both physically, mentally and temporally by the way the situation unfolded.

 

That reaction surprised me.

 

When my wife’s father died just over a year ago, her mother was somewhat insistent that she return home for the viewing so that she wouldn’t have trouble accepting it. As there was no way my wife was going to sit beside her unrepentant brother and pretend nothing had happened between them, or with the rest of her family, for even two hours of a visitation and viewing, that was never going to happen. As well, she had said her goodbyes the last time she had seen her father alive. So, she didn’t need to see him again with her own eyes to confirm that he was dead. She’d already set that picture in her mind.

 

I was fortunate enough to have done the same with each of my grandparents, so I knew what that feeling was like. There is closure in setting a final image in your mind beforehand, as I had with both of my mother’s parents the last time that I had seen them together, and then the last time I’d seen my grandfather alone. I’d done the same with my father’s parents, separated by a dozen years. I’d attended all their memorials, three of which involved trips north that I never want to take again by the way the family dynamics played out. Instead of reinforcing good memories of my grandparents, these trips fostered more familial trauma. I completely understood my wife’s refusal to do the same. Instead, she visited her mother several days after everyone else had left. Which, by the way, is something many grief counselors encourage to keep the situation from getting overwhelming for a new widow or widower.

 

As you can tell from some of the above, at the best of times death can be a messy business despite its mechanisms being pretty straightforward and simple. It’s complicated by we the living. The ones left behind. The ones who may or may not be able to confront the idea that everyone we know, everyone we’ve ever known, will eventually leave us behind. Unless we leave them first. Never mind our being willing to confront our own mortality.

 

Which may be why the rites surrounding death are some of the earliest human rituals that set us apart from other primates, and in general from all but a handful of other mammals. There is a primal mystery surrounding death, one which other species don’t appear to dwell on, or at least not to the extent that we do.

 

When we’ve had cats die, we have left out their bodies on the porch for a little while before we buried them in a kind of viewing to allow their housemates to see that they are gone. Usually, the living cautiously approach and sniff the dead, then look at us with a certain expression that is hard to interpret, and don’t go back. Only a handful who were very close to the dead call for their missing companion at night for some period of time, where they never called before. None have really searched the house to see where their friend had gone. It’s hard to know exactly what they are thinking or what they really understand. Something, from what I’ve seen.

 

Perhaps people aren’t much different. We just have more elaborate social ceremonies to help our fellows cope.

 

Different cultures have different customs regarding death. In some societies only outsiders are allowed to handle the dead. In others, only family. Preparing the dead is universal, especially washing and dressing or wrapping the body. Standing vigil over it until it can be buried, cremated or otherwise disposed of. Laying it to rest with treasured possessions, perhaps for use in an afterlife, perhaps just to honor their spirit or to keep them happy. We often mark the place we lay them to rest, sometimes with stones or shrines or other symbols, other times by using a sacred communal burial ground or just noting a private location in our minds. In modern western society, we send correspondence and make phone calls to notify friends and family of what has happened. We sometimes take pictures to share with others who could not be present. For legal reasons, we advertise deaths in papers and other public forums.

 

But most of all, we gather. We open our homes to visitations, to comfort and to receive comfort from family and friends. We feed the mourners, recognizing some have come long distances to stand beside us. We hold services and memorials. We hold wakes, not to wake the dead, but to be alert or wakeful ourselves. The veil between worlds is open. We are uncertain what might slip through in either direction if we do not pay attention. We share poignant stories and memories of the dead while trying not to speak ill of them. For some because we feel the dead can no longer defend themselves, for others because we are quite afraid that they can. We lay out the dead for viewings in funeral parlors or churches or other public venues, or sometimes in our homes on dining room tables, so people can confirm reality for themselves.

 

Dead? Dead.

 

Although many may deny it, almost all these rites and rituals are intended for the living, not the dead. Funerals are for those left behind. One way or another, the dead are beyond caring. Many people will also tell you the horniest they’ve ever been is after a brush with death. Those documented and quite psychologically normal experiences are as intense and intimate as they feel inappropriate. Life reinforces life.

 

There is solid anthropological evidence for why many of these funerary rites exist. One predominant view is that they provide a coping mechanism to channel our individual grief and other often mixed emotions (relief, guilt, anger, fear, etc.). Another is that they reinforce social coherence through group bonding as we support each other in a time of shared pain.

 

That doesn’t always happen. Death brings out either the best or the worst in people. Often both. But without those ceremonial frameworks, I think worse is more likely than better. Without set societal expectations and guidance, things are more likely to get out of hand in stressful times. Death is difficult, a mental shock. The scars from the living often linger.

 

There also might be pragmatic reasons that our ancestors stumbled upon as they codified their practices. Primitive sanitation. Dead bodies aren’t generally healthy to be around after a short time. Unintended consequences. The lye from scattered ashes gets clothing down river cleaner, or even acts as a primitive disinfectant. Communal safety. Standing vigil might have started as simply as keeping dangerous scavengers at bay, either animal or human. Unless of course you favor sky burials. But even then, that feast is ritualized and out of plain sight.

 

The most intriguing explanation I’ve read is that burial or cremation began as an attempt to literally bury or destroy the evidence of death. The anthropologist who advocated it traces it back to sacrifice (making sacred) often through scapegoating (casting the community’s sins upon a person or a creature), then killing it or banishing it and making it divine. Which he believes channels our inherent human violence to prevent our strong tendency as primates to mimic violence with further violence in a destructively escalating cycle.

 

He contends that many of the earliest burial sites we’ve found through archeology house sacrificial victims. Once the dead were dead, early societies wanted to hide the evidence of the ritual to prevent reprisals from erupting. The one way to do that was to make the victims holy after the fact, so their sacrifice could be honored as benefiting the community at large.

 

There is a counterintuitive resonance point here. In popular Christian culture (not strictly doctrine or theology), our dead are transformed into angels, by any definition divine beings, who then reside in an unearthly paradise for eternity. It is not difficult to deconstruct that myth into a near universal concept of paradise being a reward for enduring the suffering of this mortal life, which serves as a coping mechanism. Again, in popular Christian culture, some of those angels watch over us and guide us, at least if we pay them the proper respect, like visiting their graves, offering them small sacrifices like flowers at various anniversaries, and remembering them at other important family social occasions like christenings or weddings. When you pull it apart, that’s an abstract form of ancestor worship which has been widespread throughout various world cultures at one point or another in their history.

 

Or, if you favor a slightly different view, some of those restless dead may attempt to enact revenge upon us as reprisals for the slights they suffered in life. They either use small, mischievous acts, or dire visitations in our dreams or during illness, mysterious times when the barrier between physical reality and the spirit world is lower. Like gremlins or the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Should these dead be particularly jealous of the life in which they can no longer partake, they may seek to seize us while our defenses are down. From that perspective, we celebrate them to remind them that we love them. We inter favored items with them to bribe them, to keep them content in their graves. Safely entombed in stone or underground. Or diluted in water. Or dispersed upon the wind.

 

Almost any way you look at it, anthropologically the dead are potentially fearful forces that most sane people have no wish to offend. Best to hide them away in their own special area, out of sight. Close enough to visit, far enough away that neither side is inclined to casually make the trip. Not grouped together in so large a congregation of graves that we can’t hold our breath as we pass them by to keep some opportunistic spirit from stealing into us.

 

As a species, we prefer to imagine that somehow this life continues beyond the transition into death. I won’t debate any particular religious belief except to say they are ubiquitous. Most of us would prefer to imagine at least some of our dead in a better, more restful place, at the very least free of pain, though a few we might like to see receive righteous punishment for their accumulated misdeeds. Heaven and hell. Or more benignly, circling back to continue learning and improving through reincarnation. Even the most atheistic among us sometimes like to imagine our atoms serving as building blocks in creating new life even if not through conventional reproduction.

 

In other words, we construct elaborate illusions in the name of psychological self-comfort. Humans rarely let our dead rest or even fully let them go. Many people visit their dead. Many more talk to them. In general, I don’t do the former but sometimes do the latter. Just as I also talk to quite (presumably) living people who are not here with me. Sometimes I argue with both kinds although they rarely have epiphanies.

 

I think sometimes we believe we will get finally get straight answers from the dead once they have been freed from their earthly biases. But in general, the dead keep their secrets. Dead men tell no tales, at least not willingly. I think if we get answers, it is more often in our dreams, and then only because of our intuition processing events that we often refuse to accept while awake. Or through years of psychologically intense counseling, which often amounts to much the same thing.

 

Perhaps in burying or cremating the dead, we are merely trying to conceal our own grief, our own pain, whatever form that might take. Humans, like all animals, avoid pain in almost any way they can. Sometimes to the point of self-delusion.

 

Which leads me back to acceptance.

 

As I said, it quite surprised me that I had to remind myself that my mother was dead until just recently. I hadn’t felt that at all with my father, my grandparents, my uncle, a friend’s mother who helped shape me, or the best man at my wedding. Sure, I’d felt sadness and a similar sense of loss with some. I missed our conversations and correspondence dearly in others. But I never had to remind myself the situation was real. Normally, I would expect part of that with my mother was old trauma resurfacing, except I know other people who have gone through the same with a much more stable family history. Although they often felt differently about their dead.

 

The closest I have come to the feeling I had was with several of our feline companions who died. I think because I interacted with them more day to day, and so had to get used to a new routine that did not include them where they had been nearly omnipresent before. But with all but one of them since we’ve been in this house, we had a physical body to view and enough time with it for the situation to set. In the one case we didn’t, we eventually received a credible report of his death from a neighbor. Although before we did, we had a pretty certain feeling he was dead.

 

Last spring was different. I think part of it certainly stemmed from the suddenness of my mother’s death. I think part, too, from the bizarreness of the circumstances, both leading up to her dying and of the broader virus lockdown, both of which consumed a great deal of my psychological bandwidth, both of which contributed to a feeling of distance and isolation. And then there were the living who would complicate the event going forward no matter what I did.

 

But honestly, I don’t think it was any of that. I think a lot more of it came down to expectations. With my father, there was never an expectation from him or from anyone else that I would help. He made it clear throughout his life that I was not the son he wanted. He said as much to me directly. So perhaps there was a modicum of redemption when he called me in the end, not any of the three other steps/siblings, not his sister. Maybe because that was an admission of me being somehow worthwhile. In doing so, he gave me the power to deny him, although I chose not to. I suspect he knew I wouldn’t and relied on it. I had stepped up before where others hadn’t. Or maybe I was just the last, best choice he had.

 

With my mother, there was always a sense of obligation, from her and from others in my family. An obligation I no longer felt, nor felt the need to live up to. And yet, when the moment came, she chose to inform none of us. Like a feral cat, she slunk away privately to die. That level of rejection is pretty difficult to comprehend or accept.

 

But that lack of acceptance, that having to remind myself she was dead, was not out of a particular sense of sadness or grieving. It came with a certain measure of freedom and relief. It wasn’t that I could never speak with her again, it was that I didn’t have to. I no longer had to dutifully send cards and gifts, or make phone calls and get admonished or rebuked for caring or for trying to do what was right, in spite of the consequences, in spite of what it cost me. That I wouldn’t ever receive her calls again after her choices had caused her life to slip sideways, when she expected me to bail her out. In the end those choices killed her, or at least significantly contributed to her death.

 

It took those months to realize that I could finally set her burden down. And a burden it had become.

 

With my mother, like my father, there were really no larger, unanswered questions. Both my parents made their positions clear over the fullness of time, through words and deeds. As had I. Theirs had not changed, nor had mine. With both of them, long before their deaths came, I had already begun to disengage, if only for my own psychological stability. In a way I hadn’t had to with more favored friends and family even when I knew their deaths were imminent.

 

And yet, I did the same for my mother as I had done for my father and my stepmother. I performed the final ritual of laying her remains to rest, if not for me for others who, while they couldn’t or didn’t want to directly be a part of it, I believe needed it on some level for their own acceptance and mental well-being. I wrote up what I’d done knowing the people I shared it with might want to feel included in some way, where I was more ambivalent.

 

So perhaps on some level, I felt that instinctive need to honor then hide away my dead. To scatter their ashes to wind and water, only I know exactly where. To safely entomb them behind walls of light so we all might finally get some rest in peace.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

Thoughtcrime - Imbolc 2021

 

 

Recently, I was reading an article concerning what Orwell’s 1984 is really about as opposed to what people think it means as they decry certain current events as Orwellian. The article lists four terms that are central to 1984 without further explanation: Big Brother, Doublethink, Newspeak, and Thoughtcrime.

 

The concept Big Brother is well steeped in American society, to the point of us creating a reality TV show based on the concept. Doublethink (holding contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time) and Newspeak (the control of language to limit the expression of unwanted ideas, at times by turning the meanings of words and phrases upside down) are both familiar.

 

But something about the last concept caught me. Just the word “Thoughtcrime” teased me like the tone of a bell at the edge of memory. A connection to a quote. A quote from the Bible. A Bible quote brought up in casual conversation, though not directed at me as an admonishment. All that flashed through my mind in an instant.

 

Suddenly, an association I hadn’t seen before struck me. I knew it would take me a little time to tease it apart. Thus, I decided to dedicate this musing to it. If all of this is familiar ground to you, I apologize. As well as for the light review of concepts as I understand them for those who have not read the book. I have a somewhat diverse readership so I can’t count on that everyone has.

 

Thoughtcrime in 1984 essentially refers to politically unorthodox thoughts and beliefs that run contrary to the teachings and tenets of the Party in Oceania (the dystopian society the novel is set in). Thoughtcrime is detected by constant and near universal surveillance by Thinkpols (thought police) through two-way screens. Crimestop is a mental indoctrination technique each citizen uses to prevent such errant and illegal thoughts. As implied by the term Thoughtcrime, those thoughts are criminal. They are punishable by death.

 

So merely thinking the wrong thoughts and having it detected through your body language or other physical cues is a capital crime in that society if you don’t self-censor, all monitored by a constantly watching authority. That sounded more than vaguely familiar. Something in there resonated with my past. Something about sinning in your heart.

 

It only took me a quick search to find the Bible quote I was thinking of. Matthew 5:27-28. In plain English, it reads (with Jesus speaking at the Sermon on the Mount), “You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery’; but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman in lust has committed adultery with her already in his heart.” The next two verses go on to say, “And if your right eye offends you, pluck it out, and cast it from you: for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not that your whole body should be cast into hell. And if your right hand offends you, cut it off, and cast it from you: for it is profitable for you that one of your members should perish, and not that your whole body should be cast into hell.”

 

If you lust against someone in your heart, you have committed adultery. Not by action, by mere unclean thoughts. The punishment, cutting out an eye or cutting off a hand, in the context of the body is death with an allusion to a congregation or body politic. Pretty straightforward and often taken quite literally in the real world as well as a literary one, as it has been in several of the churches I’ve attended and in many of the conversations I’ve had with more fundamental believers.

 

There are a couple interesting points to unpack here. First is the change of what we commonly define as sin to include a sin that resides in thoughts rather than only through actions. Of course, one needn’t stop with lust. Covetousness could fit. Taking the Lord’s name in vain. Really most of the big ten commandments, never mind the 600-something plus lesser commandments in the first five books of the Bible.

 

Second is the repetition of the graphic, unforgiving and brutal punishment as reinforcement that this new kind of thought sin is taken just as seriously as the other kind, layered with the ambiguous phraseology in discussing body parts as members, in this case likely of a congregation. So, a dual meaning applying both to the individual and to the society/congregation in which they participate. In modern parlance, those individuals are like an unseen cancer that must be excised to save the greater whole.

 

That attitude is closely echoed in 1984. Consider the parallel. In both cases, what amounts to an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent authority (all powerful, all seeing and all knowing) monitors and judges each and every one of us each and every day, not just for our actions but for our thoughts. The punishment for such pernicious thoughts/sins is execution in one case, eternal damnation in the other, unless you are rehabilitated/forgiven by the all-powerful authority that stands as judge.

 

While we naturally assume Orwell was talking about totalitarianism, specifically fascism or Soviet communism, the concept of thoughtcrime goes back millennia before Mussolini or Lenin. Which is perhaps why it resonates so strongly throughout Western society on both sides of the political aisle.

 

I can hear the immediate objections from people who think I am overanalyzing this. Yes, Orwell was an atheist who considered himself a humanist. He fought against the fascists in Spain but as a Democratic Socialist (a moderate), not a communist. Because he had attended meetings of the Communist Party as research for a book, he was under surveillance in England in a time where fascists and communists vied for control of his country. He witnessed the tactics of British Blackshirts up close.

 

Consider though, his grandfather was in the clergy. At a young age Orwell was sent to a convent school his sister attended. While he was not a believer himself, he could quote long passages from the Bible from memory. The verses above would have been quite familiar to him. If I remember them enough to find them in a two-minute search, he likely would have known them by heart.

 

Ok, that word association game is not what I was primarily thinking about when I decided to write this essay. It was fascinating to me that it flashed through my subconscious in an instant and I was able to piece it together. But that alone is not particularly meaningful or necessarily insightful to anyone but me. My mind extended the parallel into much more controversial territory.

 

You see, I was reading this article in the wake of the January 6^th insurrection at the US Capitol (hopefully by the time I post this, I won’t have to reference which insurrection I am talking about like a Soviet revolution, Feb, Oct, 1917, 1905). At the time, several key figures who participated, incited or supported the insurrection were claiming the consequences of their actions (cancelled book deals, social media bans, job terminations, etc.) were Orwellian violations of their Constitutional rights. It’s pretty much a black letter reading that they are wrong in terms of them being a violation but they are also wrong in them being Orwellian, too. The article makes that case much better than I ever could (you can find it referenced in the Notes and Asides in the comments).

 

Regardless, I was more thinking about why particularly fundamentalist evangelicals in this country continue to support the President who helped incite this insurrection, despite his actions, attitudes and lifestyle seeming to be completely antithetical to stated Christian theological and American political doctrine.

 

Many 1984 literary scholars agree that the Trump Administration has been Orwellian. They have strongly leaned toward authoritarian while at times courting American neo-fascists. During the insurrection at the Capitol, that flirting passed into an outright relationship. Its supporters have been steadfast and staunch in their denials of it being either an insurrection or in any way antithetical to American democracy to the point of deep-seated cognitive biases. Some of the most fervent support has been from charismatic, fundamentalist evangelicals, both leaders and lay congregations. That had me wondering why, or more precisely how, they continued to be convinced their support of this man was not only right but necessary.

 

Of the four concepts mentioned, I’ve touched on the parallel to Thoughtcrime in Christian theology. Orwell’s other three terms have resonance points as well.

 

Big Brother, well, what could be more like Big Brother than an all-seeing, all-knowing, ever-present god who is deeply judgmental and at times outright vengeful. The choices you make in this life are for eternity, no ifs, no ands, no buts. No mulligans. Not exactly the dictates of an all-loving god. Would you brutally punish your children’s sometimes even minor wrongdoing forever without appeal? If so, Social Services might want a word with you.

 

Doublethink becomes even more intriguing from a socio-psychological point of view. Many of the people who supported this insurrection (and by extension the President who incited it) have had to hold at times two contradictory thoughts in their head at the same time: their dedication to a literalist interpretation of the Bible and their dedication to the Constitution. As anyone who has ever been told that the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment only applies to Christian sects because we are a fundamentally Christian nation, fully understands. Or anyone who has been told that gay marriage or abortion or even at times even racial equality violates God’s Law and are therefore Unconstitutional. Many of the people who directly participated in the insurrection are self-professed Christians but also former military or other public servants who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, including some current elected officials.

 

But this juxtaposition isn’t alien to fundamentalist Christianity. Imagine, if you will a god that so loved its creation that it sent to earth its only begotten avatar to be sacrificed to save its people set against the same god that wiped out nearly all its creation in a cataclysmic flood. Or a god who gets into a wager with a fallen angle who then capriciously antagonizes a believer’s life to win a bet (Job). Or a host of other inconsistencies. These are not easy concepts to reconcile. But Christian doctrine requires it.

 

So, is it a difficult step from those three to Newspeak, where up can be down and black can mean white, either of which can reverse at any moment based only on what your leaders tell you? That might seem to be a bridge too far given most fundamentalist’s literalist reading of the Bible and all its tenets (even the seemingly contradictory ones). Given that a literalist reading of any text is its own kind of Newspeak, a constraining and pruning of language, I think not. Literalist fundamentalism attempts to pare words down to a single desired interpretation while ignoring context, history, translation, nuance, ambiguity, parable, and allusion, all of which are what make the Christian Bible at times a rich, diverse text. If you are looking for precise details on how, which I don’t have time to delve into here, I recommend Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by Bishop Shelby Spong.

 

And yet, the New Testament cites that the devil can quote scripture for its own purposes (which some will accuse me of doing above). Especially fundamentalist Christians are taught to ignore any quoted scripture if they think it is being used to trap or trick them into evil purposes. It’s a fallback position I’ve seen used again and again in debate. It’s an escape hatch that terminates discussion.

 

In reality, I recognize that fundamentalist evangelical support of the now former President and his movement stems from Machiavellian realpolitik, that these outwardly Christian individuals are willing to compromise and sacrifice their beliefs to achieve the goals they desire. The ends justify the means. They often embrace greedy, self-righteous reasons for their support, however cynical that may sound. And no small part of that is rooted in the same racial identity politics that played into American society around the American Civil War, whether consciously or unconsciously.

 

In political terms, Newspeak is how propaganda works. Even seemingly inconsequential changes in political language over time have been called out again and again. The Department of War becomes the Department of Defense. People killed in bombing raids become Collateral Damage. Demanding respect and social justice become Political Correctness. Consequence for actions become Cancel Culture. Lies or misinformation become Alternative Facts. Etc., etc. These language changes are powerful tools in shaping thoughts. Orwell understood that, as he discussed in “Politics and the English Language”.

 

Big Brother is the constant monitoring of the masses (especially by government officials) in an authoritarian regime to ensure they are faithful and toe the party line. In the aftermath of 9/11, we have all seen such monitoring increase in the name of security. In the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol, we will again. As we did after Pearl Harbor when we gathered citizens in Internment Camps so we could keep an eye on them. Orwell understood that monitoring from the twelve years he was under government surveillance for research he conducted to write The Road to Wigan Pier.

 

Doublethink is a kind of mental purity/loyalty test that in practice reinforces the political gaslighting that starts with Newspeak. And yet it works precisely because we all hold seemingly contradictory thoughts and opinions in our head all the time. It’s just to us that they follow some internal logic and consistency. Most of us are good at compartmentalizing, which anyone who has ever held a security clearance can tell you. In that, Orwell understood the fundamentals of human nature and the nature of power, as revealed by Animal Farm.

 

And Thoughtcrime is a form of self-censorship that instills fear and doubt by reinforcing that the monitoring is inescapable. That constant second-guessing and looking over your shoulder is what allows that gaslighting to work.

 

Combined, all four psychologically subvert any individual’s will, as well as their grip on objective reality and reason. Control thoughts and you control actions. Resistance is futile. And even if it isn’t, the amount of energy you need to expend to overcome that psychological overpressure is immense.

 

And yet, you cannot lead people where they don’t want to go. In order to walk them over an authoritarian cliff, you have to give them milestones along the way, ones they are so familiar with that they resonate subconsciously. Religious touchstones are some of the most powerful because they are so ubiquitous, if sometimes invisibly woven into contemporary culture. Even atheists use phrases from the Bible without realizing it. It is the most referenced book in English idiom followed closely by Shakespeare. I could cite Daoist doctrine to Americans until I run short of oxygen. If they don’t recognize something familiar in what I say, they will not follow me, no matter how much intellectual sense my words might make or how much benefit the individuals I am speaking to might derive from them. If I want to lead them, I would have better luck with allusions to Jesus or even the Bard than to Lao-tzu.

 

To be clear, my point is not that Christians are Orwellian patriarchal authoritarians. I do not believe they are, not all or even the overwhelming majority. Nor do I believe that any religion, not limited to Christianity, is always or even predominately good or evil. As well as providing comfort for events and circumstances beyond our control, religion serves a Darwinian social function, just as many cognitive biases do, one that would have rooted itself out long ago were it not in some way beneficial to the species. In this case it provides value through social cohesion. We are not herd animals as much as we are animals that derive overwhelming environmental advantage from operating in cooperative groups. Those groups, whether tribal or national, require social cohesion to maintain.

 

I have read that religion is regarded as one of the three legs of the sociological stool that defines a culture (the other two are language and land). A culture is merely a large-scale cooperative group. So politically harnessing that cognitive bias not only makes sense, it’s likely inevitable. The problem for a democracy comes when someone is able to yoke that religious workhorse to an authoritarian wagon. As Mussolini did so elegantly but brutally in Italy when fascism was born. Who Franco then modeled with his Nationalists and received aid from during the Spanish Civil War. Where Orwell almost died from fighting against them with the Republicans.

 

As I said, he knew a thing or two about authoritarian governments, having witnessed several being created, sometime from whole cloth. Even the United Kingdom during the Depression was pretty much touch and go with the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley. And the Papacy eventually came to regret its alliance with Mussolini.

 

To paraphrase a popular expression, history doesn’t repeat but it often echoes. Which brings me back to where I started.

 

I admit, this might not be a compelling argument, more just a curious one based on the parallels. I recognize these structures might prove be thin and need reinforcement if placed under academic scrutiny. I’ve just outlined the contours of an idea that struck me. The touchstones and resonance points, while they do not make any outcome inevitable, perhaps make the one we’ve seen slightly more understandable. They create an intriguing association to me as a writer who constantly examines people’s motivations. One that I believe deserves further thought and consideration.

 

This, like all the other musings I plan to write this year, is meant as a starting point not a final destination. A journey and an exploration which we ultimately each must undertake alone as we try to make sense of our increasingly complex world. But sometimes it’s just pleasant to have a little company as we share a path along the way.

 

 

© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III

Aftermath – Winter Solstice 2020

 

Some of my friends have tattoos to remind them of significant chapters in their life stories. I have scars.

 

I am not talking about the kind of scars we all pick up through accident, injury or misfortune. I am talking about the four I laid down myself in neat, straight, parallel lines, first three then one. The set that look like a wildcat raked my forearm with razor sharp claws.

 

In previous essays, I’ve alluded to these scars and what they stand for. The closing essay of this very strange year seems like a good time to tell the rest of the story.

 

As people who read “Switching Sides” may remember, twenty-nine years ago I was deeply questioning my life choices. I had just finished a two-year tour of hell where I worked (Mr. Wizard, I don’t want to be an engineer anymore). Even after that environment had finally calmed down, things weren’t working out quite as I’d hoped. Most of my friends had picked up and moved to Seattle without warning. None were much interested in helping me find a job out there so I might join them. I needed to figure out what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go.

 

So, I decided to embark on a vision quest.

 

The week of Thanksgiving that year, I scheduled vacation so I could head into the mountains of North Carolina. When I was a teenager, I had begun a personal tradition of going camping the first weekend it got cold. Cold in Florida meant lows in the 40s. But that year, I really wanted to go somewhere more remote. I’d been to the North Carolina mountains several times by then, first on a family vacation when I was under ten, then for two weeks at a Boy Scout camp when I was a young teen, and again on a hiking and camping weekend with friends five or six years later.

 

I love the mountains, whether the Carolinas, Virginia, Vermont, or the Olympic National Forest. Something about the esthetic of wood, water and stone resonates with my soul. Perhaps my Abenaki heritage shining through. For me, they are a perfect place to retreat and reflect.

 

From my North Carolina travel atlas, I picked out a camping area in a national forest with an intriguing name: Hanging Dog. It was right outside a town named Murphy in the far southwest corner of the state. Karen and I had done a driving tour through that area and adjoining Tennessee the year before. So, I packed up my camping gear in the Jeep and headed north. I planned to stay up there for several days, hoping to get back before Thanksgiving Day. Having never before undertaken a vision quest and having no training, I had no idea how long it might take.

 

My plan was simple. The first part of most vision quests involves a fast. The drive to Hanging Dog would take twelve or so hours. I figured if I ate a decent breakfast on my way out of town that my time on the road would be a good jumpstart on that portion of the ritual. I brought rations up with me, knowing that driving back while still fasting after possibly several days would be an insanely bad idea.

 

When I got there that night, the campground was almost abandoned. I think there was one other person there. I chose a campsite as far away from him as I could get. Something I didn’t know until I was unloading the Jeep was that the park had designated, bordered areas filled with chipped gravel where you were required to setup your tent. Because it was dark when I arrived, I didn’t have time to gather pine needles to insulate and cushion my sleeping area. Which made for a very cold and somewhat uncomfortable night. As I remember, the temperatures dropped into the lower teens. The daytime highs were just above freezing. Normally not a problem. I own decent equipment and have more than a little experience.

 

But funny thing: when you don’t eat, your body doesn’t have fuel to generate heat. Which meant when I woke up the first morning, I couldn’t feel my feet. Very literally, everything below my ankles was numb, as if encased in ice. It took several minutes stomping and walking around in boots before they warmed enough to recover sensation. Even keeping a fire and wearing wool socks inside my sleeping bag the next night didn’t make much difference.

 

None of that mattered. Cold went with hungry as part of the ordeal.

 

I spent most of my days hiking around the area, exploring the shore of a lake that had been flooded as a part of a TVA dam project. Mostly, I just poked within a mile or so of my campsite, understanding it might not be the best time to get lost out in the wilderness. At some point I stumbled across graveyard with headstones that predated the Civil War, which I was pretty sure had been moved up from the valley floor when the lake was flooded. This place felt old with human habitation although the mountains in this area were still sparsely populated.

 

I found I had a lot more time on my hands than normal. It might surprise some of you how much time camping is spent in food preparation, between tending a fire, cooking and cleaning up. Usually two hot meals a day, at least in winter, breakfast and dinner. Without that chore, I suddenly had a fair bit of unoccupied time to think and meditate alone. Which was pretty much the point of the exercise.

 

With nothing else to distract you, you really begin to understand what hunger feels like. That dull ache becomes a sharp sensation when you know food is stashed a few feet away in your vehicle. By the second day, that taunting becomes torture. Except by then, you have a hard time focusing on it. Or really much of anything else.

 

But at its heart, the quest is about sacrifice, hoping it will be rewarded with a vision. Even with the cold and hunger, I knew hadn’t offered enough. I knew I needed something to hone my focus away from that privation. While I wasn’t familiar with Abenaki traditions specifically, with many native people’s that meant an offering of blood.

 

I hadn’t really thought about that part too much but I remembered the Sun Dance of many Plains peoples, which both the Canadian and US governments had outlawed in the nineteenth century. Some stories told of warriors who hung buffalo skulls from rawhide strips laced beneath the skin of their chest before they danced, sometimes for several days. I wasn’t quite ready for that level of commitment. Besides, I didn’t have a ready supply of rawhide or skulls on hand. Possibly poor planning on my part.

 

And yet, the more I meditated, the more it came clear to me that I needed to lay down a similar, if minor, sacrifice to demonstrate my resolve. So, on the third day I took out my razor-sharp belt knife and carved three parallel cuts high on my left forearm. I ensured the cuts were deep enough to transcend all the layers skin but not so deep as to expose muscle or tendon. Even with a sharp knife, that required effort and determination. When I was finished, I let them bleed a bit to help clean the wounds. Then I wrapped them in a cotton handkerchief as a bandage and tied it tightly.

 

And I waited.

 

I thought a lot about my current dissatisfaction and whether it was just ennui. I thought about the incidents in my background and how those jigsaw lines had helped craft the puzzle of who I was. I thought about the choices I’d made that had led me there, and whether I had truly made them for myself or for someone else. I thought about where I wanted to be and where my talents might take me. I thought about what I valued in this life and the things that brought me joy. I thought about the sacrifices that might be necessary to attain the life I’d envisioned.

 

Eventually the cold and hunger and throbbing ache in my arm did what I’d asked of them. I won’t go into details, but that night I got what I had asked for, though perhaps not as dramatically as I’d expected. It was more of a strong feeling of a path forward than an outright vision. But I knew it was all that would be forthcoming. When I finally broke my fast the next morning in preparation to drive home, I had a plan and a vague timeline. The plan that eventually led me to where I am today.

 

Why three cuts? At the time I didn’t know. It felt like the right number. As I thought about them on the drive back, I thought they might symbolize something different. It wasn’t until I was home and fully fed that I recognized what they truly represented.

 

When I was maybe seventeen, my father shared a story with me that I had never heard before. He was annoyed with me for something about my mother, likely for repeating something she’d said or for defending her in some way. Neither of my parents was above using my sister or me as pawns or weapons to settle scores over their longstanding grievances.

 

At any rate, sitting at the table in the breakfast nook of my father’s condo, he proceeded to tell me how on the eve of my kindergarten graduation, my mother had beaten me so badly that my head swelled up. He didn’t say what spawned this, only that when he had got home from work afterwards my mother insisted that we couldn’t go to the graduation ceremony because everyone would see what she had done. As he told the tale, he said to her, “You’re goddamned right they’ll see, Sally. Because we’re going.” And apparently, we did.

 

I don’t remember the beating. I’ve been told I likely blocked it out, which may have been a blessing, although it does leave a disconcerting hole in my developmental history. I do have a memory of something that may have prompted it, me accidentally breaking my father’s favorite liquor bottle in our front hall closet. My mother forced me to call him at work to tell him, which at the time simply wasn’t done. I was incomprehensible from terror on the phone. I didn’t fear his reaction; I feared my mother’s rage. I can’t say with any certainty that this was the incident that prompted his story. But I do have a vague recollection of that kindergarten graduation ceremony, of tottering down the aisle as ecstatic at being there as only a little kid can be.

 

That gave his story at least some credibility with me. But as I said in "Choices” earlier this year, I am an applied scientist at heart. From hard won experience, I look for evidence to confirm or refute what I’ve been told. That comes from growing up in an unstable, sometimes Machiavellian environment. Trust nothing you can’t verify. Everyone has an agenda.

 

The thing is, I never caught my father in an outright lie. My mother plenty of times. Her memory seemed completely malleable to her desire. But my father, no.

 

A year or two before this story, he had told me about my mother’s suicide attempt when I was still a toddler, where she slit her wrists during an argument sitting in the driveway of our house. He said this was just a cry for attention (exactly how he would have seen it). He said that because she was a nurse, she knew exactly how to open her veins if she had been serious. I was pretty dubious when he told me that story. But when I surreptitiously looked at my mother’s wrists at some point later, I spied very thin white scars transecting each. Not deep. When I asked her about them, she refused to answer.

 

By then, I had also heard and confirmed that when my parents were getting divorced, my father’s two sisters were ready to stand up in court to ensure he got custody. Or if not him, one of them. In 1974, that meant proving my mother was unfit as a parent. My aunts were fully willing to go to bat to get my sister and I removed from her care one way or another. My father was not. And without his support, nothing could happen. So nothing did.

 

From other things my father said to me much later, he and my mother never should have been married. His heart was never in the marriage or the family it spawned. He thought it was all a societal expectation. He fully believed he had been forced into it (he wasn’t). He certainly made clear to me before he died that I was not the son he wanted, the one he could drink and carouse with. “If you’d been a better kid, maybe I would have done more to help you.”

 

But that quote came more than a decade after this story, which is a story of its own.

 

At the point he shared the story of the beating with me, all I had was his account, supported by all the other incidents I remembered (and I have written about in poetry and a host of essays, including some from this year and last). While I can’t fully attest to exactly what happened in his story, the things I do remember resonate with it as likely truth.

 

Like my sleeping on an unset collarbone that I’d broken while hill-siliding one afternoon when I was eight or nine until my father ordered her to take me to a doctor the next morning. Or her throwing everything my sister and I owned into the middle of the floors of our rooms at least twice around the same time.

 

My mother was volatile and sometimes violent.

 

Taken as a whole, I knew there was something desperately wrong in my family. Things I was still sorting out. Certainly not as wrong as in some other people’s but wrong enough.

 

When I’d headed to the mountains that year, the aftermath of all those events was slowly filtering into place in my now fully-developed adult brain. Sometime after I’d returned with my soon to be scars, I realized I’d laid down three to represent the members of my immediate family: the one who abused me, the one who tried to kill me, and the one who left me to survive the other two. A few years later I added a fourth for Karen’s brother, the one who raped the one I love.

 

It was only after that mark of Bast was complete that I fully understood exactly why I’d crafted it. I needed a physical scar, something I could see and point to, to show that I’d been through something meaningful and survived. Something all four individuals denied or deflected each in different ways. All four of whom remain unrepentant, two until their deaths. I have no real hope for an epiphany from the other two. Nor am I holding my breath.

 

Yeah, kind of messed up but there it is. Psych 101 in all its glory.

 

And yet, seeing those scars every day has helped me, if only to remember, if only not to be gaslighted by what others deny that I recall. Generally, I am the only one who sees them other than my wife. Fortunately, I always wore long sleeves at work so they rarely drew much attention while they were still bold and angry red. I think only one friend ever asked me about them. Maybe a handful of medical professionals when I’ve had to roll up a sleeve. When asked, I usually say I that got them while camping when I was younger, which is absolutely true. I don’t often feel the need to explain. They weren’t meant for anyone but me.

 

From the aftermath of my childhood experiences, I’ve learned that sometimes you have to lay wounds bare to allow them to fully heal. Sometimes that’s the only real way to acknowledge something and leave it behind, which at the time I created them was something I had just started to do. To get where I was going, I had to find a way to acknowledge what had happened, how it impacted me, and leave the worst of it behind. To live for the future, not the past. At least as much as any of us ever can.

 

I am sure no therapist would recommend my particular method but the principle is sound.

 

I’ve thought about those scars a lot during the past four years. I see millions of people in the same position I was in, having survived something extraordinary and sometimes existential that was beyond their control, something often times denied. Millions will bear scars from this failed experiment of an Administration, some full tangible, others invisible. Hundreds if not thousands of children punitively caged away from their parents (who ICE and DHS now claim they cannot find). The relatives of tens of thousands who needless died in a mismanaged pandemic. Tens of thousands more federal employees whose service and oaths to this country and its Constitution have been denigrated. Tens of thousands whose marriages are now threatened with being invalidated. And countless others who continue to suffer from the rabid racism, sexism and homophobia that is not only back in the open but is increasingly back in vogue.

 

A new Administration cannot cure these ills. An election is only palliative. The hard work comes after, should it not be obstructed and stillborn as before. To recover, I believe we require hard reflection, truth and reconciliation. I fear that is unlikely to happen in the current climate.

 

Should we choose not to expose the wounds fully and allow them to heal, in my experience we will continue down a very dangerous path. One we have seen and continue to see of undermining the foundations and institutions critical to the survival of our democracy, a free press, free and fair elections, the rule of law, a peaceful transition of power, regard for science expertise. Instead, we’ve heard hypocrisy, orchestrated lies, propaganda, calls to violence, calls to suspend the Constitution, and a cabinet meeting where declaring martial law to rerun the election was discussed. With silence that echoes complicity.

 

This is not how a healthy democracy survives.

 

The night of the election, I woke up in the early hours of the morning with my heart pounding so savagely that I was afraid I would hear it stop. I had a disorienting feeling like I had done something wrong, just like I had when I was a kid, even though I knew I hadn’t, now as then. Just like four years earlier. Only this time, over the next four days, things turned around as all the legal votes were finally counted and all the claims of massive fraud debunked.

 

Around that time, once again in the middle of the night, I accessed that vision quest from so long ago and felt something I haven’t felt in a very long time. As our resident coyotes raised their voices just across the ditch from our sliding glass door, those scars flared back to life and I once again tapped into their power. The power that saw me write this essay faster than any other this year. The power of knowing I had survived. Again.

 

That calmed me in a way I cannot fully put in words. Once again, I found myself looking forward not back.

 

When I started this year’s essays, it was with the expressed purpose of reflecting on the past four years. Not to dwell on them, rather to influence people, if only by providing some insight that might make them think. Because I saw a stark choice that stood before us.

 

Five years ago, I swore to myself I would never again use my memories as the basis for essays. At the time, I thought they had become too bound up in other people’s entertainment which somehow felt wrong and unhelpful. So, I stopped writing them.

 

I changed my mind this year because the situation I saw unfolding was too important for me to let my own discomfort stand in the way of doing what I thought was right, even if it meant lacing my flesh with new, unseen scars. I was too disconcerted by what I’d seen unfold for four full years. I valued what I knew needed change too much.

 

Despite my desire, I doubt I accomplished much other than revealing a few more difficult experiences in my life. Most of the essays were painful to write because they were painful to relive. Although I have gotten a handful of emphatic thank yous, there have been more awkward silences, some defensive commentary, a few stunningly insensitive statements, and a little mocking of what I see and believe. I knew all that was likely walking in, but am still somewhat disappointed. I can only hope my words have helped someone reading them along the way, whether to consider a new perspective or just to understand on some deeper level that they were not alone.

 

Either way, it’s time to lay aside these burdens as we prepare to set fire to the candles to mark the Winter Solstice. With their light we defy this longest night along with all the tragedy and suffering the year has wrought. Knowing in our hearts that our days will only get brighter from here as we resolutely march toward spring.

 

 

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III