The Last Link

My brother, Jody, died on the evening of March 3rd, 2010, at around 7pm Pacific time. The facility had tried to reach me about 30 minutes before, to report a change of condition. By the time they made the call, the nurse was already on her way to tell them he was gone. I was napping, and didn't answer the phone, which doesn't bother me because I couldn't have talked with him anyway. I got the news from the funeral home calling me around 7:30pm.
Whenever you get news like this, it's always unsettling even when you're expecting it. We've been expecting it since last July. My intention was to make a return trip to see Jody again later this Spring, but it was always a gamble with time.
I haven't cried.
That bothers me to some extent, and I know it bothers my family. I've gotten "misty", as my mom used to say, but I haven't actually cried. Danni, my youngest daughter, has been calling my brother almost weekly. She sent him a Valentine's Day card. She spoke to him on Monday, and reported to me that he couldn't talk long because he was very tired. When I told her she burst into tears and wailed. The next day, I went to her place after work and we discussed the situation. She expressed extreme regret that she did not get to go back and see Jody, but she also clarified some of my own ambivilence about spending money and taking time off to do the socially-mandated funeral trip back to a place that is no longer home for any of us.
She talked about the need for she and her siblings, and myself, to make the trip "someday - when things aren't so crazy and we all have a little more money and time". Truthfully, if I were half the woman girthwise that I am now, I'd go ahead and fly back. But flying back costs me twice as much as it would cost that imaginary normal-sized woman, and this has been a Winter of financial hardship for Danni and one of $1000 PG&E bills for me, and we also just went into escrow on a house. I prefer to put what money I am able to spend towards keeping Danni in her apartment and keeping her car and insurance, and getting us into our own place with a woodstove.
I know this is one of those decisions that will haunt me for the rest of my life, but I also know that Jody doesn't care at this point if I'm at his funeral or not. My regret is that I did not have a chance to see him again, and that Danni did not have that chance, either. For 30 years, the staff and residents of his residential care facility have been his family and that family will have a chance to attend his services. They have been good to him, and they have been good to me. My gratitude is enormous.
In other times and places, my brother's life could have been a nightmare. It has not been so in the time and place that he lived. He was well cared for, and his final months have been lived exactly the way he wished to live them: eating ice cream, watching videos and coloring.
I made a snapshot-book of family photos on the train trip back to Illinois last July. I put in photos of us when we were kids, and photos of his nieces and nephews as kids, then as adults, and with their own spouses and kids. I labeled them all, so the facility could tell who was who and what relationship they were to Jody. I drew a picture of the family tree, with our parents as the trunk, our grandparents as roots, and he and I as the two main branches. My branch curled over his, and my kids hung above him reaching for the future. His branch came out straight and strong from the trunk, just above the roots. The facility staff told my daughter on one of her frequent calls that he spent a lot of time looking at the book, which makes me both sad and happy.
Once when we were kids, we went to visit one of our mother's friends who lived in the city and we were playing out in the backyard and I was supposed to be watching Jody -- but I wasn't paying attention. When I looked up, he was nowhere to be found. Finally, I ran to the back alley, and saw him, a tiny figure walking determinedly with his sway-hipped gait into the distance.
And that's how I see him now.
Good-bye, Little Joe from Kokomo, Wiggle-butt, Mangey Polecat. I'll see you when I see you. Tell the folks we think of them often, and I hope you get all those questions you had answered.
I bet Freckles was happy to see you, and he didn't growl and he was feeling frisky.
And now I'm crying. Of course.

Disheartened and Tired

Remember this post? Well, all I can say is that I'm deeply disappointed. I can't say things would have gone any better with Hillary as my choice, and I'm pretty sure they've gone better than they would have gone if McCain/Palin had won. But nothing, absolutely nothing, that I was hoping for has come anywhere close to fruition. The biggest and most sickening FAIL has been "healthcare reform", which as far as I can tell is only going to force people to buy insurance from the same corporations that have so very thoroughly screwed us on healthcare for generations.
And as for the TARP, well. It was better than another Great Depression, but then again we aren't even close to being out of the woods on that one, yet. Plus, I don't believe any corporate entity is "too big to fail". I'm of the "if it's too big to fail, it's too big to exist" school. So far as I can tell, what we've done is to give the biggest banks and financial players a huge interest-free loan which they then turned around and made huge amounts of money on, and then paid themselves MORE huge bonuses, while not stopping their aggregious behavior.
And while I understand that unemployment woes are more the fault of the last decade than the last year, I also believed myself to voting for a lot more intervention in the form of public works programs and green programs instead of saving AIG and Goldman-Sachs.

In short, I feel that I've been used. I feel that what the working class (aka "middle class") wants is unimportant to the Democratic Party, but what the corporations want is vitally important to them. I don't believe that a handful of Democratic Party US Senators and Lieberman are holding us all hostage for the sake of the people who voted for them. I think they're doing it for the sake of the insurance industry, and somewhat for their own egos. Even if they WERE doing it for the people in their home states, that would be unacceptable, since the total population of Nebraska is probably less than the city of San Francisco, but be that as it may our Constitution having given equal power to all US Senators there isn't much we can do about it. As does everything else that humans are involved in, the original goal for this has been twisted beyond the doubtless noble goal that allowing it was meant to serve. I expected a fight on healthcare. Instead, the Left signalled from the very beginning that they would accept compromise, and that guaranteed that they would get NOTHING. Hell, the filabuster is just a convention, not a law. They could have gone around the Blue Dogs with Reconciliation. And Lieberman? We all knew he didn't deserve to keep his Chairmanship, but remember how we had to let him keep it because otherwise he'd not vote for healthcare reform? That really worked out well for the Democrats, didn't it?

When the pundits and talking heads mention Democratic Party apathy, I could be their poster child, except I'm not a registered Democrat. Haven't been for years. I quit the party when they couldn't find their spine in 2004. I'm not seeing any evidence that they have found it even now that they hold Congress and the Presidency.

I don't agree with the Tea Party movement's rhetoric. I don't even think it's an actual grassroots movement. But I will give them this: they have scared the bejesus out of the Republican Party.

There needs to be something similar happening on the Left.