Monthly Archives: August 2026

Aug20

we know the fight ain’t fair

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Not all of us here are on vacation. It’s been a tough week. My son finally relented to seeing a doctor Monday after not feeling well for several days – while working construction in the heat and humidity. He could teach the Irish a thing or two about stubbornness. He had a very bumpy ambulance ride that day to the hospital an hour away. Spontaneous pneumothorax: aka collapsed lung. He had ignored it as long as possible – long enough to have his chest cavity fill up with air and put pressure on his heart. He almost blowed himself up.

So I left the house in a hurry and followed the ambulance in to the ER. After emergency surgery to insert a chest tube he was placed in a room on the cardio-pulmonary floor. Inside this behemoth medical complex he was placed in the room directly across the hall from where my former husband died in April, the last place I was sitting vigil. Here’s hoping this bookends the summer of that routine. What is that colloquial idiom…”when it rains it pours?”

Like his father and stepfather before him, my son does not surrender to any perceived weakness. And anything other than super-human strength is weakness. There is no grey area in their world. Pain is for sissies.

It is easy for any of us to hear the stories of our loved ones suffering and think “how did they do it?” Most of our ancestors certainly had hard lives. I don’t know a woman who doesn’t wonder how her Mother did it. Whatever the “it” was: physical pain, emotional upheaval, the relentless stress of daily existence. Endurance. We see it everywhere, even in this enlightened age. We are impressed by it in others; we are oblivious to it in ourselves.

What is wrong with us?! Who decided this was the way? Is this the best we can do for ourselves? We live in the culture of “self care”…as if we know what that means. I doth protest.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, once I knew he was out of the woods and being well cared for by the professionals – once he wasn’t panicked and had some major pain meds in him – I returned home almost 30 hours later. I walked in the house and was reminded that I’d left fish out to thaw the previous morning. Oops. As my Mother would say, “are we having fun yet?”

Look. I’m 72. And a half. “No spring chicken,” as they say. I don’t need to be convinced that life is not easy or pain free. But I vehemently aver that life does not need to be this hard.

My son has no health insurance. He can’t afford it. He will now qualify for emergency Medicaid thankfully. He qualified for it in his 20’s after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It covered all but about twenty thousand dollars of his medical bills. He paid that off over many years. Explain to me one more time why we don’t have free health care in this supposedly affluent country. Don’t tell me the long term stress of that didn’t take a debilitating toll on my son’s physical and mental health. I’ve just observed the effects of him not wanting to incur those expenses again. He tried to work through the discomfort.

But outrageous costs aside, this crisis could likely have been prevented. It’s that phenomena where the ten thousand dollar car engine almost blows up for lack of a forty dollar oil change. We all do it in our own way, stretch our limits just a little further for a little while longer. We Americans are suffering from an existential identity crisis: a shortage of self-awareness. Self awareness sounds silly and pretentious. We are arrogantly defensive about our right to be arrogantly defensive. Is this human nature? Don’t you believe it.

How many of our ailments do you suppose are stress-related? Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying people in other countries with free health care have no stress. I’m saying they have one less stressor. It’s kinda like I’m not saying people in other countries with strict gun laws don’t have as many mass shootings. Oh. Wait…

And while I’m on my soap box (I recently told a friend my soap box covers the entire northern hemisphere) I am also saying that free higher education leads a culture to be less defensive. Maybe a little more self aware…what might that be worth?

Aug16

the language of the heart

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Shortly after moving from the suburbs of Detroit to Traverse City back in the 1980’s, I became friends with a man named Prof Mondol. Prof wrote a novel titled Operation Tibet. It’s based on his service as a fighter pilot in WWII, having served with the Royal Indian Air Force. Published in 1979, I still have the copy he signed and gifted me. He was such a wise man. I regarded him as an unofficial spiritual teacher of sorts and held him in the utmost respect.

Due to fly somewhere on business, I offered to drive him to Detroit Metro Airport one weekend. It was an opportunity to talk for hours, and I could also take my young son to visit his father in Midland along the way. That trip would prove quite enlightening on several levels, although not in any way I could have expected.

After introducing Prof while dropping my son off, my former husband asked if he could speak to me privately for a minute. We walked down his long driveway off M20 just west of Midland. He was very direct with this statement that if I ever dared to expose his son to a black person again (Prof was a native of India), he would see to it that I never saw my son again. Specifically he explained in detail how he would have drugs planted in my car and ensure that I spent my life in prison. “Are we clear on this? Do you understand me?!” he bellowed in a whisper. Ha! As if I could be anything but clear about who I had divorced years prior. While also perfectly clear about being responsible for who I had married…and why he felt so familiar. Ass-holes are familiar to me.

I did not know that day that Prof was dying of cancer, and that trip would be the last time I would spend with him. I did not know what a gift it was. I still remember our conversation, and I have just thought of it again. Triggered recently, of course, by a family member reminding me how different we are; how I have always been, and will always be, an outsider in my family of origin. Because Prof asked me a question that day that would subconsciously affect my entire adult life: “do you believe that God created the universe – or is creating the universe?”

“Creating,” I replied without hesitation. It was an intuitive response. Immediate. From the depths of my being.

For reasons I may never comprehend, road trips seem to provide some precious insights for me. Don’t know what it is about setting a block of time aside and getting away from the house; maybe it’s the open highway…maybe it’s just making myself available to drive for people I love. My natural tendency is to stay home. I really don’t like to leave the house, and often don’t for long periods of time. To say home is sanctuary for me is a gross understatement. Home is renewal; home is life.

Sitting still does not even remotely mean I am not experiencing constant change. I guess I am living an internal life. Nature visits me at my door. The world quite literally revolves around me; I remain still at the center. You might be surprised to know that no two days are ever the same from my chair here in the corner.

But returning home recently I found myself on a detour. Road construction in Michigan happens in summer, when the weather allows. I would be passing so near to my family cemetery that it seemed disrespectful not to stop. And so I did, for the first time in years. It made me feel acutely sad. The grave sites of my parents and brother, among those of multiple generations of ancestors, were overgrown. Rocks were strewn willy-nilly. My parents graves had a headstone; my brothers did not. Later that week I was talking to my sister and mentioned this. She is the only member of my family I have much contact with at all, and then it is infrequent. We live 10 hours drive apart.

A couple of days later she asked if I would be willing to place grave markers if she were to purchase them. I agreed. She researched online and asked if she could ship them directly to me. I agreed. Within another day or so I was informed that the two grave markers had been ordered and were being shipped to her. And that she had enlisted her son, my nephew, to drive up with the markers and meet with the township for placement. He would be overseeing the project and I would be notified when it was done.

It isn’t that I mind being dismissed. Certainly not in this instance. It did startle me for a moment. And reminded me that it has always been this way in my family. I might be temporarily enlisted to participate. But then they will think better of it. As in, better not trust this to Susan. Better not let Susan make a decision. Better to handle it without Susan and then inform her. It’s been this way as long as I can remember. I am a member of the family…but just barely. They scoot over at the last minute and give me a seat on the bench. I’m an adjunct member. By default. By default that we had the same two parents, that is. But I am certainly not an equal.

And in this specific instance, the truth is that I don’t much understand or value the physical need to visit the remains of dead loved ones. They aren’t there. Although it has been documented that all wild animals in nature pause when passing over ground with remains below. It is known that elephants will spend some time stopping on their migrations pausing over long buried remains far under the ground. And they will spend almost twice as long IF those remains are of their own herd.

Which brings me full circle to what this essay is about (finally, eh?) How do the elephants know? What is the built in telepathic sense that all life on earth seems to possess? Why don’t humans understand, acknowledge and value it? What is this telepathy inherent in nature?

For lack of a better word, some would call it psychic. We are psychic beings. Acknowledged or not, we are all living a psychic life. Everything is psychic. God is psychic. You learned “all-knowing.” Same thing: interconnected.

So how am I depressed? Why am I so debilitated by grief? What is death? How can I reconcile the injustice of the world I live in? What is this perceived divide in reality?

We humans seem to have made such a clusterfuck of this ark we were entrusted with. We don’t even know we were placed here. We are in a panic that we will miss our purpose. We’ve been allocated to adjunct caretakers. Our seat on the bench is dwindling. Our time for being trusted has come and gone, and we don’t even know what is happening here.

But I do understand it. My cells get it. My psychic field, my spirit, knows. We are all part of the same God. We are infinitely intelligent. God isn’t done. The universe wasn’t created. It is becoming. We are becoming.

Aug12

the whip-poor-will confessions

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Sumthin funky is up with my internet this morning. It took me 8 slow steps to get to where I can type a new post here. And a few of my usual websites are not working…bank, email, etc. It isn’t unusual this time of year. The tourists increase the local population tenfold or more. This area has about 1,000 year-round residents, a few thousand summer residents, and another 10,000 or so vacationers. The vacationers are rude. You sit in a restaurant and overhear them complain about the slow service and lack of products on the shelves, and you can’t help but think, “are you gone yet?”

I’ve worked retail here and not only are they rude to the staff, but to each other as well. I’ve had them follow me to the bathroom and stand outside the door so that another customer couldn’t hijack my undivided attention. So they could ask me if we had these pants in another size – after having repeated three times that we don’t have back stock. Listening is hard. After labor day I gave my notice; the meager wage wasn’t worth the emotional loss of hope in my fellow humans. As you know, I take everything personally. Life is personal.

Enter the heavenly whip-poor-will to restore my soul. I live near enough to a garden center where they keep pet peacocks, which are not indigenous here in northern climes. I listen to the distinct caw of the peacocks by day. And lately a whip-poor-will has taken up residence and calls out at night. Again, a very distinctive call – so uplifting!

In native cultures the nightjar, or whip-poor-will, is said to connect us to our intuition and the deep mystery of life’s biggest transitions. It is said they heal grief and serve as a bridge between worlds. I could use some of that right now.

Yesterday I had an entire flock of chickadees come to visit. I usually have one or two hanging around, but yesterday it was a dozen or more. Just passing through, I imagine. I have a small birdbath outside my dining room window (where I sit writing this), and as they flew in and out of it I noticed it was dry. Of course it is. It’s been a hot summer. So I quietly walked out with a jug of water and a cup of seed. They sat in the shade tree above the bath and chirped at me while I refilled their supply and quietly walked back in. To my delight they played and played in the water.

A baby rabbit had hopped out from under the fence and looked at me, as if to ask if there were enough. There always is. Summer would be my least favorite season were it not for the avian tourists.

Aug3

the better end of the deal

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“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” – Gloria Steinem

In my sweet little blessed life here I was recently swimming in the warm, clear water of Crystal Lake. Out from the beach at my friend’s summer cottage, not another person in sight. She was thanking me for something – oh, driving her around, as she had flown in from her home in another state. She had bought me dinner the previous night. Our conversation turned into a back and forth of silly compliments and thank yous. Standing on a soft sand blanket, shoulder deep in blue water as far as my eye could see, I said, “well…I got the better end of the deal.”

That was the day after I got home from attending The Detroit Book Festival with another friend. She needed to attend for business and had asked me to drive her downstate. Not only because I know my way around, but because I have often bragged that “if you can drive in Detroit, you can drive anywhere.” It was a chance to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. However she paid for gas, hotel and fabulous meals in return. She also provided one on one counseling – not sure she knew she’d signed up for that, but that’s what transpired along the way. When I dropped her home she thanked me. “Well, I got the better end of that deal,” I replied. I didn’t say it lightly.

Days before my father died he said to me, “I sure hope your friends are going to take care of you in your old age.” He was implying that my family would not, because I had not taken care of him properly in his old age. And I had abandoned my siblings. The five of them (my mother being long dead) had unanimously agreed that they were done with me. They had put up with me long enough. They wouldn’t speak to me for years after my father died, or ever again in the case of my brother.

My father was in the hospital for a life saving surgery. His heart would give out a few days later. I think he knew he was dying, and it was his final chance to let me know how disappointed he was with me. My sister yelled at me to shut-up that afternoon and I would leave in tears. My father was almost deaf and apparently I was speaking loudly – as I had gotten used to doing in the recent years he had lived with me. Perhaps I, too, have become somewhat hard of hearing. For whatever reason, I was embarrassing them. They made it clear they did not want me there. This wasn’t anything shocking or new. I was their burden to bear. To say that I never fit in was a gross understatement; I was an albatross in a flock of swans.

Decades had passed since I’d left home – decades of therapy, ACOA meetings, and self examination. Failed marriages. Failed businesses. The loss of my mother. The loss of friends. I’d raised a child with his narcissistic father – who, by the way, my family loved and got along with. My mother lent him the seed money to start his own business right after our divorce. She didn’t tell me that, he did. He leveled it as evidence of how stupid and crazy I was to leave him. He won. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d gotten the better end of the deal.

My family has always told me that I am lucky, wielded this announcement disdainfully like an accusation. In fact, I am lucky. And I do not take for granted that I have fared better than they have in life. I had a better education, for one thing. But years before that I was lucky in birth order – eldest, and specifically because my maternal grandmother was close. She was a huge influence in my upbringing. And as I’ve said before, my parents addictions were not yet in full swing. My Mother was 19 when she was pregnant with me. My father was in the army and so Mom and I lived the first 8 months of my life with my grandparents in a big Tudor house in Detroit. I remember playing as a toddler in that magical house with it’s many secret nooks and crannies. My siblings have no recall of it at all. I’ve imagined my grandparents arguing about the decision to drive us to Texas, where my father was stationed, and drop us off with him. I’ve dreamt about it. I’m guessing my grandmother could hardly bear the idea, but that my grandfather felt it was the only possibility of my father taking responsibility for his young family.

Three years later we would return to Michigan. My father went to work for my grandfather. Mimi was often my babysitter. In grade school I would ride my bike to her house, often with friends in tow. We knew we could count on lots of food and goodies, and a quarter to spend around the corner at the 5 & Dime. So lucky.

I fared much better than my younger siblings in so many ways. They have lived with ongoing health problems, plagued with cancer and heart issues. Now in my 70’s I’ve still had neither – how’s that for lucky?! They have all four battled the demons of addiction – to alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and gambling. I’ve not had that to deal with. They have all faced homelessness more than once. It is true they were not so lucky.

And now in my old age I live quite an isolated life. I have lost more loved ones than remain. Thankfully I have a handful of close friends. I can count on them. They can count on me. A chosen family. It sure feels like I’m getting the better end of the deal.

If you were to ask me today my greatest achievement in life, I would say it’s having learned to value kindness in the face of cruelty. Not entirely. God knows I’ve slipped up more times than I care to admit. I’ve certainly been cruel at times. But I hope I am becoming kinder with age. It is a choice, a choice that requires practice. Kindness and curiosity are the way forward, of that I’m sure.

Feeling like I got the better end of the deal isn’t about comparison to anyone else. It isn’t a competition. It’s about being grateful. I want you to feel like you’re getting the better end of the deal when we are together, and I want to feel like I am. That’s why I say it; it reminds of how grateful I am to be with you, here, now. It’s a “just pinch me” moment. How lucky are we?!

Aug2

it’s never out of your sight

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Admittedly, I’ve never been good at separating out timelines in my life. It’s all going down at once in here. This morning at three a.m. I woke from some wild cosmic ride thinking about my RAYHOPE experience. And having an ah-ha I would like to share. It had me buzzing.

You may not remember reading the post about this (May 8, 2024). Here’s the synopsis: my father was dying. As I was driving to be his caretaker one day I had to pull over to calm down, overcome with grief and blinded by tears. It suddenly occurred to me that I was habitually praying for him but not for myself. And so I said a prayer for myself, a solicitation for help. And I ended it with, “show me just a little ray of hope…” Those are not words I have ever used. My Mother, perhaps, but I don’t remember ever saying them, let alone thinking them. I was desperate for some relief, physically and spiritually.

My father was living with my brother, way out in the middle of nowhere in some tiny cabin my brother had rented when I kicked him out of my house. Homeless, my brother had asked to stay for a few weeks, and over three years later I kicked him out. I was tired of his abusive behavior. But I wouldn’t see him that day, or ever again. So I took them groceries, cleaned the house, filled the refrigerator with prepared meals. My father was still able to get around on his own, and one of my sisters would be there the next day. Around the middle of the afternoon Dad said he wanted to lay down and take a nap. My brother would be home from work by dinner time, and so I said goodbye to Dad. It would be my turn on the caretaker schedule again in a few days.

Slowly I dodged the potholes of the dirt road for a few miles to get back to the highway. There was traffic to wait out before I could turn left. Once I did I was following a big black SUV, and as I got up to speed I couldn’t help noticing that it had a specialty license plate. A government vehicle? It wasn’t legible until we came to a stoplight miles later, and as I inched up behind it the license plate read R-A-Y-H-O-P-E.

Literally, a little ray of hope.

I had to pull over again, this time in a parking lot, to compose myself. I was shaking. Did I hallucinate that? How can that happen? There was no predetermined time frame for my visit. Imagine the complicated sequence of events that had to culminate in that exact place and time. The State of Michigan sells customized license plates. They run a check to make sure no one is already using that exact plate; there are no duplicates. What was it doing on a big SUV on a northern Michigan rural highway nowhere near anything? At some random time in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon? I did not hallucinate it. It was carefully orchestrated, perhaps over months or even years, for me. It had to be.

My father did not live but a few more weeks. My brother would never speak to me again. He was a gambling addict, and once my father was gone he would not be able to pay rent and would soon become homeless again. But he would not reach out to me. The day that had given me so much hope did not mean what I thought it meant. I have never understood it.

Until very early this morning – twelve years later – when I woke knowing something even more fantastical. Help me wrap my head around this awareness: that event was a glimpse into how the world works. It was not a miracle, not unique, or even unusual. It was momentary insight into how life works. All the time. It is all unfolding perfectly. In any given second. On any road, anywhere.

The past several months have broken me open. My days are consumed with unreconcilable grief. Maybe it’s been percolating under the surface all my life and only now has the time and safe place to express itself from my body. And this grief has simply sharpened my awareness to the point in time where I can almost grasp the enormity of this. There has always been a little ray of hope. There will always be a little ray of hope. Nothing here is happening by accident. Nothing ever has.

Aug1

public service announcement

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Part 3 of 3:

7/30, 3:33 am; I’m awake thinking about my brother again, about how he didn’t have a voice. About how I feel a responsibility to speak up for him, to tell the story of how abuse in the family of a narcissist steals the childhood of a spectacular child, an innocent child, who would never find himself again, never know joy. Who would never know his soul, his voice. Who would die alone in the rented room of a coworker’s trailer at the age of 62.

What if, at the age of 72, I drop the guilt I have carried my entire life? What if I was never responsible? Oh sure, part of me always knew my four younger siblings weren’t my responsibility. I left home at 16, telling my parents that I would no longer raise their children for them. Never mind take care of their drunk asses at three am when they stumbled in from the bar. But I didn’t really let go of the guilt, ever. The sense that I had abandoned them all. I remember being in my late thirties, sitting in a therapy session with my sister who looked right at me and told me she still could not forgive the fact that I left them all to fend for themselves when I was sixteen. I abandoned them. I abandoned my siblings. She told me they were angry at me – not at my parents. And I get it now; in many ways I was the parent. When I left at 16 they had already depended on me for years.

And I didn’t just disappear. Perhaps it would have been better if I had. No, I went away to boarding school. To what I still call the real Hogwarts. I went from a living hell to magical days full of beauty and art and inspiration. I went to Kingswood Cranbrook. I was in my heaven. I left my young siblings to fend for themselves against a monster no one could name. It was 1970. There was no such thing as Child Protective Services. No one to call, should anyone in the community realize something was wrong. I only realized it at a subconscious level myself. My body knew it, but my psyche wouldn’t define the fear for decades to come.

And I have carried guilt ever since. It is heavy. My body can’t seem to lose this visceral fat. My ankles are swollen, my knees ache. I can’t eat anything spicy, or digest gluten anymore. I’m a walking inflammation factory. Rather than accept this all comes naturally with age, I protest. There is nothing natural about this. This comes from aging in a dysfunctional, misogynistic family and culture. The one that flourished in the post-war industrial boom of the mid 1900’s.

The internet is full of articles about the inflammation that occurs with age. WHAT IF it actually only occurs in an aging society of narcissistic abuse victims? And don’t tell me you aren’t one. Not if you live in the United States, or under any oppressive government. HOW the everloving fuck do you think we got here??!!! Wake up. We are a misogynistic culture of narcissistic victims. AN ENTIRE CULTURE, people. And regardless of your age or gender or socio-economic status, ain’t nobody done here until everybody is done. You don’t have to like it. But you do have to live it. Some day I’ll tell you what we all lost when we lost my brother.

And you wonder why I’m angry all the time.