It’s been a long while since I’ve posted. Truth be told, it’s been a long while since I’ve written much of anything and I miss it. I miss putting my thoughts on the page (or screen, as it were) to the point of becoming anxious and even depressed. It was nearly impossible for me to write immediately after Kevin died and the combination of grief and lack of my usual outlet drove me to strange panic attacks, loss of sleep, and days of staring into space. I rented a house near Lake Michigan for a few days and told myself I had to face the writer’s block. Once I did, the words poured out and this blog, along with the beginnings of a book, were born. But now I feel back in that space again and it’s almost as troubling.

Though I’ve hesitated to write about it, and felt for a long time that this blog was not the place for it, I am now willing to say that I attribute nearly all of this difficulty to current politics. If you are feeling like you don’t want to read one more thing about that, I hope you will hear me out. 

The mind goes through so many difficult emotions during significant loss and grief. The grieving are tossed into a tumultuous sea, battered around until our bearings are completely lost and we feel we can only tread water in hopes of eventually finding shore. Exhaustion, hopelessness, regret, anger, constant worry; those are the weighty emotions that the grieving bear. We try to shake them off until one day they are no longer so much a part of our daily lives. It is damn hard work. I have worked hard at it, as have my children, Kevin’s and my family, our friends. I could almost go through a calendar since 2010 and mark the times where I felt the various stages of grief and then learned to lay them down.

I don’t know if I’ll ever again live without worry. Death and grief create a sense of vulnerability that is unparalleled. I worry about my own well-being and health, for I am my children’s only parent. I worry about our finances (I am extremely lucky that Kevin planned and we’re ok, but we are nowhere near where we would have been were Kevin still here and working a job where he was achieving). I worry about my children’s futures and how they will be impacted long-term by the loss of their father. I worry about growing old alone. But, because I am a person of the world, I also worry about bigger things like the planet and inequality and living in a just society where everyone is valued.

Since November,  I am disheartened in a way that I haven’t been in a long time. I have low energy, no focus, and most days, I pour my creative momentum into trying to correctly explain my POV as a liberal to people on social media who have no interest in understanding or finding common ground. So why begin a blog about the election with a primer on the emotions of grief? Because I have felt all those things again over the past eight months.

I fell in love with Kevin for many reasons, not least of which was because he had dropped out of college as an engineering major and returned when he decided to pursue his first love, political science. He ended up in the corporate world, but would have made a wonderful politician, especially later as he became more deliberative. Our early dates were filled with talk of how we would save the world and what Reagan’s presidency meant long-term (much of which has come to pass). Together, we attended rallies for Mondale and Dukakis, and canvassed for Bill Clinton with our infant son in a carrier. 

I credit my dad for making me a political person.

Dad

He was a proud Yellow-dog Democrat from Tennessee who schooled me on how the Dems lost the South the minute Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. He was a union member with whom I walked picket lines as a young girl. He once was nearly thrown off a bus in Kentucky in the 1950s because he gave up his seat to a young African-American woman. He idolized Franklin Roosevelt because he lived through the Great Depression and believed firmly that we all have a responsibility to uphold even a small piece of the social safety net. He knew from experience that those New Deal programs saved millions of lives. When I met Bill Clinton last year, I told him first about canvassing with my infant son, then told him about how my parents kept his picture in a frame in their guest room. 

And now I find myself struggling, angry, and genuinely afraid for our country and the division that we currently face. I’m trying to understand how people, some of whom I know and love, could vote for someone who behaved in the way our current president behaved. I won’t provide the litany here, it’s been done in many other places. We have come to a place where there is such division between those who want everyone to have equal rights, regardless of who you love or the color of your skin, and those who believe that this equality means taking something away from them. The lines are drawn and they don’t follow the lines drawn in the past. My father disagreed with Republicans over issues like limited and had no place in people’s homes. Those were debatable topics that were discussed civil tones. Now, much of that party is about judgment of anyone who is "other" and a seemingly narrow definition of what it means to be American. The current administration says they were elected to disrupt, but what it appears to me they wish to do is to dismantle all the strides made in the 20^th century to ensure the affirmative role of government in our life, the part where they “protect the general welfare” of the citizenry, especially the least among us. It is difficult for me to see this as anything but heartless selfishness, though I feel compelled to try to understand.

When Kevin died, I lost the provider of health care for my family. His employer allowed me to purchase at the same rate for one year. Then, overnight, the cost went from $150/month to $950/month. All of us were seeking grief counseling which, along with all other mental health services, wasn’t covered at all. My son was on ADD medication, which wasn’t covered. It was a terribly frightening time when I could see that the life insurance legacy Kevin had so carefully planned would be eaten away each month as I struggled to pay for insurance. As I had a plastic bin containing over $1 million in medical surgery, treatment, prescription, and emergency visit bills, I knew I could not ever be without insurance. I have taken extra work teaching in order to remain at a job I love but which cannot provide insurance for me. When I post about this publicly, I’ve been called a “welfare queen” who "mooches off the government dole." This is what we’ve come to. We don’t try at all to understand the real situations of real people. We simply name-call anyone with whom we don’t agree. 

And it is not just my personal fear over losing health care. It is also my concern for science and for our planet. It is anger that an international emergency like climate change has been politicized and people have been wrongly convinced that it’s not real. How can this be? Equal pay, the protections offered by Medicaid, the war on facts and on the press, accessibility to the voting booth, the vilification of certain religious groups and immigrants, the war on higher education as being the playground of the “liberal elite,” or the demonizing of public education as a place of brainwashing; the list goes on. My parents worked hard to make sure that their kids could go to college so they wouldn’t have to toil in a factory (though that is good and honorable work). Now, I’m being told I don’t understand the very demographic in which I grew up because I’ve gone to college and entered the professional class. Where do we go from here if an entire segment of our population feels it is wrong to improve their situation, or that it’s more honorable to struggle with unemployment and addiction than to go to college? I honestly grapple with these issues daily and have felt no effort from anyone who espouses them to attempt to explain to me how they make our country better.

It’s a daily assault on so many things I hold dear and important.  It’s an assault that is exhausting and seemingly has no end any time soon.

I often wonder what Kevin and my dad would think of these strange days. I so miss having them both to talk to. I know that not having them has impacted my physical and mental health. Holding on to anger, fear, and frustration, or dousing them with red wine and boiled carbohydrates has taken its toll. 

I don’t know what our future path can be. I am trying to get back to reading, trying to find empathy in situations where none seems to exist, trying to rest so that I can battle another day. I make near-daily phone calls, write emails, sign petitions, attend organizing meetings, learn how to circulate petitions. I am resisting what I feel is an administration that has absolutely no moral compass and no concern for those most vulnerable--the refugee, the disabled, the unemployed, the woman wearing a sari or a burka, the young black man who simply wants to walk down a neighborhood street. I am resisting senators and members of Congress who, I believe, are terribly

I know I am a different person having lost Kevin and having lived through the grief of his loss. And I can see that I am becoming a different person yet again—a fighter, a resister, a more outspoken feminist. I have commented before about the meta-experience of watching yourself change from outside forces, the deep analysis that tells you that you’ve become a different person, with different motivations and priorities. I feel that happening again and hope that it is enough. Friends might say that I should concentrate on myself and my kids; that no one would blame me for backing out of activism after all I’ve been through. But if I’ve taken any of those “life is short” lessons to heart over the past seven years, then I cannot walk away from what I feel is wrong. It isn’t enough to value every day, you must also, of your own volition, make something of that day. I want to fill each day with justice and knowledge, and spend my time working to help the world inch closer to equality, acceptance, civility, and love. It is not how I thought I’d be living this time of my life, but outside forces sometimes compel us to become better people than we once were.