Beyond Categorical Terrorism

Kudos to Rachel Maddow for blurring out the face, and refusing to repeat the name, of the young man suspected of joining a prayer service in South Carolina for the purpose of killing the leadership of a congregation with two centuries of leadership on behalf of equality for Africans and African-Americans in this country (USA). When I say I hope other media will repeat this technique,  my hope rests not in personal repugnance, but in the deepest roots of my religious tradition.

Several decades ago, the Unitarian Universalist Association introduced a program called “Beyond Categorical Thinking,” with the intention of teaching us adherents to look beyond the superficials of race, gender, age, economic status, cultural heritage, gender identity, sexual orientation — anything you can see on the surface — in order to open ourselves to a deeper kind of listening. Heart to heart. Dream to dream. Pain to Pain. Idea to idea. Fact to fact.

Twenty years later, or whatever it has been, neuroscience underscores the role of such aspirations when it comes to social choices. Instinctively, we feel more defensive in proximity to someone who looks or sounds different from ourselves. Despite our best intentions, when someone restates a known lie in order to rebut its truth, our ears reinforce the lie and tune out the negation. And reflexively, before our rational mind can flick its switch, the dominant parts of our brain light up — these being our temperaments, our primary intelligences — whenever we engage a situation, actively or passively. “You always say that!” pouts our teenage offspring. “Why do you pull back?” inquire our therapists. So it does take work — constant self-monitoring and recommitment — to get outside our comfort zone, and, just as crucial, to shut down inner messages which say, “Here, and here only, is where you belong.”

Happily, the same neuroscience that seems to doom us to autopilot has discovered that the brain itself is plastic. That doesn’t mean it leaves nasty little fish-killing beads in our waterways, but the other kind of plastic, the one that means “constantly open to reshaping.” Researchers looking into “cures” for stroke — not unlike educators trying to help young people become the first member of their family to graduate from high school — have discovered that constant repetition of necessary practices can teach the brain to work differently. At first, the necessary practice must be guided externally. Even young people nowadays might find themselves in closely-monitored physical therapy for a month or two, pushing an ankle to point a different direction, sweeping our arms in strange directions to strengthen our rotator cuffs. Meanwhile, what’s really happening is that up in our heads, our basal ganglia are telling other parts of the brain to set up new functional arrangements. (This even works with my wife’s Stage Four Huntington’s Disease, which is why this blog has suffered from neglect: she’s had to learn to walk again after a serious fall in October. But walk she can.)

But I digress. Back to Rachel Maddow’s commendable media leadership. The first step in making room for new habits is to get out of old ones. She used her media space to deny this man the fame he sought among a particular population.

The first step we must take as a society is to remove all content labels from extremist acts. To deny them the theological, racial, cultural stature they seek is the first step in undercutting their attractiveness to a generation raised on selfies and Instagram. Whether they commit their crimes in the Middle East or Midwest, in the name of Anglo-Saxon purity or theological puritanism, let their message and faces vanish. Assign them numbers and dates, the way we mark our wedding anniversaries and birthdays. Put them on a map, yes — but say no more than “another murder in Texas” or “another suicide bomber in Ramadi.” Name their weapons and other tools — but only so peaceseekers can more clearly see a “how” that we can manage.

For most of the six decades of my life, I’ve found some kind of pleasure in studying English history. The first thing we have to learn is that the so-called English Civil War included religion-based beheadings and burnings, massive destruction of sacred artworks, and send generations of Roman Catholics into underground worship (from which they fled to Maryland). Yet at the same time, over in Africa, some tribal leaders were waging wars whose purpose was capturing prisoners to sell to English merchants anchored in ancient port cities from which scholars and monarchs had once sailed in grandeur that Europeans hoped to appropriate. Extremism finds most of its victims among its own kind.

So let us remove the faces, the theologies, the ideologies of extremism. White folks do it and white folks fight it. Members of other races and ideologies do it, and in those same communities are tireless opponents of those miscreants.

It’s time for Unitarian Universalism — a religion of the Enlightenment tools of research and reason — to step into wider frameworks with that old theme of getting “beyond categorical thinking.” Yes, we need to combat misdeeds with information about the how, the where, the what. But let our “who” be blandly demographic and our “why” couched not in terms of  theology — that most misused of sciences — but neurological and sociological verities.

A Death in Summer

Last week a colleague I knew in seminary took her own life. She was younger than I, ministering steadily in stable congregations, but beyond that, I knew nothing of her life since graduation. Mostly, those who knew her are declining to speculate what might have happened, draping her death in the dignity it deserves.

My new wife and I are having a blissful first month of marriage (one month today), but my colleague’s death prompted me to reflect on what July has been at different stages of my life. As an elementary school child, I remember looking forward to summer vacation because school had not provided me with the hoped-for playmates. My family’s intellectual focus meant we did not — and do not — play well with others. We ask too many questions, most of them being, “Why?” But during long summers on our little foothill in Colorado we could indulge in all manner of history-based fantasies. We reenacted novels and movies, sang along with our mother at the rickety old basement piano. It is this epoch of life that my current newlywed July brings most to mind; it goes far to explain why Vermont felt so instantly like home.

Around ten years of age something inside flipped this formula of program-year agony, summer bliss. School got better that year, fourth grade, thanks to a caring teacher and a solid friend. When classes ended, my parents consented to my first self-initiated foray into the outside world: Vacation Bible School at a nearby Methodist church. Then we moved to a more congenial neighborhood and I began making friendships that sustained themselves twelve months a year.

After two years of this came magnet school. Once again, social isolation cloaked summers in pain and dread. Until I could drive (I hated bicycling, and it would not have supported my careful fashion statements anyway), the days dragged in hours of reading, listening to records. My father took us on long camping trips in places I treasure, but “roughing it” was never my style. Mostly I counted the days until I could reconnect with friends. It is instructive that on our camping trips,I would be looking as much at the other campers as at the scenery. What I remember most from those years is a night some strangers invited me to join them at their bonfire, and we laughed into the night.

The news of my colleague’s death, at the height of a beautiful summer, thrust me back into the longing, the dread, the agony of the decades when the waning of school and church opened into a dark season of loneliness. Through the 1980s and 1990s, I did my part in a strident group of UU Christian leaders who insisted on holding worship every Sunday in summer. We couched our commitment in theological terms, insisting that God does not take summers off. Many UUs heard it as liturgical arrogance, and on some occasions, I’m sure that’s what I intended. But the underlying purpose was pastoral. All summer long, there are people whose personal lives deplete rather than restore their hearts and souls. Economic and social dislocations often erupt in summer, as northern hemisphere families use the long, warm days to move house. Many of those moves are unhappy ones: divorces, job loss, house loss. These things might actually feel worse when flooded with sunshine, surrounded by flowers and green leaves.

In that long-ago Vacation Bible School, I learned to sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” at a moment I needed a friend. For decades, that conviction was enough to console me in hours of loneliness, not because of the song, but because I could open one of my Bibles to the Sermon on the Mount and recover that blissful personal presence. The volunteer ladies who taught us, fed us, played piano to our scraggly singing. The minister whose own kids probably wished they were on a camping trip like the ones my father arranged. These are the sacrifices of faith that brought a real Jesus into my life.

Where were we, these emissaries of that Jesus and his community of healers, prophets, teachers, when our colleague needed someone for a summertime vacation? Where were we, these friends and classmates, when her soul hit its long, dark night on a bright summer day? My Facebook feed reminds me that UU clergy treasure our summers as “time away.” We need tp recharge our batteries and our families need our undivided attention. But with the oversupply of trained and credentialed clergy, with the difficulties of our downwardly mobile, planet-grieving social milieu, may her death call us outward, a second, deeper layer, ready to steady those whose pain increases when regular — rhythmic — life subsides.

(I notice I cannot bring myself yet to say her name; it is too painful to shift her identity away from the bright young woman I knew to the one she must have become. RIP.)

Deepening Into Caregiving: Summer

Over the last few weeks, Politywonk has gotten married, for the first time, at age sixty, to a wife who lives with Huntington’s Disease. Caregiving has become my life, in part because it lets me keep writing and reading and reveling in the arts. 

But for many years, as the sun crested through its Summer Solstice and began receding toward Autumn, I have fought off the urge to just be home. To rest and eat lightly, watch lots of baseball, and choose languid audiobook performances that fill the house with landscapes and cultures we’d be visiting if we could travel.

I fought off these impulses, as relics of earlier career paths, as the curse of being raised by educators. But no more. My wife and I have beautiful flowers and trees, not many, but enough, right here in our own yard, and this is their one brief window of opportunity. From now on, we’re reverting to the agricultural rhythm, even if we only support a few bees. 

And what does that mean we are moving to other months? Not writing, not even cooking — which simply moves to overnight hours, when cooler temperatures and quiet offices make it both more comfortable and more ecological. No, it’s the barrage of annual medical appointments. They wound up here because we’re here, and medical schedulers need to find people who don’t need the busy seasons of autumn and spring (in Vermont, winter is not a reliable scheduling option).

But from now on, we’re just saying no. I’m gonna quit waking up and gazing with sorrow at the roses as I leap in the car for some upkeep of something else. No, it’s time for the roses. It’s time for the lilies, the annuals, lifting bulbs, and slicing out bindweed. Cleaning out the garage, where wind-scattered leaves from last autumn are turning into compost and mold.

Look out, vacationers! We might not have money, we might have a dread disease, but that doesn’t mean we can’t vacation. Vacation is a state of mind, and my mind has just adopted it.

After (Another) Fall

Our routine of meds, meals, recreation, respite care — it’s all been on a roll for the past few weeks — and Saturday night had us all set to return to worship after the cold spells and schedule adjustments. (The Weather Channel still points us out as a cold spot, but after the part of the Polar Vortex that we got in December, it’s all good now!)

Anyway, I settled in at the computer with my tea, waiting for her to wake up.

Then came the THUNK from the bedroom: she had fallen.

I found her on the floor. Prone. Face down, fully elongated, breathing deeply. She did not respond to her name or to touch, but she was breathing. She’s usually a responsive sleeper, so this puzzled me.

So what did I do? I figured her REM sleep was unusually deep, that her Huntington’s Disease sleep chorea had propelled her over the side of the bed, and she would wake up when her dream finished.

Sure enough, about fifteen minutes later, she wandered into the living room (yay! walking normally!) asking, “What happened?”

And I STILL didn’t get it!

When she was more wobbly, nauseous and confused after two more hours, I called the Replenishment Relative, who said I should take my beloved up to the hospital to be evaluated for concussion.

How did I not think of that?

It took another hour to obtain permission from my beloved to call an ambulance (note to social activists: mental health issues impair decision-making capacities), but when she stood up again and toppled like a cut tree, the fight was done.

And here’s the amazing party: After the EMT’s strapped her into the ambulance, they did a routine Carbon Monoxide test, and her levels were extraordinarily elevated! They came back in and checked the house (which was fine) and the alarms (which were serviced three weeks ago and worked perfectly).

The CT scan of her brain was negative for internal bleeding or concussion symptoms. A long day at the hospital brought down her Carbon Monoxide levels, and we slept in the living room, where she has a safe accommodation, until her niece and nephew can obtain and install the half-guardrail on our beloved heirloom family bed.

I write this 24 hours later. She’s got a few bruises, including one on her head, but she’s basically fine. Clear head, eating, resting as she does during each day. PBS Nature is focusing on wolves, and when I turned on one we saw earlier this week, she immediately complained that “we saw this one before.”

So now, the issue is me. The doctor said to watch her closely for two full days, and that’s not something I can delegate. But after missing Christmas, New Year’s, everything since Thanksgiving, what I’d really love is to believe that when those 48 hours are over, I am meeting someone special at a spa up in Stowe, to relax, to chat, to haunt the fitness center, the pools, and the massage tables.

But it’s more likely that I’ll be lucky if I can let myself take an hour or two around Burlington. However, I DO plan to spend those hours joining and using a gym.

Why Can’t My Mind Seize This Opportunity?

Here in Burlington, Vermont, it is cold, damn cold. It has been so for a couple of days and and gonna be so for quite some time. I have carefully looked ahead in the weather forecast to see when we’ll cross back up towards twenty (Fahrenheit) so I can get more groceries. That is thirty degrees and several days away — not counting wind chill.

Why should a caregiver care? Most days, I don’t go anywhere anyway; staying home with my sweetie and her disease keeps me busy and happy. But too often, since her greatest ambition revolves around listening to news shows (ranging from C-Span to MSNBC), my butt gravitates to my chair, so close to the sparkle of those blue eyes peaking out from under her fleece cover.

I’ve made a list of things to do, and most of them are really important. It feels like something inside is shifting in their direction. But mostly, I’m just playing on the computer, while MSNBC plays in the background. There’s some pride in having taken out the recycling this morning (most people didn’t) and brought in the bins this afternoon (apparently unique, even for those who got them out in the first place), but that’s a pathetic level of accomplishment.

Do other caregivers have this problem? I wish I knew…

When Math Was a Capital Crime

It’s impossible to remember all the books I’ve read, all the stories they contained, but I do try to combine my memory of stories with the books and authors who brought them to my attention. Alas, that does not apply to this story. But the truth of it has been borne out many times.

The Sharecropper Era was a terrible time in United States history. Not all sharecroppers were former slaves, many were also former smallholders who could not compete economically against the large landowners who undersold them by exploiting the sharecropper system. “Exploit” here does not mean “they employed that system;” it means, “they controlled it, manipulated it, and violated every safeguard by which the sharecroppers ostensibly had the right and power to earn their way off the land.” Some of their tricks could be readily spotted: the false weight scale, the healthy product discarded for imaginary imperfections.

But then, there was also “the tab.” Miners would have had the same problem. If you couldn’t add up what you spent in the company store and subtract what you paid back, with a record verifiable by outside impartial witnesses, your chances of earning your way out of bondage went way down. When The Freedmen’s Schools went up, “writing” did not mean poetry, it meant “record-keeping.” “Arithmetic” did not mean equations, it meant household financial transactions. And lynch “mobs” knew who the really outstanding students were.

This was the story that stuck with me. My father had lived in the south for much of his adolescence, and believed the myth that lynch campaigns (we now know there was no “mob” — “impassioned lack of discipline” — about them) devoted their attention to those who disturbed the public peace with violence: housebreaking and such. But no, it was those who disturbed the ancien regime by helping their friends and family keep proper records about weights turned in, money paid (or, in the case of wages, not paid), and then, what was charged and paid back in the stores.

Other than actually picking cotton and tobacco, this doesn’t strike me as very different from how the powers-that-be run our nation today. Do we really know the terms and exclusions of our credit card bills, our health insurance, our mortgages? Do we know who we owe, how much we owe them — and what we are paying back? For many of us, the answer to that, is “no.”

So when Americans fall behind the rest of the world in math, the most important problem is not that employers are forced to accept less effective employees. The most important problem is that the average American, as a householder, as a voter, as a public watchdog, has no idea who owes what to whom. No idea how it was accrued, and, above all else, when it will be paid back.

I take this to be some of the frustration behind Tea Party anger. Most of them appear to have grown up with an expectation of controlling all these numbers, these budgets, these decisions. Beyond the issues of racism, of sexism, of skill levels, I share with them this simple pain: we have absolutely no power to put this back into simple, solvable math.

 

Pastoral Care for Obamacare

Now that the Affordable Care Act has provoked the unavoidable controversies, I find myself missing true religious leadership during this process.

You might be liberal or conservative, in either your theology or your politics, but as a clergy-person, you are taught to stand with your people during times of change, and reassure them that, “Yes, change is hard. Yes, change is scary. When familiar things get rearranged, it feels like you’re under attack.”

Depending on your theology, you then say, “You’ve been through stuff like this before. You know people who have been through stuff like this before. Change is hard. Change is scary. You feel like you’re being attacked. Let’s see if you are really being attacked, or whether God is working in your life to make things better.”

This is where some facts come in. Not big picture government facts, but personal information: “Do you have health insurance right now? What is the best part of it? What is the worst part of it? Think about your own family. What do you know from coworkers and neighbors with the same coverage?”

Then you stay personal, not political. The religious path is to stay away from the blame game. “How did you feel when that happened? What were people telling you? Did anyone step up to help you with the other stuff at that time? Who was that ? What did they do for you?”

Depending on your theology, this is a chance to call on God, with a prayer of thanksgiving for everything that worked. The family members that loaned money. The neighbor who cut your lawn without being asked (this really happened to me). The coworker who kept your desk up-to-date while you were out. The Meal Train that brought food while your family lacked a cook. Community. Connections. The things health insurance never offered, and never will.

And then, back to health care. Not the law, your life.

“How much of what worked for you in that situation is affected by the Affordable Health Care Act, either for good or ill? Do you even know?”

“So if you don’t know the answer to this, can we just say a prayer for courage and God’s love while you work to figure this out?”

If liberal religious groups really want to make this law happen, their first step is to quit talking about policy and start setting up small groups to work together on the scariness of this adjustment.  To set up prayers for everyone making this adjustment, even just as part of worship. Name it as a stress sweeping through our nation, just as much as immigration injustice (however you define THAT!) or an unexpected wave of water.

Politicians are going to be reworking this thing for a long time. Meanwhile, we, in religion, we’ve got people we ought to be caring for. And the more strength we can bring to their souls in this stage, the more strength they will bring to the stages of correction and adjustment that come next.

I Used to Be So Good at Vigiling

Now that disemployment policies (deliberate imposition of unemployment on otherwise willing and able workers, as opposed to “natural unemployment”) have taken so many out of the rhythms of outside work, Books of Hours, Daily Rules, etc, are making a big comeback. Being more of a Christian than anything else, I, too, have frantically searched various such resources for a way to manage my own expanding time.

Here are the three resources on which I have settled:

Music of Silence by David Steindl and Sharon Lebell, with an introduction by Kathleen Norris

Seven Times the Sun: guiding Your Child through the Rhythms of the Day by Shea Darlin

and a reflection series from the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, MA.

It seems I cannot master more than one piece of this at a time, and anything that’s mastered one day is likely to slip away the next week. But here are the ones I’m feeling pretty good about: Terce (the mid-morning break for renewal), Vespers (the end of day wind-down reflection) and Compline (the final, bed-placed spiritual immersion).  I have made some progress on Sext, which is said to be the worst one, because it’s when you pause for the midday meal and rest and then get back to work.

Notice I haven’t yet mentioned Prime — that first morning application of energy to tasks. But it’s coming along.

Nones — the end of day clean-up and preparation for tomorrow? Forget it. Not a clue. Someone once told me they detected some “J” in my Myers-Briggs profile, and I still wonder who they were talking about.

Which leads me to “Vigil.” I hadn’t been paying much attention to this one, and it turns out, I should have done. And when I reread that section of Music of Silence two days ago, it was not about the night before — Erev, as Judaism says — but more about that time one lies half awake before dawn, visions of the coming day darting through a mind too tired to chase them down. For me, at least, the result is a horrible clash of aspiration against mortality. Doomed before I start. It’s a dreaming moment, and I’ve reached an age, and a poverty, in which I know most dreams must be put aside. It seems to be the last part of me that hasn’t caught on to being out of the marketplace, away from the community where people push each other along, and thereby are all more productive.

There are things I still know about what will happen. When my fiancee wakes up, it will be Prime (thank God she’s a morning person and gets me going!) and energy will rise within me. When her Huntington’s Disease knocks her back into sleep about halfway through my Prime, it should be my Terce (coffee break), but often sinks into a premature Sext (lunch hour). But if I just remind myself that there’s lots to be done even later, through dinner and bedtime, it makes me feel better and Sext settles into a calm that refreshes.

But Vigil. That’s the tough one. Right now what helps is blogging (thank you, dear reader), Facebook (God bless Community), and a small list of email check-ins that help me remember what I’m doing.

And, since it’s so verboten to say this for ministers in covenant or search with congregations, my monkey mind relies on judicious and minimal applications of Ritalin to keep it organized. There are many family members now using pharmacological as well as spiritual tools to deal with responsibly diagnosed ADHD.

Vigil is when I have to remind myself of that diagnosis. This will not be the day I do a thousand things. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s just one day, and there are just a few covenants — at best — in which only baby steps will be taken.

Knights used to vigil to prepare for investiture, a changed life. But in my protesting days (and thanks to those of you now able and willing to do this work), it was only a single execution, a single life for which I stood outside for hours.

That’s when I was good at Vigil: when I knew it was about the tension between life and death. How little we can hope to do, how much we can achieve by doing little.

Good News, Bad News

It should have been a moment of joy, not of calculation. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and however much I do for her, she does as much or more for me.

So OF COURSE when she asked me to marry her the other night, I said yes.

That’s the good news: Lynne and I are engaged. Despite her Huntington’s Disease (she is about to enter her twelfth year of living with it since diagnosis) and our being both women, marriage is a real option in her mind.

But maybe, for me, not so much.

Not that I hesitate in making her my life partner, calling her “wife” to my “wife,” “spouse” to my “spouse.” For years now, I’ve been fantasizing more about what she would wear to our wedding than what I would wear. Would she put aside her deep aversion to jewelry and wear a ring that tells the world she’s mine? It’s almost as if I quit wearing any of my own rings until the day she puts one on my hand.

But, alas, financially, I can only do a non-legal blessing ceremony. Not because we’re both women, but because at low incomes, marriage gets heavily penalized.

I don’t often encourage UUs to study information from Sam Brownback, the socially conservative governor of Kansas, but he’s got my back on this one.  That was in 2008; the update on Obamacare is just as bleak. Small wonder that David Blankenhorn, long a pro-family activist, has abandoned the fight against marriage for same-sex couples like Lynne and me and begun asking how to support any couple, straight or gay, who wants to be married and poor.

Even the laughably left-wing state of Vermont, which is perfectly happy to let us get married with full equal rights, would then turn around and cut off the pay I get for staying home to take care of Lynne. What started out as equal rights has suddenly made me aware there are equal penalties.

These same penalties apply in Social Security and numerous other low-income supports. The Earned Income Tax Credit, the single largest redistributor of income into working poor households, is one of the worst offenders. If you thought America had long since accepted life without The Donna Reed Show, you haven’t been paying attention to these injustices, not based on gender, but on class.

So yes, do congratulate us, and celebrate our good fortune in so many ways. But if you really want to do something useful, to make this about more than just two women in a struggling once-middle-class household, put these injustices up next to your concerns about DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and devote yourself to any couple, straight or gay, who wants to get married — and simply can’t afford to.

Closing Twenty Years

Earlier this week I resigned from the Unitarian Universalist Ministers’ Association. At the same time, I recommitted to the Unitarian Universalist Society for Community MInistries. But I’m not sure that will last, either.

My UU identity and work are stronger than ever, but they’ve become completely private endeavors. My daily reading is a wonderful resource from Beacon Press, Rabbi Chaim Stern’s Day by Day, an interfaith gathering of wisdom through the Jewish Lectionary Year. My history interest is still UU polity, in which I’m examining the immediate post-Roman Empire Western World for deep roots of elected governance combined with pagan ritual. Surprisingly, once you drop the Rome-centered view of the same regions, a coherent and unbroken story emerges. How much we could learn from the Jews about having a canon which tells that story, with all its contradictions and imperfect characters, week by week, every year, with no goal other than lifting our sense of self out of any particular time and place, into union with The Eternal from which our faith was given.

When I visit the local UU society on Sunday, I get none of this. The overwhelming sensation is that last residual of a dead faith, one from which God has moved on, leaving behind obligations that never end. The worship experience is delivered with excellence and commitment, and we had a huge turnout last weekend for our Beyond Categorical Thinking workshop — which means the ethical and spiritual core of our leadership stands ready to grow and serve — but I just miss a central presence of that God Who Unifies History.

As a caregiver, I need an unsullied message about larger concerns. Where does suffering come from? What will give me strength for one more day? As an aging person, I want to know who will mourn for me as me when I’m gone. Who will even know me well enough to say who I have been? A society that avoids discussing the God Who Unifies History — not just European history, not just national history, not just human history — cannot know my soul, any more than can a society that limits God and History to any one faith, place or species.

From the return of Jupiter and Venus this week through the quadrennial ritual of watching a Presidential debate, I believe in a God who speaks through knowable systematic theology. It is not chaos, it is not abstract or mystical. That doesn’t mean there are not mystical moments or chaotic disruptions to the sequence, it just means things return to that place of relationship, where Abraham and Sarah received the promise of descendents as numerous as sand in the desert or stars in the sky. Where Noah received the rainbow and the dove, and Jesus went apart to regather his strength through prayer. The place where Lao Tzu watched the butcher and cherry blossoms represent the fleetingness of beauty.

This place is not in the Middle East; it isn’t in the Far East. It isn’t on a timeline that historians can lay out and ask for on tests. This place is a one to one connection between Eternal and Mortal realms, in which each knows itself to yearn for and trust in the other.

I know there are many others who feel the same longing, which is why I bother to share. But as my partner sleeps longer and longer hours and my care-giving obligations grow, I need a religion that wants to take care of me, to reinforce its sense of my place in this larger realm.

Well, that’s it for today’s whining. The good news is, we had a weigh-in yesterday,and Lynne is back up to 140 pounds. The bad news is, her chorea is starting to fight back against the miracle drug we depend on to keep her going. We’re going to look into physical therapy, but we can’t deny that Huntington’s Disease remains fatal. Is it time to be grateful that we had this last good year? That we refuse to concede.