HOOLOOVOO!!!

So, I am poking around my blog, trying to find the date of something as I prepare for my Christmas Photo A Day blogs… and, to honest? I got CHILLS reading this…. I hope you will read, and share. And REMEMBER TO VOTE.

aliaslaceygreen's avatarMore Notes From the Refrigerator Door

The word Hooloovoo has been floating through my head these past few historic days. I am proud to be living in a BlueState again, surrounded by other blue states. By blue people. (Hooloovoo’s are of course a super-intelligent shade of the color blue, a species of creature in DouglasAdam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)

I’m not going to spout numbers, because I am not a statistician or a mathematician. I am an artist, a quilter, a photographer, an occasional writer and thinker. Therefore, I shall lay out only my thoughts and observations about the recent election. A topic that I consciously chose to avoid during the campaign. (Of course, my blog is so rarely and randomly updated that it would have been a pointless exercise.)

On the days (weeks, months, years) leading to Election Day, we were bombarded with chaos. Absolutely nonsensical rumors became Biblical…

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friends?

I don’t block or unfriend people as a matter of course. I have, on occasion, removed a hitchhiker… someone who I don’t know; never met, but who maybe was a friend of a friend from a literary group or a high school classmate’s neighbor, who I may have given a chance, who turned out to be more trouble than they were worth.

I do not.

But I have been.

Unfriended.

Blocked.

By FAMILY.

By “friends”…

…Because my religious beliefs and behaviors don’t align with theirs. Note–I am NOT in any fashion STOPPING THEM from worshiping as they wish. We are, for the time being at least, still FREE to worship as we see fit. YOUR desire to worship should have NO BEARING on how OUR country is GOVERNED….

…Because my political philosophy doesn’t align with theirs. My opinions are based on factual information, not hyper-partisan spin. (Of course I have shared a misplaced meme once or twice. I have occasionally not vetted something as well as I should. I happen to be human.)

But I WILL NOT BE QUIET. Not in the face of injustice, not with willful ignorance staring me in the face, not when people have locked themselves into a narrative that excludes all EVIDENCE because of some perceived, CREATED fear. When people refuse to CALL OUT EVIL because their ‘leader’ is providing them tax relief…. real or perceived… when the three co-equal branches of government will not call out utter fraud and possible treason, all because they crave POWER over patriotism…

I will continue to maintain my grasp on the correct side of history, as all of the horrors of this world through themselves at us. No matter that people vilify me or mine. I know I am in the right.

AND I WILL BE VOTING.

(Note also, that I have it on good authority I WILL be going to heaven. Sr Concepta assured me of this on many occasions over the years that she spent walking in my neighborhood, when she would pat my tiny daughter on the head, and say hello to my overgrown puppy.)

 

All the papers had to say was that Marilyn was found in the nude.

Some thoughts have gelled in my head over these past few days of such private tragedies of public people.
We ALL know the pain of loss. All of us. Some of us have had more charmed lives than others, but we all know loss.
And all of us know the particular pain of the loss of death by suicide. (if you think you don’t, look more closely. You do. I can rattle off the names of three people–without even thinking about it)
It’s different than death by cancer, or death by drowning or death by car accident or death by old age.. And while we rush to comfort the survivors of death by many means, we pick apart death by suicide in a different way. We do not mean to, of course.
YES. That person may be alive today if only ….
“They had so much to live for, they had success, they had money, they had fame…”
When you do this, this picking apart, this cataloging, this ticking off of whys, you are hurting the people they left behind in ways that can’t even be imagined. You are minimizing their lives in pursuit of analyzing their deaths.
In the same way that someone who loses someone by some chance accident will have to live with the idea that if only that Lego hadn’t been on that top step, you are consigning the family and friends of those closest to someone who died by suicide to never be able to find peace with the fact that truly, they could not have stopped it.
Sure, they may have delayed it. Who knows, they may already HAVE delayed it, once. Or four times. And certainly, if that person was able to get the medical care they deserved they may have gone into remission.
But just as an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, a cancer survivor is always in remission or not, someone who is suffering depression isn’t cured. They are managed– by medicine and therapy.
And every time someone in the public eye dies by suicide, and everyone bemoans the loss, EVERY SCAB IS PEELED OFF and the bleeding starts again and the healing takes three steps back for all those anonymous souls who are left behind.
We attempt to respect the privacy of death by other means, but for this, for this–we want the gory details…and all the papers had to say was that Marilyn was found in the nude.