Tag: life

A Backhanded Blessing

March 25th, 2026

She’s in jail. A person who I care about very much was incarcerated two days ago. It sucks. It’s really hard to give that event a positive spin. The person is looking at more than just jail time. They are staring at potentially years of prison. In many ways it’s a grim future.

On the other hand, it could be worse. I guess things can always be worse. The person is an addict. Their drug of choice is alcohol, although I am not sure that the word “choice” is accurate or appropriate. I think that for this individual the ability to exercise free will is much diminished. They aren’t in control of their habit. It is in control of them.

For weeks now, actually for years already, I have agonized about what this person would do next. My wife and I have lived in fear, a fear that this young woman would die. The person we love was unstable and sick, and with her anything was possible. We never knew what would happen. As I was told once, “The pattern is that there is no pattern”. That is the truth. There has been nearly constant chaos for as long as I can remember.

Now this person is in a location with structure and routine. She is relatively safe, well, as safe as person can be in a jail. Jails can be scary places. I spent just a few hours in a jail, and I remember quite clearly moments of raw fear. The only advantages of her being in a jail are that she probably cannot harm herself or others. Jail is not a good answer to her problems, but it is the only answer currently available.

The truth is that since this person was incarcerated, I have been breathing a sigh of relief. I am not as scared as I was just a few days ago. That does not mean that all is well. It isn’t. This turn of events brings new challenges for the young person and for everyone who cares about her. We’ll get through it together, but it will be hard. I look at the bottom line in this situation: she is still alive. Everything else is secondary to that.

It bothers me that in our society the best we can usually do for a person with mental health issues is to lock them up. We have a decades-long War on Drugs that has never had any real successes. Our country frequently blows up boats that may or may not be bringing drugs into the U.S., but we don’t make nearly the same amount of effort to understand addiction and its treatment. We only care about people with mental health problems when they inconvenience or endanger us. If a person decides to use a drug to quietly commit a slow-motion suicide, we are okay with it. We don’t care about the harm that addiction causes because we don’t care about the common good. We only give a damn when it hits home, and hits hard.

I prayed, and still pray, every night for the person I love. I prayed that she would survive. God answers prayers, but often in odd ways. Sending this person to jail is a backhanded blessing, but I’ll take it.

Set Yourself on Fire

March 20th, 2026

I had never heard anything about self-care until after my wife and I became fulltime caregivers for our grandson, Asher. It initially felt like an alien concept to me, and it seemed a bit self-centered. It sounded like encouragement to take care of Number One above all things, and I had trouble with that. After all, Karin and I had to focus on Asher who was just a tiny baby when we started being his foster parents. Being there for Asher was, and often still is, an all-consuming activity.

The plan at first was for Karin and me to act as foster parents for only a limited period of time, maybe for a year or so. That scenario did not work out. That time frame dragged out to eighteen months and eventually our role as foster parents morphed into being Asher’s legal guardians. We came to the realization that our commitment to raising Asher was open-ended. We were his caregivers for the duration. We were in it for the long term.

I think for me that epiphany is what changed my mind about self-care. I finally knew that I was not involved in a sprint. I was running a marathon and so was my wife. We had to take care of ourselves in order to care for Asher. We had to learn how to pace ourselves, and how to share the burden. Karin and I became acutely aware of how much we needed each other. In a way caring for Asher makes our marriage stronger because we have to work together to raise Asher. Neither of us can do the job alone. We have a common goal.

This being the case, we have to avoid burnout. We have to keep tabs on each other’s health and wellbeing. The most often asked question in our home is, “Are you okay?” This is not a frivolous question. We really need to know. Likewise, Asher also ask us this same question, because he needs to know that we are able to be there for him. He depends on us for stability and safety.

Karin and I give each other permission to take breaks. She gets to go to her knitting groups. I get to meet with my friends for coffee or a beer. We take turns watching over Asher. We are able get support from our friends. We are concerned for each other out of love, and also from a sort of enlightened self-interest. We cannot afford to have either of us flame out. Both of us have to be functioning in order to provide for Asher. In in the end, it all revolves around Asher.

Self-care is not selfish. It is simply accepting the fact that we are mere mortals with limitations. As a friend told me,

“It does no good to set yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm.”

Reunion

February 8th, 2026

I received a letter a week or two ago from a couple high school classmates. They are busy organizing a 50th anniversary celebration for the Class of 1976. I find it almost impossible to wrap my head around this development. Based on the letter, there has already been a massive amount of planning and preparation involved with this event. They have arranged a tour of the old high school. The organizers have a dinner and party set up at a local hotel. There are detailed instructions in the letter about how to pay for reservations. Still, I have lingering questions:

“Why? Why do all this? Why bother?”

At the risk of stating the obvious, fifty years is a long time, and at least in my case, a lot has happened during those years. What do I have in common with these classmates from five decades ago? What do I even have in common with the person I was back then?

Probably not much.

I have kept in contact with a grand total of three of my high school classmates. I’ve only seen two of them during the last decade. If I went to this soiree, I doubt that I would recognize anyone. I expect that nametags will be necessary for any sort of socialization.

The letter asks people to “meet us in the Grand Ballroom at 4:30 for dinner, conversation, reminiscing, dancing, cocktails, meeting old friends, and making new ones.” Dancing? Seriously? How many cocktails will people need for that?

What about reminiscing? This implies that a person wants to talk about what it was like back in high school. I am hard pressed to recall much that is worth remembering, much less discussing. Do I really want to converse about the days when I was young and stupid? I once read an interview within which John Lennon was asked about getting the Beatles back together. He sarcastically replied to the interviewer that it would be like going back to high school. I can understand Lennon’s viewpoint.

When I look back half of a century, I don’t feel nostalgia. I recall most of all that burning desire to get the fuck out my hometown. I wanted to see the world and have adventures, and that I definitely did. When I really think about it, it is clear to me that almost everything I did while in high school was part of an effort to go somewhere else and to be somebody else. Paul Simon best described my feeling at the time in his song, “My Little Town”. The lyrics go like this:

“In my little town, I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all.
And he used to lean upon me as I pledged allegiance to the wall.
Lord, I recall, in my little town,
Comin’ home after school, flyin’ my bike past the gates of the factories,
My mom doin’ the laundry, hangin’ out shirts in the dirty breeze.
And after it rains there’s a rainbow and all of the colors are black.
It’s not that the colors aren’t there, it’s just imagination they lack.
Everything’s the same back in my little town,
My little town, my little town.

Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.

In my little town, I never meant nothin’,
I was just my father’s son. mmm.
Savin’ my money, dreamin’ of glory,
Twitchin’ like a ginger on the trigger of a gun.

Leavin’ nothin’ but the dead and dying back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.
Nothin’ but the dead and dyin’ back in my little town.”

That song tells part of my story. Eventually, years later I returned from California to my place of birth. I came back a very different person. I came back mostly because my wife and I had a baby boy and he needed more family than just us. Was it a good decision? I have no idea, but that’s what we did.

We live within ten miles of my old school. We live within ten miles of the hotel where they want to have this shindig. I could easily attend. Sure, Karin and I would have to find a babysitter for our little grandson, Asher, but we could figure it out if we wanted to do so. I don’t want to.

Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. The past isn’t even past.”

He’s right. My past is an integral part of my identity.

I don’t need to go somewhere and wallow in it.

Hold You

February 3rd, 2026

There are times when out grandson, Asher, wants me to carry him. That is usually not a problem. He’s just over five years old, and he tips the scales at just over forty pounds. The thing that I have to keep in mind is that, with each passing day, Asher is a bit bigger, and I am a bit older. At some point, perhaps soon, I won’t be able to carry him. That’s just reality.

Last night was a rough one for Asher. He sleeps with me. He has done that for years, and he dozes off with his heavy head lying on my left bicep. When he came to bed yesterday, his legs were hurting. He had been playing and kicking a lot earlier in the evening, but I don’t think that’s why his legs were bothering him. He has sudden growth spurts, and when those occur, his legs ache. Sometimes, the soreness is mild. Last night it was fierce. He quite literally had growing pains.

Asher fell asleep in my arms, but he was awake again after only an hour or so. He was crying and moving around. I got up to find him some Children’s Tylenol. My wife and I asked him to take the Tylenol for his pain, but Asher wanted no part of it. He doesn’t like to take pain meds. That might be a good trait for later in his life.

Eventually, Asher settled down and slept again. About two hours later he was up again, once more crying. My wife came to bed to comfort him. Asher laid between the two of us. The tears flowed for a while, and then he calmed down and slept.

This cycle went on for most of the night. Asher would sleep fitfully for a while, then wake up and cry because of his aching legs. Each time, I held him close as he wept. I could feel his body slowly relax and his sobs fade away. I couldn’t think of anything to do anything to ease his pain. I could only hold him so that he would endure it. He did.

The last attack came before 3:00. It wasn’t as intense as the previous bouts of pain. His body was finishing its work extending his bones and muscles. Asher eased on to my shoulder and closed his eyes. He finally slept peacefully.

I stayed awake. I stared at the skylight and thought about the words of a song:

“I can’t carry you forever, but I can hold you now” – lyrics from, Hold You Now by Vampire Weekend

Wars that Come Back Home

January 20th, 2026

“Another head hangs lowly
Child is slowly taken
And the violence caused such silence
Who are we mistaken?

But you see, it’s not me, it’s not my family
In your head, in your head, they are fighting
With their tanks and their bombs, and their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head, they are crying

In your head, in your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie
What’s in your head? In your head?” -from Zombie by the Cranberries

I got a call a couple hours ago. It was from a young man who is very dear to me. He lives in Texas with his wife and young children. I have known him for many years. He served in the Army. Fifteen years ago, he was deployed in Iraq. That experience changed him forever.

The young guy did most of the talking. He wanted to tell me about his work pumping concrete at construction sites. He lives in the country. A lot of his jobs are in the Bryan/College Station area. He told me that six out of eight of his company’s recent jobs were cancelled because ICE agents were grabbing people that looked illegal to them. He had mentioned to me previously that almost all of the concrete finishers on the jobsites were Latinos. During the last few days very few of them have been showing up for work, so the young man has not been able to work either. In general, he likes to work with the Latinos. They bust their ass on the job. In the past, they have been friendly and shared their food with him.

He went off on a tangent for a moment, and said, “Well, if things get bad pumping concrete, I might just join up with ICE. I don’t know what else I would be able to do.”

I thought to myself, “Jesus Christ, don’t do that.” I didn’t reply out loud to his comment. I could imagine the conversation going down a deep rabbit hole.

At one point, the young man asked me,

“What do think of that woman who got killed in Minnesota?”

I replied, “I got some thoughts. It’s not a good idea to surprise a guy carrying a loaded gun.”

The young man said, “She was coming at him at high speed.”

I got pissed off, “No, she wasn’t!”

He answered me, “Yeah, well, I would have done the same thing he did.”

I responded, “I know you would. If somebody started coming at you, you would be right back in Iraq.”

I felt scared and hurt, nearly shaking. The young guy was speaking the stone-cold truth. If he had been in that situation, he would have pumped four rounds into the woman too. I know that in my heart. He would have been at war again.

I had actually been thinking about the killing of Renee Good before the young man called me. I have been wondering if the ICE agent was a combat vet. I have been wondering if he had PTSD like the young man I know. Did the shooter just react? Was the decision to shoot automatic? Was he suddenly back in a very scary place far, far away from Minneapolis? Did he bring the war back home like my young man?

I don’t know. I can’t know.

The young man knew I was upset. He told me, “Well, I took a different path. I’m not an ICE agent.”

I replied, “I’m glad.”

Christmas Cards

December 21st, 2025

I send Christmas cards. Lots of them. I think that my wife and I have mailed over seventy cards this year. I have posted most of them. Almost every day I wrote notes in some cards, put stamps on their envelopes, and dropped them into mailboxes.

Why do that?

The main reason that I send out Christmas cards is because I like doing it. I suppose that is the main reason for me to do anything. In this case, I do it in order to maintain the tenuous relationships I have with far-flung friends and family. I write cards to people all over the world, and with some of them I haven’t seen their faces or heard their voices in decades. Yet I still feel a connection with them. Sometimes we get responses to our cards, but often we don’t. Writing a card is a lot like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the sea. The recipient might get it, and they might read it, and they just maybe might write back. Writing and sending physical messages is an anachronistic practice, one that is nearly lost in our age. However, it a means of communication that has soul. There is something almost magical about sending or getting a handwritten card.

It should be noted that I am choosy about what kind of card I send to an individual. Some folks are very focused on the religious aspect of Christmas, and to those persons I usually send a card with a Christian theme. However, I know Jews, Muslims, Buddhist, and atheists who don’t give a hoot about the birth of Christ, yet they celebrate during the season. They get other types of cards. My Jewish friends all got Hanukkah cards. We are celebrating different festivals, but they long for the same things: love, joy, and peace. I try to express similar hopes and wishes in the cards I send to other non-Christians. My family celebrates Christmas, but the message of the Incarnation is universal.

I know people who are insistent that Christmas be solely about Jesus. These are the ones who believe there is a secular war against Christmas. There may in fact be a war, but the real enemies of the holiday are consumerism and greed. Christmas has always been tied with paganism in some way, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Years ago, we had a real tree in our house and burned real candles on it. That’s a very old German tradition that harks back to pre-Christian times. Christmas has a deep connection with ancient feasts that celebrated the winter solstice and the rebirth of the sun. The holiday is fundamentally about the return of light and warmth in a world that has become cold and dead. The symbolism is all around us this time of year. I have only to look out my window and see all the Christmas lights trying to bring a bit of joy to my part of the world.

When I send a card, I write a message in it tailored to the recipient. I seldom just scribble my name on a card and call it done. Do others actually care what I say? Maybe not. I think they realize that some effort has been put forth. I hope the recognize that I give a damn.

Peace on earth.

There is Always a First Time

November 11th, 2025

I got a haircut today. In a way, getting a trim is kind of pointless for me. There isn’t much hair left to cut. However, the little bit of hair that is still on my head was looking scruffy, so I decided to a “hair salon”, which is basically a fancy name for a barber shop that pays its stylists low wages.

I wound up waiting quite a while to get a cut. I couldn’t understand why the place was so busy. Then I saw a seemingly endless parade of old guys staggering into the salon to get vouchers from free haircuts. It didn’t click in my mind why the shop was giving out vouchers until I noticed that a lot of old men were wearing caps with military insignia. Suddenly, I remembered that today was Veterans Day. A long line of elderly vets stood in line, many of them leaning heavily on their canes, and waited to get a freebie.

I got out of the Army in August of 1986. I became a veteran at that point, but to the best of my recollection, I have never taken advantage of any of the Veterans Day benefits. I am not sure why I always avoided the handouts. Maybe I was too proud, and or maybe I just didn’t want to flaunt the fact that I had served. It always seemed kind of tacky. It seems like on one day each year, people momentarily recognize that others sacrificed something to serve our country. A few of those people who are aware of the service that veterans gave to them try to give something back. What is given to vets is usually not very much: a haircut, a free breakfast, something that can qualify as a tax write off. I just didn’t want any of that.

I finally got called up for my haircut. The lady that cut my hair knows my head, if not my history. She knows that my needs are simple. All I want is for her to use a clipper with a Number 2 guard all the way around my noggin. I sat down and she put the chair cloth around me. I told her,

“For what it’s worth, I am vet.”

She shrugged and replied, “Thanks for your service.”

I said, “I flew helicopters. That was a long time ago.”

She smiled and told me, “It doesn’t matter how long ago it was. The important thing is that you served.”

She mentioned that a cousin of hers had been a military pilot and now flew for Flight for Life as a civilian. We talked about flying for a while. Then I spoke to her about my son who was deployed in Iraq. She told me about her nephew who had also been in Iraq. Her nephew wanted to get into the Rangers, but he got in a serious motorcycle accident and had a brain injury. He had memory loss, but somehow still remembered enough bad stuff from Iraq to have PTSD.

Our conversation was brief. It doesn’t take long for a stylist to give me a buzz cut and trim my eyebrows. She had me check out her work with a mirror and then pulled the cloth off me. I got up and walked to the counter. She did something on her computer and said,

“The haircut was on us. You don’t have to pay anything.”

This was my first time getting anything for free on Veterans Day. I pulled out my wallet anyway. She still deserved a big tip.

Involuntarily Offline

November 9th, 2025

Ten days ago, my laptop took a shit. I was kind of expecting this to happen at some point. The laptop was already six years old, which meant that it was well into obsolescence. In addition to that, I had dropped it a couple years ago creating an ugly crack at the corner near the on/off button. The crack had increased in size over time. Finally, the computer refused to allow me to type on the keyboard. I was required to do something if I wanted to go online.

I took the ancient laptop to Best Buy. I have total coverage with Geek Squad, and I planned on using it. It should be noted that it is nearly impossible to go into a Best Buy and physically talk to a Geek Squad agent without an appointment. Just getting an appointment is no easy task either. A person either has to do it online (which is not possible if the device, like mine, doesn’t work) or do it on the phone, which requires a number of long and unpleasant steps. In any case, I had an appointment, and I did in fact speak with a human being.

I turned in the computer for repair, and I was informed via text that the work was completed a day later. I went to the store to pick up my resurrected laptop. I should have had an appointment for this, but somebody handled my issue anyway. The man explained that they had not been able to replicate the problem with the keyboard. He told me this as he played around with the computer. Then he realized that, yes indeed, the keyboard did not work. The tech sighed and said,

“This always happens during check out.”

He gave the crack in the corner a hard stare and told me,

“That may be the death sentence right there. There is lot going on underneath that crack, and the mother board might be damaged.”

I asked him, “So, you are telling me to buy a new one?”

“Well, you could…”

I interrupted him, “Never mind. Where do I go to buy a laptop?”

He pointed across the room. “The salesperson will help you.”

The sales guy did help, and then he took me right back to Geek Squad, so that they could transfer the data from the old computer to the new one. The bottom line was that it would take at least two days to transfer the data from the memory. I bowed to the inevitable and left both computers in their hands.

After two days, I once again went to the store. I got my brand-new Hewlett-Packard Omni Book and proudly took it home. I plugged it in and got online. It worked splendidly for five minutes and then it didn’t. It froze up completely every five minutes.

Fuck.

I restarted it and rebooted it and I finally went to the Best Buy site to chat with a Geek Squad agent with a multi-syllable first name. He did a complete tuneup on it. I tried it again. No change. I contacted Best Buy again, and this time the agent threw up his hands in despair and gave me an appointment to visit another store.

Nice.

I had to wait two days to go to the store. In the meantime, I tried to write on my blog using the partially incapacitated laptop. That was a bitch. I had to restart the computer several times and find the page where it locked up. I finally finished the essay (my previous post on this blog), but it cured my desire to go online.

As this saga continued, I came to understand that I really only need to go online for maybe a few minutes a day. The rest of my time was wasted reading articles on the Internet that either depressed or infuriated me. I had been trying to ween myself off the computer before it quit on me. I never take the laptop with me anywhere. It stays at home. I don’t have a tablet or a smart phone. I am attempting to avoid being a prisoner of the Matrix. I actually want to be part of the physical world in all of its beauty and horror. This takes a certain amount of effort.

I took the new but broken laptop to Geek Squad. A pleasant young woman asked whether I had gone online for help. I assured her that I had already jumped through all of the required hoops before coming to her. She determined that I was right. The piece of shit was broken. Fortunately, my coverage allowed me to swap out the new/old laptop for a new/new laptop. Of course, I had to let Geek Squad transfer the data again. That took another two days and required yet another appointment.

This afternoon, at long last, I went to the store, and the young lady presented me with a fresh, data-infused laptop. I took it home. Miracle of miracle, it works just fine.

That’s why I am writing to you now.

Carrie

October 19th, 2025

Carrie Zettel is dead.

On October 12th, Carrie was killed by her daughter. The young woman bludgeoned her mother to death with a rock in the backyard of their home. The killing was all over the news, probably because of its particularly gruesome nature. My wife, Karin, and I didn’t know about Carrie’s murder until a couple days later. The funeral was yesterday, Saturday the 18th. Karin attended the service. She went there because, years ago, we knew that family quite well.

Two of our children attended Tamarack Waldorf School with Carrie’s two kids. She had a son and a daughter. Her son was in a class with our youngest boy. Both of our families lived in the southern part of Milwaukee County, which is far away from the Waldorf school, so we carpooled to school nearly every day. We did that until our son and her son graduated from Tamarack in 2008. After that, our paths diverged, and we lost contact with each other.

Every death is a tragedy, but some deaths defy understanding. Apparently, Carrie’s daughter has a long history of mental illness, so perhaps the killing was not completely unexpected. But still, how does a person wrap their head around this kind of violence? How does Carrie’s son deal with this? Is it even possible to come to terms with trauma like this?

I don’t know. I have never dealt with a death of this sort. The closest I’ve come is when our oldest son went to war in Iraq. He killed people there, and I have had difficulty accepting that reality. However, my experience is like nothing compared to what Carrie’s son has to process.

My wife told me that the funeral service was well done. The son gave an eloquent eulogy about Carrie. Another person mentioned to me that the son “stood tall and spoke well of the new commandment” (“Love one another” from John 13:34). I thought that maybe I should’ve gone there with Karin.

I had another place to be when the funeral was in progress. My friend from the synagogue, Ken, had invited me a couple days before the funeral to come to his home for kiddush, seeing as it was Shabbat, and his wife was out of town. I had already told Ken that I would come to share the meal he had prepared for us before I knew anything about the time and date of the funeral. It was impossible for me to tell Ken that I had a funeral to attend. Since he is an observant Jew, he does not communicate electronically at all on the sabbath: no phone calls, no texts, no emails, nothing. I couldn’t just not show up. So, I went to Ken’s home and kept him company for two hours. I needed to do that. We ate, we talked and enjoyed each other’s company. Shabbat is a gift from God, a day for rest, prayer, and friendship. Nobody should be alone on Shabbat.

I told Ken about Carrie, and we talked about her at length. I am sure that Ken prayed for her. Even if I wasn’t at the funeral, I remembered her.

She was good woman. I grieve for her. I grieve for her children.

Funeral

September 6th, 2025

Yesterday morning I dropped off my grandson, Asher, at the Waldorf school. It made no sense to me to drive all the way back home since I need to pick up the boy in four hours, so I wandered around the east side of Milwaukee. I decided to walk from Brady Street south on Van Buren to the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. The cathedral is the heart of Catholicism in southeastern Wisconsin. Sometimes the heart seems to be suffering from arteriosclerosis, yet it still beats. Many years ago, when our kids were at the Waldorf school, I would often hike down to the church. Somehow, after nearly a quarter century, the journey yesterday seemed significantly longer.

The doors of the cathedral were unlocked. Way back when, the place was always open during the day. During the winter months, homeless people would huddle in the rear of church, often sleeping in the pews buried in their overcoats and caps, just trying to stay out of the bitter cold for a while. When I walked into the sanctuary yesterday, there were no homeless folks, but there was a funeral Mass in progress. A woman handed me a pamphlet describing the liturgy. I took it and sat down in the back.

The Mass was for Thomas “Tommy” August Salzsieder, a person unknown to me. The priest was in the middle of giving a eulogy. I wondered how well the priest knew Tommy. I have already been to funerals where the presider knew almost nothing about the deceased, and his speech was basically a work of fiction. The priest described Tommy as a man of faith, and that “his life was not ended, just transformed”.

I also wondered about that comment. What does “transformed” actually mean? Looking at the assembled mourners, I noticed a lot of people with grey hair or no hair at all. They were all elderly, my age. We are all in the batting order for this transformation of our lives. The priest talked about heaven, a concept that I simply do not understand. When I was young, I thought heaven was someplace where God pats you on the head and gives you a cookie for being a good boy. Now, I have no idea what it is. Honestly, heaven does not sound terribly inviting. I would be okay if the end of my life was like when they put me under anesthesia for surgery. Nothing. A void. A blank screen.

I thought about Tommy, and frankly I envied him. His work is done. He no longer needs to fight or struggle in life. Life is beautiful and glorious at times, but it also literally exhausting. Tommy can rest now, whatever that actually means.

The liturgy was a work of devotion. I could tell that. The cantor did a soulful rendition of “Panis Angelicus” from Cesar Franck. A funeral can be inspiring if there is love involved, even love that is buried in grief. I have been to funerals where it was obvious that the service was the result of reluctant duty. People went through the motions hurriedly in order to get the dead person deep in the ground as quickly as possible.

A while back my therapist gave me an odd question. He wrote and asked,

“What do you want Asher to remember about you — not what you did, but who you were?”

I have no idea. In a way, the question seems irrelevant. I won’t care what Asher remembers when I’m dead. I’m pretty sure of that.

However, what Asher remembers may very much matter to him. His memories might affect the trajectory of his life. Will he remember when I was angry and impatient? Will he remember when I had his back? Will he remember when I failed to listen to him? Will he remember that he received unconditional love from me?

But I’m describing things I do, but not who I am. I don’t know who I am, not really. Maybe Asher will have a better idea of who was when I’m gone than I have right now.

I hold Asher in my arms at night so he can sleep. When I die will a meta-parent hold me in their arms? Will God whisper to me,

“I embrace you now. I have always embraced you.”