How to Get Through the Next Few Days
Could it get any weirder or more terrible than it’s been? Of course it could and does, all the time, world without end, amen. I’ve just been sitting at my dining room table weeping. The word weeping. My rage — formidable at best — has softened at this point into weeping because what to do with the rage but let it leak gush out and on and on filling oceans, cupped hands. I just read a ProPublica story about a young woman, Josseli Barnica, who died in Texas because her doctors didn’t provide emergency medical care. She had a miscarriage and died of sepsis. Her cervix was dilated to the size of a baseball for hours as they waited for the baby’s heartbeat to stop. When it stopped, the doctor helped her to deliver the dead baby. She was sent home after eight hours. She bled for two days and went back into the hospital and died. Of sepsis. The hospital is a giant for-profit one that’s all over the American South. Josseli Barnica was Sophie’s age. She had a little girl at home, a husband, an extended family. She died of an infection. Her “doctors” were stymied by Texas’ anti-abortion laws that threaten prison time, fines, all made valid by that august bunch of cretins sitting on stone thrones most of whom practice Catholicism, the religion of my ancestors and one that I’ve long shed in a kind of eighth sacrament repulsed by the pedophiles, the cover-ups, the wealth and graft. Is it ok to say that I hate these people who have worked so hard for so many decades to do this to Josseli? Is it ok to say that I am repulsed by Christianity as it’s practiced today? We are not responsible for forgiving our oppressors. I know what it’s like to want to lift up someone who you love and run with them from a hospital from the indifferent hands that touch that throw darts at the wall that stare at screens and abide by laws that have nothing to do with law or love. I wish I could have picked up Josseli in my arms and raced away with her from that hospital, that state, this country on the brink. How to get through the next few days? It’s almost sundown here, the sky is pink, there’s a breeze ruffling the water in the birdbath just outside the window, and I have to get up and turn on some lights.
#vote #harriswalz
Yes.
My daughter has had five miscarriages - lost a tube and ovary with one. Did lots and lots of bleeding - terrifying bleeding. She had the care she required because it was not yet made impossible, although absolutely nothing does anything about the extraordinary grief and sense of loss or can repair that part of her heart (and mine) that has been shattered.
She went through horribly expensive and painful fertility treatments for nothing but huge bills not even remotely covered by our BS American "healthcare" (as if) system.
She's 43 now and has given up. She would have died at least during one of those events if the treatment had not been available to her.
I understand- better than many, frankly- what is at stake. Her sorrow IS my sorrow and it never really goes anywhere. It's in a little box in my heart that I avoid looking to.
I despise everything about every bit of this entire election. All of it. So many terrible and monstrous events and future uncertainty/certainty.
I've lost all faith. All hope. And I don't know if I'll ever feel any of those things again.
I know this is not a helpful comment but it's the truth and that's all I have left.
I know. Monumental rage ripples through me like uterine contractions for that young woman for all the women dying and harmed by murderous legislators.