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