The Late Arrival

Troops. Numbers. Percentiles. The more I consider the units of weights and measures, the more I'm convinced, it must be related to the counting. The "It" being the shootings, injuries by firearms and deaths. That "It." There's been yet another mass shooting , and a few days before that, a shooting that's left a little girl who's around Georgia's age clinging onto life by a thread. Both are tragic, as are other incidents around the country which didn't make national or local headlines. But this isn't a rant about gun regulation or about video games' influence or a culture of violence or services for the mentally ill or unemployment or any of the usual suspects. This isn't about beating our swords into plowshares , or the NRA or even gun regulation or communities taking back their communities. Maybe that's all part of It. But a big part of the It is in the Counting. The way we count ourselves . The way we count li...

A little over one year ago for the kid barely in his twenties. A month ago for the forty-nine year old rock star’s girlfriend. Barely a week ago for the twenty-two year-old entrepreneur. Come July, it’ll be seven months for the thirty-some year old mom of little ones not yet in their teens. Sometimes death by suicide makes headlines. Sometimes, the loved ones drowning in its wake are the only ones who know about it. When it’s a headline, count on news anchors to assume a pseudo-sad tone as they report the tragedy with heads cocked to one side, staring through the camera’s lens and into the eyes of whoever is on the other side, and asking Why? …and then moving on to the next news bite for popular consumption. "There are such things as dumb questions, and in suicide’s shadow, Why is the dumbest of question of them all." Answers to Why are never productive. They don’t restart the heart, cause oxygenated blood to course through the body to...

The easy way. The path of least resistance. Admittedly, it's my route of preference. Conflict? Confrontation? Any sense of discomfort, and I'll go over the hills and through the woods and three times around grandmother's house to avoid it. Especially at this time of year, the easy thing is kvetching about the endless running, the needle on the scale that threatens to inch ever forward, the expectations put upon us by our kids, our significant others and ourselves. Not to mention the music. Which I did. Right here . In this post . But sometimes you have to dig and do the hard work. The antithesis of the easy way. I mean get dirt under your fingernails to find the joy -- even in the holiday music, since most of it beckons us to joy, happiness and peace. Peace in the midst of reality. For me, that reality is having terminal illness and death in some shape or form breathing down my back and lurking around every corner. Too many people in my circle will have one less ...

A bird's-eye view of the ocean, a blanket of blues and violet. Could be dawn, it could be sunset. There are no undertows, no threat of menacing aquatic life and tidal waves look like silent ripples in a pond. In the middle of it all is a tiny speck of white -- or maybe yellow. It's Diana Nyad somewhere in the in the sojourn of an over fifty-eight hour swim toward the Florida Keys.   Now zoom in. Further into the journey as she reaches her destination greeted by wading well wishers and you see her emerge from the waters swollen and dazed. This scene isn't as serene as the imagined one. In fact, there's even a trace of ugliness and gritty reality there, but within that scene, we're able to hear Diana reminding us to "Never give up" and that "You're never alone." That's something that can't be heard in the idyllic birds-eye view. Everything's prettier from a distance, don't you think? Doesn't mean that the zoomed-in gr...

The rush of cold air and sticky summer heat created a thick fog as I opened the freezer door. It was someplace in the back. Forgotten and alone, but still usable: the whole chicken I planned on making for supper. At a few months shy of turning twenty, this would be my first attempt making a “mom dinner” for the family since my mom’s death a few months back. She’d buy whole chickens – fryers – because they were cheap. This last lone fryer, a rock hard frozen bird, was one of her last purchases and my inheritance. I threw it in the sink and covered it in tepid water to defrost. Some hours later, as I cut away the now defrosted chicken’s shrink-wrapped plastic shroud and gave it an icy cold kitchen faucet shower, I could feel something shaking around inside the cavity. Instantly, my mind’s eye pictured mom’s hands going inside the thing and pulling out tiny, mushy flesh-colored baggies before cutting up the bird for frying. With chin lifted skyward and mouth corners turned down, I...

I work for a nonprofit. More specifically, I raise money for the nonprofit by writing grants, mailing solicitation letters, making calls and tap dancing and singing, if asked. It’s a challenge, I mean, let’s face it: my nonprofit’s not helping puppies, kittens or another awwww-so-cute-invoking constituency. The people coming to us have alcohol and/or drug problems, or struggle to put food on the table, or are unemployed, or have been abused, or are abusing, or are on public assistance, or fall within any range of broke, struggling and searching for a lifeline. Sometimes one person has all of those issues, but more often than not, they’ve got a combination of a few. Issues like those never thrive in a vacuum. We see and hear a lot of the ugly, seedy side , and it isn’t just the ugly seedy people from the ugly seedy side of town who need help. The well-dressed professional from the burbs is just as likely to ring us up or walk through the door as is the tattered person from the slu...

That smell. That sour-sweet-earthy smell paired with the bite of the mid-fall wind puts me right there on 52nd street on the north side of town. Even as I write this, I can smell it: it's October, and I can almost feel crabapples from the Grady’s tree pop with a thud under my feet. These were all harbingers of winter – the smell, the bite, the pop. It meant things were dying and temporarily ceding their place to make room for blankets of snow. The dying never bothered me. In fact, I looked forward to the smell and this natural cycle that meant backyard igloos, “face washes” (courtesy of my brother) and snow days off school were on the way. Two years after mid-October of 1988, that smell was a punch in the gut. Tears started streaming from some internal well unknown to me up until that point. Evidently, my mom’s diagnosis of liver cancer, her struggling through it for weeks and her death one week before Thanksgiving had tied that smell to that time . That’s when I sta...

To think that providence would take a child from his mother while she prays, is appalling  Who told us we'd be rescued?  What has changed and why should we be saved from nightmares?  We're asking why this happens to us who have died to live, it's unfair  This is what it means to be held  How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life  And you survive This is an excerpt from the song I listened to on the ride home from work. It’s a pretty song, very melodic and “singable” as my mother would say. But today the lyrics hit me especially hard after yesterday’s news about the drowning of a young man. His dad happens to have a pretty high-profile job in the community and Twitter was buzzing with well-wishes, prayers and condolences for this young man’s family. Rightfully so. I thought about how terrible, how nightmarish this must be for his parents. Then my thoughts turned again to the young man who was a victim of homicide in one of ...