Filed under: Uncategorized
To memorialize the passing of loved ones, I send donations in their honor.
Typically to the Southern Poverty Legal Center which combats racism and intolerance with a tenacity toward justice that is beautifully fierce.
Somehow this evolved as my tradition for grieving friends - rather than subject them to my casseroles or more flowers whose beauty they are in no state of mind to enjoy, I honor their loved ones name among the compassionate and righteous.
But lately, I have been sending far too many such donations out.
The money is not the issue, but the frequency of need for such memorials, has been staggering.
Yeah kids, we’re not in Kansas anymore, and we are well on way to being the new members of the sandwich generation, stuck between caring for children and caring for aging parents. I actually don’t consider my folks "aged" but I know that our time together is unwritten. They could go unfairly young, as both my grandfathers did, or they could live unpleasantly too long, as both my completely disabled grandmothers now are.
Grandma Yang was still drinking shots, playing MahJohng, and getting her hair done in salons into her very, very late 80’s. One needed only to glance at the old lady to still see how beautiful she had been, and still was.
I’m grateful she had time to meet P before our wedding.
She drank beer with us, saw me try on my Chinese wedding gown, and laughed and laughed at P passed out "like a litle Pig" on the couch- jet-lagged & stuffed to the gills with all the food they had foisted onto him.
But past 90 was brutal, and now her memories are fog 85% of the time, her legs pain her too much to walk, and each day requires professional monitoring and tending. In a bed across Taipei town, Grandma Hsu lies uncomprehendingly in an even denser fog.
I wish we had had time, had had the foresight to ask them if they wanted extreme measures to preserve their technical lives. I know Grandma Yang always believed she’d meet her husband again in another life, I was told stories about how his spirit had visited her before he left.
It pains me to see the grandmas intubated, and we all struggle with the questions about what they would have wanted or not.
Having no such answers, my family spares no effort nor expense to keep them in this world. I have seen filial piety and devotion on a scale that humbles me, and that I pray one day to measure up to.
I prefer to cultivate memories of walking to the bakery or department store with one of the Grandmas. About how neither one really wore make up, but were exceedingly and amusingly particular about their hair.
I will choose to remember the Grandmas who ran giddily off into the snow & would sneak chocolates, rather than their curent limbo status.
And for that matter, on Memorial day, unlike most, I recall deeply in my bones what it stands for. This current war fiasco has gone every single bit as badly as many of us had feared, draining worldwide goodwill & US finances…
As the sister of a Gulf War veteran-I do know some piece of what War really means in modern times. Its everyone carrying on their merry lives untouched by any actual sacrifice, while your family stews in anxiety about their only son.
It’s the war being "over".
Yet your brother, sister, mother, father not coming home for 10 or more months longer…to none of the fanfare they deserve.
It is knowing that those who go off to battle are almost never the same upon return.
Civilian life isn’t always comfortable anymore to those who fought for their lives in a clusterfuck ostensibly for democracy, but truly for oil. There are no yellow ribbons and assistance as they try to pull their lives back together- broken love affairs and families, PTSD, job skills such as "firearms".
I am not a soldier.
Not USMC like my brother (thought quite seriously about joining, but realized I’ve an oppositional streak 10 miles wide that simply can’t take orders under any circumstances).
But I have worked closely with survivors of war, and their children-the next generation who still suffer from the impact of battles long, long, past; and I have felt the grip of terror in my home.
My parents grimly watched the news each night for signs of where the Marines are in Iraq, lying to my then-cognitively-sound grandmothers about his being on active duty. One night his ship hit a torpedo or mine, my parents said almost nothing. On duty their whereabout are classified, vague. The terseness and anguish that prevailed before we got word that he was actually not on the ship at the time- are etched permanently in my heart.
Ben & I used to think my mom was so emo and weird.
We’d be watching something on TV like the "Zulu" movie, a cowboy flick, or a cartoon like Starship Troopers - and she’d cry sometimes during the battle scenes.
"Mom..it’s a CARTOON." Puzzled frowns and eye rolls.
She’d look onscreen at the dramatic scenes of clashing waves of warriors streaming at one another.
"I can’t help but think of each one of those boys, how it takes 20 years for a mother to raise a child into a man and it can all go away just like that."
Well, 20 years later, I have an inkling of what she meant in her empathy for those fictitious soldiers’ families.
I have seen & felt in my bones what wars really do to families, and so I hope all can take a moment to memorialize not only the warriors, but their loved ones, families and loved ones on both sides of all battles.
No Comments so far
Leave a comment
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
