How Death Animates Us

Perhaps this blog will become: life as animated by literature.

I couldn't fall asleep last night, as happens when I'm newly off alcohol and back to the gym, so I read this graphic novel that's been sitting on my coffee table for about a year: Unknown by author Mark Waid and illustrator Minck Oosterveer.

It's about death. Since Molly's it's become clear that every piece of art and literature is about death. I knew this at fifteen and twenty-one. Just forgot.

The main character, Cat Allingham, is a detective with a brain tumor whose last mysteries involve learning if there is or is not an afterlife. It was only the first in a series, so the jury's still out.

On Sunday, Sonia and I had lunch with my parents and they acted like themselves for the first time in her presence, teasing one another relentlessly, engaging with us and actually showing some joy. It felt good.

We met at the Cheesecake Factory in the suburbs. My parents bravely tried the thai lettuce wraps and loved them. We shared two pieces of cheesecake (all chocolate) at the end and moaned about the indulgence. We walked around the mall together afterward and went shoe shopping, where Sonia impressively saved me $30 on a pair of $105 shoes at DSW.

Who knows why people do what they do? Given time or traumatic events, my parents seem to have turned a corner. They seem more open, more accepting, lighter. I have two theories and they both have to do with death.

A few weeks ago on the phone, my dad told me about a 26-year-old boy who had gone missing from the bar a few miles from their home. It was the same bar my brother and I frequented in our twenties, the closest one to our childhood home. The boy had suffered from mental health problems and substance abuse. He'd joined my mom's church to get help with the drinking and the drugs.

Then one evening, he left the bar, threw his phone and his keys in his car and walked into the woods. It took them a few weeks to find his body, but everyone knew what had happened. My dad told me that path led to an overlook where it would be easy to jump into the river. He didn't tell me that the boy was gay.

The boy who killed himself was or was not gay. In any case, he was in working class Pennsylvania where some combination of lack of opportunity, lack of options and lack of mental health services led to him finding this way out. His options were religion or alcohol. If he was gay, a religion that despised him wouldn't cut it.

Another thing happened this winter. Driving home from the high school where he's been substitute teaching since he got laid off 12+ years ago, my dad did a 360 on an icy two-lane road and narrowly missed an 18-wheeler. Says his life flashed before his eyes. He is increasingly the kind of man who will say things like that, although it's a new look for him.

My mom texted me about the incident the night it happened. She expressed thankfulness for Sonia and my brother's girlfriend. In their shock after that near-miss, they knew what mattered. They knew that Sonia and my brother's girlfriend were the people that their children would come home to if something similar happened.

In The Unknown, death is a chalky-faced stranger with the build of Herman Munster. In my life these days, it seems to be animating a little empathy among my family from a still-safe distance. The empathy is motivating -- it feels like all I've ever wanted -- and makes me want to spend as much time with them as possible. Help them keep their monsters at bay.

Why We Write Novels, Inspired by Trump Supporters

I grew up in rural America among those who elected Trump. In mocking interviews, his supporters say, "I don't care about the facts. I know it’s true."

Or, “you have your facts and I have mine.”

Working in education, I see an opportunity for curricula about facts vs. opinions. But these statements go deeper than poor critical thinking, to the root of subjectivity. 

Imagine person A and person B.

Person A decides by age 25 that evangelical Christianity is the answer to life's pain and a path toward meaning. She goes deep into religion, and everything she encounters in life seems to affirm her religion. If you think that religion is not circumspect enough to inhabit the modern world, look again. 

Person B has been exposed to religion for her whole life, and never once inspired. By age 25, she is reading every book she can get her hands on and believes literature is the path to truth. The study of philosophy, history and psychology make sense of the world, and everything she encounters in life seems to affirm the primacy of empirical understanding.

My mother is person A. I am person B. This is why one writes novels.

Open Letter to Trump Voters

I know who you are.

You are the Italian, male partner of my cousin who owns a small pizza shop in a dying factory town. You're ambitious but always complaining that you can't find good help. Sometimes, you note the race of your employees that don't work out, and I remain silent. I never questioned to your face that you might not be a very good boss, especially to people who don't look like you.

You are my white, male cousin who served six years in the Navy and had a young marriage turn to dust. By the time you found your second wife and fell in love, you were no longer motivated to explore the world or move out of your comfort zone for a job. You moved back to the county where you were raised and got a job at the paper where your dad worked.

When you were traveling the world with the Navy, you imagined more greatness for yourself. Now you work 9-5, struggle with health issues, and find comfort in the evangelical church. I truly don't know what to say to you. I don't understand why you would look the other way when faced with a hate-spewing monster, or worse, vote for him.

You are my aunt, the stay-at-home, Christian wife of my mother's brother whose interests and hobbies are limited to scrapbooking and other forms of nostalgia. Although you take a passing interest in my work with urban youth, I don't correct you when you frame our conversations about my work in terms of "us" and "them."

I never tell you, "If this is how you see the world, then I'm not on your team."

I wasn't always silent. In my early twenties, the end of college and early working life, I engaged each of you in conversations, some of which ended in tears. The tears were always mine. These were the Bush years and the first Obama election.

What will I do about Thanksgiving and Christmas this year? My black friends on Facebook are inditing me to engaged in a deeper way with my racist family members, to point out hate speech when it comes up, to speak up. Despite the fact that I have so much more knowledge now, I'm reluctant.

Facts and passion may not be enough to change the minds of my relatives, who have decided that we are living in a subjective world, that objective truth and objective justice do not exist.

I don't want to relive the tears of my young cousin's wedding, my aunt going on and on about the number of new Hispanic mothers she sees in her work, always on welfare, always having more children. Her cheerful judgement of their worthlessness. Then, I did speak up.

Her husband, my uncle, doubled down. "You don't know what we see," he said. "You might see something different where you live, but you can't see what it is like where we live. And we're paying for them."

I think that's when I left the room. It's not that I couldn't see; it's that I have different eyes.

The nurse is my godmother, the one who was supposed to be responsible for -- I don't fucking know what -- my spiritual understanding, my enlightened upbringing.

This week, a black woman I know was walking down the street and was trailed by three white Trump supporters. "You'll be under ownership again soon," they said, and laughed.

They laughed.

In South Philadelphia, there were at least two instances of pro-Nazi graffiti.

At the University of Pennsylvania, black freshmen and others were personally, directly threatened with lynching by an online troll who texted threats to their phones, possibly from the University of Oklahoma.

If you voted for Trump, here is what I need from you: denounce his sexist and racist rhetoric today. Do not wait. If you voted for him because you believe in the same God as Pence or because you're dissatisfied with your possibilities for the future, denounce his sexist and racist rhetoric today. If you voted for him because something he said resonated with your lizard brain and you really believe he's going to be a positive change for America, denounce his sexist and racist rhetoric today.

And if you voted for him because of his sexist and racist rhetoric, dear God, don't you DARE call yourself a Christian.

In either case, read a book (something not by Sarah Palin, please). Make friends with someone who doesn't look like you. Get some new eyes. You've made a mess, and we're all going to have to clean it up.

Isaac Knew Abraham's Plan

My strongest remaining tie to Catholicism is the stories. I love the resonance of Bible stories, especially the story of Abraham and Isaac. They are a part of my mythology, too.

The Abraham and Isaac story resonates with me because it is so utterly horrible and so familiar. My mother has faith like Abraham, for which she would sacrifice anything "of this plane."

In case you're not familiar, the Abraham and Isaac story goes like this. God tells Abraham to bring his eldest son, Isaac, to the top of the mountain, and kill him there like a sacrificial lamb on an altar. Abraham, without a single recorded question in any of the Biblical texts I found, proceeds to the mountain with his son. Abraham carries the knife and the fire (no matches back then), and Isaac carries the wood. You need a lot of wood to burn a recently dead anything. 

It takes the three days to get to the place where God wants Abraham to kill Isaac. Imagine that journey, with Isaac (who I picture as between eight and twelve at the time) asking questions like, "The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for burnt offering?"

I understand that Biblical times were different: harsher, with shorter lifespans and perhaps not as much attachment to life, but I still can't give Abraham a free pass. Isaac was his only legitimate son, born to him and Sarah late in life. There was no promise of another. 

Don't even get me started on how, for every Biblical scholar who wants to condemn homosexuality based on the line "You shall not lie with a man as with a woman," there are a dozen twisting themselves in knots to justify or gloss over the use of sex slaves by so-called men of God. Because in fact, Isaac wasn't Abraham's only son. He had a son, Ishmael, by his slave Hagar, who are only mentioned when convenient because of their status as second class citizens.  

Oh. I didn't want to get started. 

Returning to the story, Abraham gets as far as binding Isaac's limbs and laying him on top of the altar, on top of the wood. Do you think Isaac might have picked up on what was happening, offered a little struggle? Could he ever forgive a father who was willing to do that to him? 

There's a streak of masochism in Christianity that repulses me: Abraham the willing victim of God's request, Isaac lying down, mute, on the altar like the sacrificial lamb his father plans him to be. 

I have found the gay Christian blogs (bless their hearts) that work so hard to make the words say what they want. Although I respect the endeavor, for me, it's not different enough than the endeavors of the bigots, using the stale and ancient words to condemn homosexuals, women who've had abortions, or other social pariahs who don't fit with white, middle class values. 

That's what the Christianity that I know has become in America: white, middle class values and self-righteousness disguised as spirituality. In the Evangelical church, there's a little religious ecstasy mixed for a release. 

They need that release. It is a struggle, for many Christians I know, to live their lives contrary to so much actual evidence (the history of the earth, global warming, the nature of evil, you name it). Even gay Christians in progressive and accepting churches have to reconcile with the fact that several branches of their own religion would cast them out. 

Religion is one of the greatest crimes of humanity, compelling generations of victims to live in direct opposition to their own self-interest. 

The greatest victims of religion are those who believe fully, who are willing to sacrifice their children, standing right in front of them, for the promise of an afterlife they haven't seen. 

But of course, we their children are also in trouble.