“The Stories We Leave Behind”

.When the World of Fantasy and Reality Collide

Sometimes the world of fantasy and reality collide in a most unexpected way. Over the last 2 weeks I lost a good friend and neighbor, then my cousin passed away. I recorded an episode of one of my favorite TV shows, NCIS, but didn’t view it until Feb 25 which was after my 2 people were gone. It was a memorial to one of the characters who played a prominent role on the show for years. (NCIS ep on Feb 19  “The Stories We Leave Behind” was a memorial to the character of coroner Dr. Donald Ducky Mallard, David McCullum passed away in real life last year and this was the way they honored him and wrote him out of the show) It was the best episode they ever had written and had me in tears because it reflected exactly how I was feeling in my loss. Here are 2 quotes from that ep that hit me hard but is advice we all should take to heart when we lose someone:
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“We all die twice: Once when our bodies give out, then again when our stories stop being told. So keep the good doctor with us by sharing his stories.”
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“All we have in the end are the stories we leave behind. We also have the lives we touched while we were here” – Tony DiNozzo
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This is my poem about remembering those who have passed through our lives
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The Memory Keeper’s Promise
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Your life was a wondrous, magical, mystical Journey.
It gave us love and laughter, and memories
That will live forever.
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Our experiences together through earthly time,
Left within us a piece of you.
Like a many faceted jewel set within a brooch,
These memories catch light,
Refract it and shine it outward.
When we remember you, we hold this jewel,
Turn it, admire it.
And it sparkles in the darkness of our despair.
A light to those who must now walk without you.
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Your name can be carved in marble or etched into plexiglass,
But what does that say of your soul?
Who were you and what did your life mean to your loved ones,
To others, to humanity?
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It is in our memories, that the spark of who you were is kept burning.
Deep within us the precious bits of your/our existence together,
Remains alive.
You did not “go quietly into that dark night…”
For your memory is a flame lighting up the recesses of our souls.
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As long as one living person remembers you, you will not die.
It is this memory I will carry with me and share with others.
This I promise: you will never be forgotten.
And your light will shine across time and space
For we are….always and never….touching and touched….
                                                        @Leona M Seufert

The American Dream In Times of Distress

Bono from U2 has this to say about our American Dream (What America means not just to him but to the world):
It’s more than just a place it’s a “land of promise, a song still being written, an idea.” At a speech in 2012 at Georgetown University he declared, “the idea, the American idea…that you and me are created equal. And God love you for it because these aren’t just America ideas anymore. There’s no copyright on them. You brought them into the world…These truths, your truths, they’re self-evident in us.”
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So just what IS the “American Dream”, the real American Dream? Let’s start with words from the Constitution:
“We the People of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty on ourselves and our Posterity…”
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Then let us jump to the words of Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self –evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
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In today’s world it seems that these words are now only a dream! However, these words are even more important to focus on in this time of political and economic upheaval in our Nation.
Let us never forget the truth that American Democracy is not a dream. It’s as vital as the air we breathe and the water we need to drink. I feel that our politicians and many of our American citizens have forgotten that.   

Words Matter

I have a friend who’s an Episcopal priest and he told me he can’t stand this “trans stuff” people wanting to change their gender. I asked him what was the problem as you don’t have to agree with someone who wants to change but it is their body and therefore there choice. “Oh no”, he said. “One must accept how God created you, if you are a woman, then God intended you to be a woman not physically alter yourself to become a man.” I’ve encountered individuals who are appalled over the idea of cutting off parts of the body to change one’s sex but believing you can’t change because that’s how you were born? Because “God” made you that way? So I asked him: “Should a person who was born with a deformity not be able fix it? Should a person with a deformed spine not have surgery to rectify that? Should a person born deaf not get cochlear implants?” His only answer was that these were medical conditions. But then I posited: “What about plastic surgery? Just as in trans, one alters the body. You are born with a crooked nose, you get it straightened. What about a woman getting bigger breasts? What about gastric surgery to make you thinner.” He had no answer to that! My final zing was: “Now let’s look at organ transplants. You cut out your original God given heart or kidney to replace it by someone else’s!” With that he shouted “Even your Pope agrees that’s acceptable to the Lord!”
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Sigh…I’m not trans and I wouldn’t have sex change surgery. However, I am afraid that this attitude of his is one of the causes behind why some people hate and have even murdered trans individuals.
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The last topic of our “hot conversation” was when he said, “So what is it with this pronoun stuff? There are only he or she, one can’t be a they or them.” With that I had to agree, partially. If you want to be grammatically correct, “they, them, us” are all referencing multiple individuals but someone who, for example, considers themselves(s) a bisexual individual is still only one physical person. Oh well, but to the person who wants to be referred to as “them” words matter. And regardless of grammar rules, we should accept an individual’s wishes as to how they want to be referenced.

The American “Untouchables”

In America discrimination isn’t based upon a caste system like in India. Discrimination is usually based upon something tangible such as the color of your skin, your gender or your criminal background. But is it? After reading an article in the April 2022 issue of Wired magazine (Caste Away by Sonia Paul) describing how Indian immigrants continue to experience caste discrimination from other Indian immigrants I realized that this reporter’s writing about the Indian caste system could be applied to certain Americans too. A caste system is alive and well in the US!
Remember the Aids epidemic? Anyone who tested positive in the 90’s before our current “miracle” drugs were available were considered “untouchables” and shunned. And gays had to be careful not reveal that they were gay because, by association, ALL gays were Aids positive. Times changed and gays are no longer stigmatized as untouchables. Plus laws were created banning such discrimination. Then came COVID-19.
In 2020 when the COVID pandemic ran rampant, lockdowns, quarantines, etc. were attempts to contain the virus and impacted most everyone, healthy or sick. Then came the “miracle” vaccines. And that is when a whole cohort of individuals became untouchables. Governments created vaccine mandates that banned individuals who refused to be vaccinated from almost every aspect of society. The fear was they could have the virus, and thus transmit it making you sick and die. Isn’t that the very definition of an “untouchable”?
Just like the Indian caste system, there is no real way such as skin color that can “out” our unvaccinated untouchables. So governments came up with a system that solved the problem: vaccination cards. As part of the vaccine mandates that were passed anyone who didn’t have this proof of vaccination was now prohibited from entering their workplace, going to museums, etc. Unlike the Indian caste system based on birth, for people not wanting to “get the shot” there are many, many different reasons. And yet all unvaccinated were lumped into one “caste”, the “unvaccinated”.
We are not yet out of the pandemic. Vaccine mandates have faded away. However, there are other ways to remind the untouchables of their status. We continue with public service announcements on TV about getting your “booster shot” be a good citizen and protect the “vulnerable”. And even if an unvaccinated person can enter, say an art exhibit, and then has a discussion with someone about their unvaccinated status or vaccine hesitancy, just watch the reaction…
We now know that even the “fully vaccinated” can catch COVID and transmit it. Recently a White House gathering, and a huge social event for journalists, has shown how easily this occurs. Fully vaccinated and tested, permitted entry to these highly selective gatherings, yet days later the virus was spread with attendees testing positive. But the “unvaccinated” caste system still prevails! It is the unvaccinated who continue to be seen as the threat.
At the start of all this it was thought that the courts would side with eliminating the mandates, seeing them as a form of discrimination. That failed. The law was never and will never be on the side of this American caste because fear and control is at the bottom of it all. Just like in the Aids epidemic, you don’t want to have contact with someone who might make you sick. So if you are unvaccinated you hide your caste status just to survive another day “…you are forced to hide your identity to be somebody different than what you are…a violation of one’s basic rights.” (Milind Awasarmol, quoted in the April 2022 Wired article Caste Away by Sonia Paul)
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Are we really, anymore, “the Land of the Free”?

On Climate Change

With the recent climate change conference in the news, I feel that this poem I wrote a few years ago says it all:
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We Must Stop the Destruction
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What have we done
To this place of our birth?
Contaminated water
Contaminated earth.
Wrung dry the rivers
Squeezed out the lakes.
From others less fortunate
The rich nation takes.
Can we reverse it
Can we atone?
Give food to the starving
All skin and bone.
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The green movement’s trying
But is it too late
To shore up our planet
Make the destruction abate?
Is anyone out there
Who will carry the cross
Turn sadness and hunger
Stop all this loss?
The ozone’s depleted
The soil’s dust and dry.
Can anyone stop it …
Will anyone try?

 

Remembering Hurricane Sandy

It’s the 9^th Anniversary since Sandy hit and I was plunged for 11 days into a world of no electricity. I wrote this poem years later after another blackout but a shorter one. What inspired me was the memory of being without power during Hurricane Sandy and how my laptop died when the battery died but an old manual typewriter would have gone on clicking! So using the idea of us being “underwood” for the trees clobbering the power lines I wrote this poem (“Underwood” was also the brand name of a manual, non-electric, typewriter popular at the beginning of the 20^th century)
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Underwood
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Wiz, bang, snap
There goes another tree.
The wind picks up stronger…
A thud, the ground shakes,
Sounds like the end of the world.
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I awaken to darkness
The wind still howls.
No electricity, no radio,
Look outside, houses, cars
Crushed under dead wood.
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Computer only connection
But battery won’t last.
I type, type, type,
Need to get that article done
Before screen goes blank.
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Deadline looming;
Print what I have before death
Snaps the laptop out.
Sitting here in the dark
What can I do?
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One day, two days
After the storm
I take a flashlight
Frantically search closets
Find the old monster hidden in back.
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Clickety clack go the keys
So hard to press down
But at least this typewriter
Won’t die in mid sentence
Like the newfangled laptop.
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Article completed
Put it in envelope
Send off by snailmail
Thanking old Underwood
I return him to his shelf.

Words Matter

You Are Murderers
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What has our society come to that we call people who have different opinions, make different choices “murderers”? Haven’t we learned anything about how practicing discrimination, and putting labels on individuals who are not like us demeans the ones labeled? We’ve stopped calling physically challenged individuals “cripples”, intellectually challenged people “idiots” and gays “faggots”. Some believe that this word substitution is really only bowing to political correctness. However, any label that makes a person less than what that person is as a human is an unconscionable misuse of language.
Obviously, nothing has changed. As this COVID-19 pandemic rages on, we seem to have stepped back in time to another pandemic – AIDS. Gays were not just shunned and feared that they could transmit the virus and kill others, they were denied basic legal rights and many were murdered. Then the truth of how that virus spread was discovered and the outright discrimination and shunning stopped. But it went underground in society, like a Shingles virus, awaiting another time and group of people to rear its ugly head.
We have a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. That is a blessing. However, its very existence has splintered our society. For those individuals who refuse to “take the shot” society has labeled them “murderers”. The unvaccinated are now blamed for spreading the virus and causing deaths. Yes, they (and even vaccinated individuals with “break through” infections can!), can but to be a murderer you must, both in the dictionary and the legal definition, do your act with an INTENT to take a life. No unvaccinated person is doing that. There is yet another fallacy: all unvaccinated people don’t want the vaccine. The unvaccinated are a diverse group ranging from the hard core anti vaxers, to those who medically can’t take any type of vaccination, to those who are in parts of the country where getting access to it is difficult.
All Germans were Nazis, all gays were infected with AIDS, all Chinese are responsible for bringing the virus to the US…all unvaccinated individuals are murders…when it comes to discriminating against a group of individuals, nothing has changed over the decades. What a sad commentary on our society.

Remembering 9/11

This year is the 20^th anniversary of that dark day

As a writer, immediately after that black Tuesday, I started to set my grief to words. As the poems and essays piled up, I decided that others could benefit from reading about my pain and thus created a website, The World Trade Center Journal (which I’ve been updating for the last 20 years!), containing my writings, photographs, and photomontages.
My hope is that by sharing my memories and my grief, the Twin Towers can live on in our hearts and our grief can, at some point, be quelled.

That Which Survives – 9/11 20 years later

That Which Survives – 20 years later
9/3/21
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Each year, it begins with a name
All that survives of you,
And the 2,976 names that follow
All that remains of them.
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The crowd stands and listens
Some clutching photos
Of what once was and is no more;
Now only on paper.
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Standing on sacred ground
With water rushing down
Like the tears
For the departed never found.
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You stand on the perimeter
Silently remembering back
To that horrible dusty, death filled day.
In your town,
And in towns across the nation,
Memorials have a piece
Of metal, twisted and sheared.
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A woman born on that day
Feels life move inside of her.
She hears the names,
Her father’s spoken
Brings tears to her eyes.
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The image and smell of smoke
Invades my mind.
Can it be 2 decades since
The time when the Towers fell?
How did we all survive?

Pray for Haiti

I’d like to share this poem of sadness that I wrote in 2010 after the devastating earthquake hit Haiti. Please pray for all the people of Haiti, impacted by the current massive earthquake, who lost loved ones and for those whose loved ones are still missing.
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A Valentine for Devastated Hearts
2/04/10

 

In the darkness a voice is crying
Blood spattered at her knees.
Her child’s last breath taken
As from the rubble she was freed.
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We send you water
We send you bread
We send you our love so that your soul will be fed.
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On a road that leads to nowhere
Young and old walk in fear.
All around are piled the bodies
Of those they held dear.
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We send you water
We send you bread
We send you our love so that your soul will be fed.
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The innocent children are crying
Orphaned, lost, alone
Wandering the streets of devastation
Who will give them a home?

Bread and water sustains the body
Can’t help you put the pain behind.
Only love can do the healing
Because love is patient, lasting and kind.