Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and wiser, but I’ve noticed that things which now bring me to tears are less the everyday instances of hurt, pain and sadness and more the unexpected moments of joy, reconciliation and serendipity. Maybe as the years advance we become so accustomed to tragedy that we’re more easily moved to tears by sudden simple beauties which were always there before us but at an age when we believed the world owed us more and it blocked our vision.

The less time I have left the more important I find it is to plan a clean exit on a high note guided by simpler truths.
This, and the wrinkles, is how I know for certain that I’ve grown up.

◦ So here I am at home serving what feels like a few months beginning of an indefinite life sentence, isolated while the rest of the world is busy getting back to social normals. I’m not angry, but I do miss their healthy freedoms that if risked, with high probability would be the start of the end my life. I hold first prize in every high risk category. Age, male, diabetic, ex-smoker, hypertensive, heart disease after three cardiac arrests, and treated with 28 daily medications, now seriously questioning what was once an abundant faith and if this worry is even worth it any longer. I now work from home, have few visitors other than socially distanced masked people I suspect are my family and then only rarely. I rely mostly on my kids to run my errands and when I take the rare solo journey out, it’s only when absolutely necessary, brief and followed by a monotonous routine of home sanitizing rituals. I’m not a buyer of all the media hype and exaggerations but I have seen the pained suffocation of those dying on ventilators and the many makeshift morgues for the dead around the world, afflicted once before entering a losing battle with far fewer preexisting conditions than I bring to the table. Unsure if masks, sprays, gloves and sanitizers even work anymore, they’re the only presumed deterrents to increase statistical probabilities of staying alive. Despite my occupation, I don’t feel very essential and this same 1,285 square feet has become a monotonous four-month detention center for working, eating and sleeping—not always in that order but all for which I remain very thankful. Despite what this has come to and so many differing and argumentative opinions, I often feel very much alone in mine and largely misunderstood by younger, healthier people unconcerned for themselves for legitimately better reasons. If I’m to be safer, I vow it won’t be dependent on the actions or inactions of others but entirely up to me and the boundaries I set and keep perhaps at the expense of not being quite fully human. Living rationally and reasonably all my life in nearly every other dimension, my living parts are starting feel a little less alive, occasionally paranoid and maybe even mentally unfit.
All this to say that I’m fairly certain I’m not entirely alone in these thoughts and like those others, won’t be immune to the insensitive criticisms we’ve come to expect as a result.
Not whining here, just offering a personal glimpse to affirm those of so many others who still feel very much the same but have been shamed against sharing it.

The sheer brevity of our existence makes the spending of it on noble, enduring purposes all the more critical. We need far fewer flashes in the pan and far more firestarters of causes that will long outlive ourselves, spark others to follow and stoke embers for the next generation. Life extinguishes too quickly to spend it on anything less fierce.

It wasn’t in the cards.
For 30 years I’ve collected greeting cards but have given up the habit for how much it hurts. It’s been a favorite pastime shopping rows of card racks for hours at a time walking out with all the very best wishes for any occasion or holiday or simply “just because.” The funniest, the best written, the most beautiful and all the ones that made me wipe my eyes in the store over the years ended up in three crates, many now yellowed, none of which were ever sent. Turns out I couldn’t bring myself to part with them when someone’s occasion or holiday was approaching. Today a foot-high stack each got their own final read and their last cry before being buried in a 13 gallon sack of memories whose optimal times had come and gone, now rolled to the street for their crimes of assorted missed opportunities. Everything Mom, every Wonderful Dad and all those bought to give in case I ever fell in love again, which at my age has turned out as unlikely as me sending out a card to anyone who’d deserved it at just the right time or occasion.
So after a productive afternoon and a half box of tissue, it’s time to make myself dinner and climb into a melancholy dreamland of rest and regret. From this day forward, if you ever get a card from me, trust it will be freshly picked and never too belated to matter when it really could have.

Way too alert to the ever-changing news, I find I’m getting more caught up in network waves of hopeless thinking, sadly-speculated scenarios and general maladaptation to the new normal than I would like. And I suspect I’m not alone.
It’s no help that I haven’t seen nor touched a living human being in weeks and now witness more televised refrigerator trucks full of dead bodies than any healthy psyche should. I’m on my 17th day working alone from home 40 miles from everything and everyone I cherished as normal, welcome impositions to my day. I’m now thinking some of what I’ve considered temporary accommodating changes may soon become eerily permanent.
We’ve been told who and what is essential, and my head is working overtime without permission connecting all the dots of what’s to come, weighing alternate endings, and being entirely futile at the expense of decent sleep. So many possible end games. So many tipping dominoes of a world and economy likely to continue its decline long after I’m gone from this earth.
Having lost our health and wealth and so many departures of loved ones before their due dates, the only way to break from this gloom is time travel.
Set a future date, go there, and envision life without this black swan. One thing unique to our species is vision. It pulls us into, across and through tragedy and we have always, always emerged victorious. This ain’t the end. Not even close.
Where there is no vision, the people perish.—Proverbs 29:18

Our city is now the nation’s worst provider of affordable housing with only 12 affordable living units available per 100 seeking households. Fixed-income seniors comprise well over ¼ of these households and senior communities are at capacity with waiting lists up to two years. Their rents are elevating well beyond thresholds of fixed income affordability. They’re stuck where they live, paying higher and higher rents first at the expense of food, then medicine, then utilities, and having neither the physical nor monetary means to absorb the effort or costs of moving to lower rent residences even if they were available. Priced out of apartments beyond their capacity to pay, they are soon evicted with a credit black mark making it virtually impossible to rent anywhere again. Housing programs which exist to provide rent subsidies to the lowest income seniors are backed up 2 years for applications and another 2 years for placement. With few remaining possessions and fewer options, they move into high-priced weeklies until the money runs out, sending them to capacity homeless shelters, cars and city streets. The fortunate few may rent rooms from strangers, becoming easy marks for cons, theft and crime. And for all of them, options dissipate eventually cycling them back to those same shelters and streets they fought to avoid. Most are 70-95 with progressive health conditions, few if any basic computer skills to navigate sparse online resources and no available surviving family to intervene. An entirety lost, neglected and unemployable generation with no remaining resources, transportation or connections, their final days are spent on the streets, some in abusive nursing homes, and others in the silence of mortuaries.
This is the actual real life progression of old age for so many elderly you will never ever meet.
If this makes you sad, don’t miss the more important opportunity to be angry.
If you want to be part of the change, help #TeamHopeLink stop this now.

These efforts to stop the virus are at the very least counterintuitive. Humans are programmed to expect that a deliberate action is supposed to create or build something that will thrive. To act now to create the exact opposite result seems entirely unrewarding and counterintuitive to our very nature. It’s a new way of thinking toward a solution for so many but a smart and necessary one. #thenewnormal

Every end is a new beginning, and the backside of these events will have unimaginable takeaways to address and resolve. The calendars and economies of every household, community, state and industry will necessarily restructure to recover the losses, consequences and fallout. So when this event has subsided, voluntary, peaceful, patient cooperation will be more necessary than ever. Unprecedented times. Unprecedented measures. Unprecedented consequences.
But we are Americans, an unprecedented nation of overcomers who can show the world how it’s done if we will replace selfish ways with generous ones and welcome a new normal. Adapt and change, emerge and thrive again.

The past 72 hours has changed our way of life more than anyone ever imagined and more is coming faster than most will be able or willing to process or unfortunately for some, believe. Apathetic underreaction and panicked overreaction are now strange bedfellows—both enemies of a solution that can save lives and preserve sanities at a fraction of the cost we might otherwise pay to our future. Be smart and do your part so we can look back on these awful times more sooner than later. Adapt, change, live and thrive.

By anyone’s count, he was seven times older but never once left her side.
He was her warmth, her comfort, and the one with whom she cuddled with each night and woke each morning. She prepared their meals and they took walks both mornings and evenings while she reminisced about the days when they were younger souls on longer journeys. Her companion and protector, together 15 years without so much as an argument, they were best friends until last week when he curled up at her side never to wake again.
Others may pass but loneliness isn’t quite as lonely when you’re old and have enjoyed a lifetime of love and loyalty with a dog.

It was a massacre as each interracial soul poised as my victim, lined up in three uniformed battalions fifteen deep, my capture under the cover of darkness. I ripped open their tent for a ruthless ambush without warning. Then one by one I ripped out their guts single-handedly relishing each kill, twisting their mangled bodies, drowning their carcasses in a pool of milk until no more Oreos remained.