I've often screamed at the universe asking why my beloved hubs (who, due to his post-WW2 childhood in England and an uncle's death in WW1 at the age of 19, lived in grave fear of authoritarianism consuming his beloved, adopted home) and my beautiful, fierce mama (daughter of a WW1 wounded veteran who sold poppies on street corners during WWW2 to support them and gave to that cause her entire life) had to die when they did, less than a year apart.
Now I know. What is happening now would simply have shattered both of their souls. Watching the level of suffering and despair they'd have endured over all of...this...would have wrecked me.
We'd have had to worry about him being stripped of his naturalization for speaking out (he loathed the orange menace with the heat of a billion white hot sons). That COVID was his cause of death in June of 2020 is the cruelest irony imaginable. He was on a ventilator for four months and heavily sedated; I have hoped this whole time that he never realized WHY he was dying. Since I didn't even get to say goodbye after 22 years together, I'll never know.
She, in her late 70s/early 80s, single-handedly wrote over 4,000 postcards to voters and joined me at marches in her wheelchair, from that horrid inauguration day in 2017 where the SoCal skies opened up and wept torrential rain on us, clear up through her final Women's March in 2020 before she was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer. But at least, at her death in May of 2021, she was able to leave this life with a sense of hope that her work had left us in good hands. Catatonic on her deathbed, one of the last things I reminded her of was that her postcarding for Warnock and Ossoff helped flip the Senate.
The countries inhabited by those spurned allies are those of my ancestral home...England and Sweden. I am beyond horrified and embarrassed at what this demon is doing to us on the world stage.
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