dontletthemwin - Tumblr blog

dontletthemwin · 5 months ago

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Eulogy

(TW: current US politics, 9/11, mention of racism/sexism/ableism and such language, mention of suicide)

I step out of the funeral home to a drizzle just heavy and persistent enough to be annoying, and stare at my blurred, traffic light-streaked reflection in a shallow puddle on the asphalt. There will be no reception after the service, no cold cuts trimmed into fancy shapes to blunt the reality of no one being in the mood to cook, no glasses of whiskey to render their medicinal burn and mask the empty pit that drops from my heart into my stomach. No other mourners are here to partake in such distractions. I stand alone, in a black dress that was modest once, over a decade ago, but puberty has made the ruffled sleeves and plunging neckline insufficient to cover me, and the hem hits an inch above my knees. Three faux onyx stones, embedded in cheap filigree, shine like dull glass from my waistline. I wore this dress to at least one of my grandparents’ funerals. I can't remember whose. Two of them passed in separate Januarys, while the other two departed in the summer. Today's event is in April, maybe March. The ceremonies past hadn’t taken place in this brutalist tan-bricked building that resembles a shrunken-down version of my old elementary school, and they certainly didn't end with me exiting onto an abandoned urban street riddled with potholes.

No, I must've seen this imagery in a movie before. I'd say a noir, but the stoplight is glaring too brightly for that. And the time for a detective is long past. The postmortem examination will be one for the history books, though. Or perhaps I'm recreating imagery I read in a long-forgotten novel. This seems much too melodramatic to be real. A raindrop pops on the nape of my neck, its chilly vestiges mocking my flight of denial. Of course this is real.

Can you forgive me for clinging to the idea that this is an illusion? After all, I came here today to bury my country.

The cracks were always there, I was just too young to see them at first.

The first period of my life, the precious, untouchable span of two years or so when I become more than conscious, actually aware, centered around the turn of the millennium. Everyone had so much hope back then. The 2000s were when we were going to reach the depths of space, and build robots and flying cars and utopian cities all finished in a shade of millennium chrome, and we were ringing in this new age with televised bashes and brassy school band performances and cheerful songs every elementary school kid knew by heart. The colors seemed more vivid back then. The commercials between the cartoons I watched splashed the palette of the late nineties across the huge CRT TV screen in my living room in thirty-second intervals. The lightning orange of the Gatorade logo against the backdrop of gray sweating athletes blazed so brightly, you could practically hear the thunderclap. Is it in you? Yes, yes it was. Also orange was Crash Bandicoot, alongside his purple rival Spyro the Dragon. Pray-stay-shun. Most tantalizing was the electric yellow of Pikachu, on the box of Pokémon Yellow. And don't forget the translucent purple Game Boy Color to play it on. I never got it, but I happily dreamed. Instead I got a little yellow radio from the book fair, with a neat little 3.5 mm headphone jack. I tuned it until I hit upon a song I knew: “Kryptonite” by Three Doors Down. I belted it out: If I go crazy then will you still call me Superman? That was the soundtrack of my summer. I'll still listen to that song sometimes, when I futilely long to rewind my life to the year 2000. Before everything unfurled, in a way I wouldn't understand until much later.

I couldn't watch SpongeBob before school that morning, my dad said grimly. He always kept a fairly straight face, but the line of his mouth seemed longer, his lips thinner. A skyscraper with smoke billowing out of it took the laughing sponge's place that Tuesday. I didn't really know the building: that was New York; I was in Chicago. The newscasters said it was the World Trade Center, a plane hit it, no, now two planes. “Terrorism”... “second tower”... “Pentagon”... I understood enough not to argue with my dad. Big concepts for a second grader, but I knew things like this just didn't happen to us. The rest of that day's a void in my memory, as if my brain never once recorded it. If it doesn't exist in my mind, it didn't happen, right?

I don't know if it's naive for me to claim America's innocence died on the same day mine did. Or maybe it's naive for me to assume my loss of innocence means anything in comparison to the dead bodies, aspirations, and assurances left splattered on the concrete altar, some writhing and sputtering, some dashed into porcelain pieces surrounded by white and gray dust.

I understood we were off to War. Military men in green helmets touched down in the desert in a country neither I nor my classmates had heard of. By the end of the year we knew it was Afghanistan, though asking most of us to point it out on a map was a lost cause. Gone was “Kryptonite”. Either you dove headfirst into the resurgence of country music, and counted the number of times the words flag or cross were mentioned like rosary beads, or you joined the mainstream disaffectedness that was nu metal. My mom would turn on 94.7 The Zone in her car whenever she had to drive me somewhere at night, so System of a Down could entertain us with mournful, hypnotic ballads I wasn't quite old enough for. My favorite was a haunting, churning song about Ariel, the mermaid in the sky. Also gone was the chant my class had made up on a whim, that smacked of the fears of the eighties: We are Americans, living in the land of– oh geez! We are Americans, being taken over by the Japanese. Now the bad guys who wanted to ruin our country were the Muslims. The A-rabs. Al-Qaeda if you wanted to be fancy about it. We didn't have any Muslims that I knew of at my white-bread suburban school. We just knew bearded brown men in turbans had bombs and were trying to detonate them all across America. We publically confronted the concept of them with disgust disguised as patriotic fervor. It's what the adults did all the time. Privately, they became a punchline. But as my cohort aged into middle school, starting around 2006, hating still images on the news became passé, and the war wasn't going too well so it was best not to bring it up. Influenced by their parents, many moved on to a new target.

Mexicans. Illegals. While we were writing insincere letters to stuff into care packages for soldiers fighting a war we secretly accepted was pointless by now, some Patriots decided there was a war we were fighting at home, within our borders. One we could still win. No, we had to win it before all the jobs went away and little girls got raped. These subhumans who held no respect for our laws were invading every town in the nation, simultaneously undercutting Honest Americans, stealing high-paid jobs, and sending all our factories to the country they'd just fled. There were Mexicans at our school, and they became punching bags to take the brunt of the hate mindlessly passed down from parents to children. We were traumatized, after all. It was okay to hate. I didn't pay attention to it much. I was too busy dealing with my own bullies, both boys and girls who harassed me because I was quiet, fat, nerdy, and couldn't manage a social situation to save my life. But I remember the first boy to have a crush on me was a so-called Mexican. He would sneak me spare Starburst candies, and his last name was Castro. I held no ill will towards him, but I simply didn't know him well. After a year or two, he and his cousin moved away, and my dumb ass spun a conspiracy theory I thankfully kept to myself: they were not Mexican but Cuban, and related to Fidel.

By seventh or eighth grade, I realized the illegal argument was full of shit. The Mexican mob descending upon our boring suburb never materialized, and the only Hispanic man I met from my father's manufacturing job was the only work friend I'd ever seen him have. Yet illegal immigration remained a prescient political issue, and one day, the teacher of my gifted program asked the twelve of us to write down our thoughts on it. She didn't tell us she would select some of our paragraphs to read aloud to the class. So I was honest. I wrote that I didn't believe we should be deporting infants and children, who’d had no say in the decisions their parents had made. The moment I first realized there was a cruelty tangled in our country's politics, a suffocating twine left in a junk drawer to unravel and ensnare everything that touched it, was the moment my teacher read my words aloud, excluding my name. A blond-haired, blue-eyed boy scoffed, and a nausea bloomed in the depths of my stomach. The gut rumblings of social rejection were familiar, but this pain had a razor sharp edge on it. “That's stupid!” he declared. My policy would only encourage pregnant migrants to give birth here, so their “anchor babies” could secure a foothold from which to leech our country's resources. This boy sincerely believed thousands of barefoot Mexican women, dressed in tatters with bellies fully round with child, were vaulting barbed wire-lined fences and making mad dashes across the border to squat and birth their children on American soil. The teacher chided him for calling other people's ideas stupid. But she never engaged with his assumptions. And as the readings continued, I sensed my opinion was in the minority.

To be clear, I wasn't immune to the disinformation culture. It's perpetually trendy amongst middle and upper class white people to make up lies about others, then spread and repeat them to the point they sincerely believe their own falsehoods. Our parents had completed high school, possibly attended college, then walked with diplomas in hand straight into a career, a house, and the American Dream. Most of them had worked hard to obtain what they owned. Yet they were incapable of comprehending life has different difficulty settings, originally assigned arbitrarily, now assigned, ostensibly, according to whatever society deems each person deserves (using arbitrary criteria). The public must believe the American Dream is guaranteed with enough hard work. Otherwise, their reason for being falls apart at the seams, a crucial stitch cut. Their eyes will bleed as they see the yawning abyss they stand above for the first time, the layers of the bodies of the less fortunate stacked at the bottom, creeping ever higher. And instead of keeping vigil for the lost, many will decide to wait for the stack to rise so high, they can walk straight across the pit on the corpses’ backs.

So to feed the illusion, to reinforce the idea that bad things only happen to bad people, they spin justifications as to why their neighbors can't take hold of the same manicured lawn with wrought-iron fence and backyard pool life they possess. The homeless man on the street must wake up with a clear mind every day and choose to do drugs. The single mother must have conceived her children in a series of one-night stands with different men, and the daycare would definitely let her kids stay there for free while she works a respectable 9 to 5 job; all she needs to do is ask. The delusions cover not only the poverty of others, but any unexpected suffering in their own lives.

My mom's pet scapegoat was vaccination. My younger sister was diagnosed with what would nowadays be called level 3 autism. My sister is nonverbal, and will require assistance for the rest of her life. A loving Creator wouldn't dare destroy my mom's dreams and inflict such a hardship on her; she did everything right. It must be the vaccines. She must've been tricked. She truly believed I, like her, would find comfort in blaming white-coated, unfeeling professionals. She lent me her copy of Evidence of Harm to read in my preteen years, and I absorbed it as gospel. I constructed an entire English project around the harm of vaccines, and how the federal government was complicit in a conspiracy to inject infants with mercury additives and create a mass health crisis. I cited sources, spoke for fifteen minutes in front of the class, and played a primitive YouTube video showcasing and summarizing my “proof”. I followed the letter of the project and got an A. But one boy in my class, who was perhaps the son of a doctor, raised his hand and asked the single question that snapped me out of it: “Why? Why would the government do that?”

My crash from the stratosphere of knowing all the answers was rapid, yet graceful: I'd grown the wings of humility before my bones shattered against the ground. It turned out the medical community weren't the ones lying to me. It wasn't until I reached my late twenties that I learned, I, too, had autism, and my parents had hidden it from me. If it weren't for my perceptive therapist, they likely would've taken my diagnosis to their graves. The idea that a just world had delivered them two disabled daughters was simply too much to accept.

The dawn of my high school years beamed the pastels of optimism over the browns and grays of our news stations and radiated warmth into our scarred souls. It was 2008. Hope. Change. Printed in bold block letters my generation will never forget. Obama's message was simple, yet sorely needed. There were dissenters, of course, and their numbers increased the more his presidency progressed. The words “birth certificate” were mumbled under the breath occasionally, but earned dirty looks from most who overheard. Our city claimed him as a native son; he was untouchable. Counterculture was tentatively accepted as culture, when it came to emos and goths and geeks. The Gay Straight Alliance coexisted alongside the Future Farmers of America, and in fact maintained much higher membership. We'd wrapped ourselves in a flag that gleamed a fresh, blinding red, white and blue, but it had merely had new dye injected into it. Individual superiority and the consequent lies and hatred were still woven into its fabric. It hadn't even been laundered.

I realized within the first couple weeks I was fresh meat, but not the tasty kind, just a ragged, torn entrail left for scavengers. A pair of senior boys groped me in the hallways, uttering no catcalls or insults, only sinister laughs that conveyed their message well enough: You don’t know our names. The fuck you gonna do about it? The friends I’d had in middle school invited me to homecoming only to abandon me. I couldn’t be molded into a viable member of any social group. That would require me to spend an hour on my hair, to not dress in baggy, dated clothes to hide my ever-shifting body weight, to believe in an ideal enough to conform to it. I would forever remain outside the vacuum-sealed popularity bubble. My entire schedule consisted of honors and AP courses, with each class at least half full of popular kids whose parents had begged and bribed the administration for their seats. From my desk, I often gazed on wistfully as our school’s celebrities talked about their parents’ lake houses, the upcoming football games, the dates and cars and tattoos they’d have soon. They maintained false airs of acceptance. They’d jump on the chance for a photo op with a special needs student, and wear yellow ribbons on their lapels, oblivious to those contemplating suicide feet away from them. But if your parents didn’t have spending money to toss around? If you lacked athleticism, no matter how hard you tried? If you didn’t pay lip service to the Hollywood high school ideals? You weren’t worth talking to.

Thus in the background of hope, I began to hate. Everyone was stupid. Didn’t they see their pep rallies and parties and rocks-for-brains boyfriends and airheaded girlfriends wouldn’t matter in a few years? Why should I respect my peers, or waste time living up to their impossible standards? I was a star student; how dare they deprive me of a friend group, of prom night, of an existence where I was at least tolerated? Most of all, I hated myself. I must be fundamentally broken, if this diverse microcosm of hundreds of students who were touted statewide as some of the best and brightest had no home for me. Others fought similar demons in silent agony as they doodled in their notebooks and nibbled at the cheap cafeteria pizza. One girl supposedly laid down on the tracks of the Metra commuter rail and gave up. School tossed an impenetrable veil over the mentally struggling, and we waged our wars in total darkness, unaware of the bloody swords swinging furiously next to us, unable to hear the animalistic cries of our psyches rising in a wretched howl.

That’s not specific to your generation. That’s not a universal American experience as much as a universal high school one, you might argue. No one really fits in during high school. In response, I ask what kind of culture allows this pain to be passed down so much that you learn to expect it, to allow some dead teenagers as an acceptable loss so others can have the best times of their lives? And meanwhile, malicious and uninformed political takes continued to circulate, as regularly as breathing air. The only friend I had romanticized the antebellum south, which only cared about states’ rights and silk skirts, not at all about the slaves toiling in the fields. (Happily, her stance has changed.) I spoke against abortion in our AP Government class, as a birth control user who had never even come close to having sex. And a junior infamously got written up because on December 7th, he asked a teacher married to a Japanese man whether her husband felt sorry for Pearl Harbor.

It took college for me to transcend my old spiteful self and shed my rotten chrysalis. College, which most people in America cannot or will not go to. In no particular order, I met a classmate who escaped the shadow of a sexist father and planned to devote her life to teaching music in inner-city schools. I met a trans woman who was closeted at the time, yet holds more courage in her heart than I can ever hope to. Her activism took, and still takes, the true shape of fire, igniting others, surging forward in an unbreakable wall, yet warming them with love, like a mother holding her child by the hearth. I met a computer science professor who pushed and pushed me to lend my skills to a national lab, until I acquiesced and wound up finding my calling. I met the man who became my husband, a third-generation Mexican immigrant who taught me to broaden my horizons while hiking his own. (He joined the federal service also, to become what was effectively a forest ranger.) Everyone I met possessed not just an ambition, but a desire to help the world. At twenty, we were envisioning our own epitaphs, not because we felt death nipping at our heels, but because we wanted to make sure they were good ones. We knew there were so many wrongs in our country, yet very few of us were equipped to fight the storm that broke free from the looming cloud of despair that had festered and hung over our homeland for years, concealed in plain sight. If we’d taken the time to turn around, we would’ve seen America’s own grave protruding from the cemetery dirt.

I don’t need to belabor the following years that led up to this day in 2025. I graduated in 2016, when hope passed the reins to fear and division. What it took was a man who told the nation our comfortable lies were the truth, it’s all someone else’s fault, there’s no need to look behind the curtain and shake yourself to your core. To admit this demagogue was a liar himself was like poison to legions of voters who finally felt validated. Our illness, our moral pandemic, was commentated and capitalized on, actively encouraged and shielded from antidotes. Most of us watched family members succumb to it. It’s been almost ten years since I lost my mother to it. My husband lost his father, but I feel the worst for my dad, who watched both his wife and brother devolve into unrecognizable shells that blast recordings of Fox News’ greatest hits from their mouths toward any attempt at intelligent conversation. Our disease was pronounced terminal, yet our oligarchs and their cults denied it while arranging flowers around our nation's coffin.

I sigh and turn back towards the funeral home. The viewing room is just inside the front door. Wreaths of roses and lilies occupy each corner, with typed paper plaques reading “Sincerest regrets”. Fifty flower pots line the room's borders; each state sent something for the occasion. Carnations and camellias provide the valorant red. Columbines and violets substitute for the blue of perseverance. Magnolias and laurels interspersed splay their petals out and form white stars. Countless paintings and photos cover every square inch of wall space. Famous scenes of battle and victory, personal pictures of families smiling while waving American flags. In the center of the age-matted carpet is the coffin – wide open, with no body inside. I didn't walk outside because the funeral was over. I just needed a breather. A hope, a prayer. Truthfully, I came here today to ensure this funeral never starts.

I lock the heavy wooden double doors leading to the outside and tie the brass handles together with rope. Then I try to pull the handles towards me, testing them one, two, three times. My back presses against the oak. I cross my arms and brace myself. The shambling husk of my country could tear at the hinges any moment now, desperate to lie down for its final nap. I don't intend to die here. Countries form and disappear in the blink of an eye, sunken in the great tides of history. My young family means more to me than any nation. Family's more fragile, more ephemeral, but I can lead them to safety without my voice being drowned out. However, I'll hold my position for as long as I can. I've waited on the steps of prosperity all my life for the golden doors of America to open for me and grant me my birthright. They never have, yet despite the nasty whispers, the shoves of those who felt they deserved to be first in line, the futility fatigue that crept into the darkest reaches of my mind and told me I was owed nothing, I fell in love with the people waiting alongside me. A king shall not contain these multitudes. Nor shall I. If they desire to gather around the occupied coffin, light the candles, then disperse as strangers, their common thread severed, I'll have to step aside. But I love them, so I'll try to save them.

I look down at my feet and notice shoe-shaped smudges on the floor. I remember the last time I believed loneliness was my sole companion, when I was a teenager. I was wrong then, and there's a chance I'm wrong now. I hope to God I'm wrong.

Well, I took a walk around the world to ease my troubled mind I left my body lying somewhere in the sands of time But I watched the world float to the dark side of the moon I feel there's nothing I can do, yeah…

#my writing #politics #us politics #memoir #current events #usa #american politics #fascism #fuck fascists #project 2025 #millennials

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