The Last Illusion
On Sunday, I got to put her to bed.
My sister and brother-in-law cared for her during the week. They had moved her bed downstairs, in front of the bay window. On Sundays, before driving home to Louisville, I took her to the bathroom. I waited outside while she finished, then helped her wash her hands.
“Ready for bed?”
She looked at me, cutting her eyes, because turning her head took a full minute’s effort.
Sometimes she could walk, slowly and with help, to the side of the bed. Usually not. I lifted her small frame, one arm around her back and the other under her knees, careful to keep her head to the right. I walked cautiously through dogs, shoes, and toys underfoot, noticing how care, when it’s real, is mostly logistics.
I lifted her over the bed rail, smoothing her nightgown to keep it from bunching beneath her as I lay her down. I hit the button that started her tape of Andy Griffith singing favorite hymns. I tucked her in, kissed her, told her I loved her.
My sister’s family took care of her every day. But Sunday night, I got to carry her to bed.
On the drive home, I tuned the radio to NPR for distraction and company. I heard an in-depth story that validated what I had already learned. Stem cell research was showing promise for the treatment of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and could one day lead to a cure.
The most promising stem cells came from embryos prepared for in vitro fertilization. I knew how it worked. I knew that unused embryos were discarded either way, just as the body discards those it does not use.
Later that week, I sat in my living room watching the news. My senator — my mother’s senator — was leading the charge to shut down funding for stem cell research. He talked about how the three-day-old embryos had “the possibility of life.”
I thought about my mother, how I had lifted her so carefully into bed. And about how my sister would lift her out in the morning and take her to the bathroom. How she carried our mother to her chair.
Propping her up with pillows so she wouldn’t fall over.
I was taught that there is good in everyone. Maybe there is. But I began to wonder whether it made any difference.
The signs had been there long before I was ready to read them. Laws and policies I had accepted as imperfect but necessary. Compromises I told myself were steps forward. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had been one of them.
When it was enacted, it felt like progress. Not justice, but something better than the open ban that preceded it. I told myself this was how change worked. Incremental. Awkward. Imperfect. But forward.
It took time to see it for what it was. A policy that required one side to disappear for the comfort of the other side. A decision that allowed politicians to claim moderation. A law that told gay service members to disappear or risk discharge, loss of benefits, a ban on future service. Stigma that would follow them for life.
Nothing had changed. It wouldn’t for seventeen years.
Men and women were serving honorably. They deserved full respect. Not a state-sponsored closet to hide in.
For years, I had heard people argue that gay marriage should not be legal. I had never heard a reason beyond a skin-deep reading of Leviticus, or the “icky” feeling of seeing two men holding hands.
As a grown man in my fifties, it was disorienting to hear strangers debate my life and relationships, to pass judgment on whether either was acceptable.
Why do you care?
Who are you to have an opinion on my life?
How could my marriage possibly harm yours?
By then, my patience was spent.
My life was not anyone’s issue to debate or resolve.
What angered me most was the assumption behind it. There is no way to argue that I don’t deserve the same rights that you enjoy without also saying that I am less than you.
When the Supreme Court finally struck down most of the legal barriers to gay marriage, I didn’t celebrate. I hadn’t won anything. I was just glad to see the clock run out on a game I never should have had to play.
We were sitting in the living room before dinner, phones out and scrolling. Curtis had the remote and landed briefly on a news channel. A political operative was describing the good his candidate had allegedly done for what he called “the Black community.”
Curtis snorted, half amusement and half contempt. “Wow,” he said. “That right there is some disingenuous bullshit.”
I had been half-listening. I couldn’t speak to the facts, but the words sounded measured. Reasonable. Statistics, programs, outreach.
Curtis spent years in television news. He knows the difference between what people say on camera and what they believe when the studio lights are off.
“He’s not talking to us,” Curtis said. “He’s talking to well-meaning white folks who just want to feel okay about us without having to look too deeply.”
I rewound the clip.
I listened again, and began to hear what he had heard.
I realized that I had moved through most of my life assuming good faith. Curtis had not. He listened for what was implied. For who was centered. For who was being managed.
What I had called optimism was also insulation. I had never fully engaged until the problem affected me directly.
The same was true for Curtis.
It’s just that it affected him directly from birth.
By eight o’clock on election night, I felt sick.
We didn’t need to see the final calls.
We decided together.
“We don’t need to sit through this.”
I shut it off and slid in The Hunt for Red October. We had seen it many times. We knew every line of dialogue, and exactly how it ended. We sat in silence, taking comfort in the Cold War and nuclear brinkmanship.
The first time, I told myself it was anger. Or fear. Or protest.
The second time, the conclusion was unavoidable.
It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. The casual cruelty wasn’t just collateral damage.
It was the draw.
People had watched the mocking, the belittling, the daily contempt. The lies and distortions. It didn’t matter what it cost them, as long as it cost someone else more.
They wanted all of it.
I don’t know anymore whether there is good in everybody.
What I know is that it doesn’t matter.
Not as long as there are people who don’t believe in good.
Who don’t want it.
Who see no reason to look for it within themselves or others.
Who, if they ever found it, would see it as weakness.
Or maybe it just isn’t there.
Whether it is there or it isn’t, believing it has cost me more than it was ever worth.
Waiting for the good to show keeps the bad alive until it does. If it does.
I’ve waited long enough.
This hits deep. Thank you.
“We sat in silence, taking comfort in the Cold War and nuclear brinkmanship.” Oof!!