Condemned

   The Department of Correction in my state is executing or trying to execute killers this month, and current and former co-workers are journalists-on-the-spot, covering the struggle, experiencing the experience, furthering their careers. Two strong minds sit right beside me, Eric and John, and I hear them on the phone, digging, polite but pressing, and in consultation, energized. Strong. 
   Apart from the awful importance of what's going on, separately and persistently, I brood about ambition and wonder whatever happened to mine. Did I never have any? Was all that yakking about duty to one’s talent back in high school just transient, flimsy self-importance? 
   I think that, yes, it must have been.
   And now here I am in the final third of what will be my lifetime, watching my mother decay in a bed. Her life — big, really, and full of giving and doing — has narrowed down to a rigid but alive carcass incompletely monitored by a mind deprived of facts. Sunday she told me, as though I wasn’t there, “I guess Julia Loyall isn’t ever going to die.” 
   It sounded like regret.
   The Mom I dismissed when I was in high school today hardly exists in my memory. Instead I’m consumed by the image of young mom, Julie Lynch, child of immigrants. Pretty, thwarted, funny and fun-loving.
   My chest twists as I think about that child while looking at today’s puzzled, childlike person who presses her index finger into her mouth and says, “Some of them are gone” — her teeth.

   Last night I dreamed I was surrounded by angry young women. All of them looked like a former co-worker who was a genuine little crusader, always shaking her fist at injustice. All these small women were shaking their fists, at me: “It’s too easy to go on going back and forth in your middle-class comfort, limp as a ragdoll, while we are fighting for a better world. You waste your time.”
   I remember arguing with them/her eloquently. I said something like (and yes, I do have a prissy vocabulary), “We live in a world of pain and surcease of suffering is impossible here. There is darkness everywhere, touching every life. But don't you understand that it’s arrogant to see nothing but the bad and no good life other than marching and arguing all day? It’s naive to dismiss the good world, the light and hope, healing and helping: children, learning, beautiful flowers, dear faces, sweet memories, friends, silliness, jokes, music and joy. If we insist on showing that light to the darkness, we also are fighting the fight. We are. I am.”
   Michael tells me I was snoring lustily when he left for work.

   But I woke up feeling dim and sad anyway.
   I wish poor Mom had not lost her lower teeth. I wish her body was not dissolving.