Day: September 17, 2026

One of the hardest parts of living through this moment is the weight of watching terrible people do terrible things and feeling, in some deep and constant way, helpless.          —-Heather Delaney Reese

I will be the first to admit that I have an obsessive personality. I am someone who continually worries. Perhaps it is so because I have endured many tragedies in my life that have made me a bit wary of what the future may hold. 

I have also been a mother and a teacher and in that role I have seen life change in an instant. I have had to be ready to react to danger and difficulties in order to protect my children and my students. I developed eyes in the back of my head and a kind of sixth sense that made me able to see bad things coming and deal with them before they became inevitable. I have slept in a state of alert for much of my adult life, listening for the cries of my babies, hearing the thump in the dark that was my elderly father-in-law falling. I learned to see the signs of my mother’s mental illness long before they were apparent to others. My almost psychic abilities were born from experience and a need to be ready for whatever tragic moment came my way. 

I joke about taking hours to finally allow myself to relax and fall asleep but like many folks who are responsible for others it is not really so funny. Life has trained me to be much like a faithful watchdog perking up at the instant that danger lurks. I suppose that my constant attention to the world around me has developed over the years because time and again I have momentarily been taken aback by the vagaries of life only to have to snap back quickly.

The last many years have been personally difficult for me and my family but also for most of the world. I was rocking along in a state of elation upon retiring from full time work and for a few years I enjoyed travel and being the master of my own calendar. It felt good to be so freed from constant responsibility buttaround seven or eight years ago all of that began to change. 

My father-in-law and his wife had become more and more unable to maintain their independence as illnesses and the process of aging complicated their lives. Both of them battled with illnesses and struggled during the pandemic. It became apparent that my husband and I would need to watch them more closely than ever before. Then a bit over five years ago my father-in-law’s wife died from congestive heart failure and he ended up in the hospital dangerously near death for weeks. When he finally overcame his medical problems he came to live permanently with me and my husband. 

In the meantime my husband’s own health problems seemed to dominate our days. So of course my vigilance became a twenty four/ seven challenge which I somehow managed to endure even as it sapped my energy. I was grateful to have the ability to handle the stress and the uncertainty but enduring such moments always takes its toll. 

Since 2024, the whole world has felt unsafe and demanding. For a “fixer” like me daily life is often difficult to endure and manage. I feel as though I should be doing something to set things right but the present moment is beyond the reach of one person. There is a great deal of ignorance and evil and jealously playing out on the world stage that should be concerning to everyone but is seemingly being ignored by so many people. Our very institutions are being threatened and in some cases have already been sacrificed by the whims of our ever declining president. So, yes, I feel somewhat helpless in this moment knowing that even my posts are little more than an outlet for my concerns rather than a successful rallying call for everyone to see.

I cannot even begin to express how much I love and appreciate the United States of America but right now the nation is hurting. I hear the cries but feel limited in what I might do. I try to warn people but they are so often unwilling to accept what I have to say. Instead they cling to ideas from our president that are not just false but destructive of our very democracy. There is not even enough hyperbole to explain my fears for the entire world as an elderly demented and vengeful man wreaks havoc by the hour. 

And so I watch in horror hoping that there are enough people like me to ultimately bring about the changes that we need to stop the purposeful damage to our very democracy. I am alert. I can see the truth. My only wish is that others who are seemingly looking the other way will one day also realize that this moment cannot stand and that the truth must unfold. We the people owe it to everyone who has ever struggled to set things aright by doing our duty no matter how difficult the coming days may be. The hard part of living is upon us and each of us must be ready.