Earlier today I learned that Susan Niebur, who I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago, passed away today after a long fight with breast cancer. She leaves behind a husband and young sons, and a collection of friends who span the globe. I did not know her well by any means, but my heart breaks for her family today as they start a new chapter of their lives.

And more personally, my friend Jackie received some very bad news today. Jackie has been fighting brain cancer for several years and the results of her scan today showed that her tumor is growing again, which means that the last treatment available is no longer working. I’m absolutely heartbroken for her, for her family and for all of us who love her. Reading her news tonight was nothing short of devastating.

I don’t really know what else there is to say. No one should ever have to face what Susan, Jackie and their families have faced and will continue to face. No one should have to be as brave as them, and somehow, they make their bravery look effortless.

Please join me in sending love to Jackie and to Susan’s family tonight. Wrap them in love and support and remind them that no matter what happens next, they will never, ever be alone.

Dear Loved One,

I know you are struggling right now. I know that nothing is as easy as it seems like it should be. I know that getting up each day, going to work, going through the motions of life is nothing short of exhausting right now. I know and I’m so sorry.

You tell me that you’re not sure you can do it, but I know you can. I know you can because I see what you don’t. I see the strength that you have, the strength that will get you through this crappy day or week or month. I see the tenacity and perseverance that you can’t feel anymore, because you’re too deep in this cavern to find it.

You tell me that you feel like you’re losing control of your life, but you can’t see that by reaching out, by asking for help, by trying to move on, you are exerting control. By choosing to get out of bed and going to work, even though it’s going to suck and feel awful, you’re in control. By choosing not to just lay down and let this anxiety, this depression, whatever label you need to put on it, by not letting that run your life, you are more in control than you have ever been.

And yes, it feels awful. I know it does because I’ve been there too. There are no words to describe how awful it feels to be where you are today, or where you were yesterday.

It will get better.

I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. I care about you, and other people around you care more about you than you’ll ever know. And we’re going to help you get through this. It will get better because you are strong. It will get better because there are people who care, including me. It will get better because you have too many great things ahead of you for it not to. There simply is no other choice and you have to believe that too. You have to accept, to trust me, that this really will get better.

You need to know that you are loved. You are cared for and about. You are never alone in any of this. Even when you think that no one is there, there is always someone thinking about you, praying for you, loving you. You are never alone.

I just wanted you to read this, to know that no matter how bad you feel today or tomorrow or next week, that it will be okay. It will get better. Even if you can’t see how, people like me, people who love you, can. And we will be here for you because we love you too much to ever walk away.

Lean on us. Let us carry you when your burden is too great. Let yourself fall sometimes, because we are here to catch you. And then when you’re ready, get up and try again.

I love you dearly, we’ll get through this together. I promise.

Katie

I could not care less if you agree or disagree with what these students are protesting, because that doesn’t matter. And for the love of God, stop making it about politics here, because what happened here was not really about politics at all. It was about an abuse of power by the police. These kids were sitting, silently, non-violently, protesting something they believe in. You know, that first amendment right to assemble? They were exercising that.

And yes, they had been asked and told to move.

They are being civilly disobedient, that is the whole point. You defy authority, non-violently. And truly, I would have had no issue if they were arrested for their protest. That’s fine, if they’re truly breaking laws, arrest them, make their parents come get them. But I cannot in any way, shape or form, understand how the police thought it was appropriate to use pepper spray in the faces of those college students.

You do not meet non-violence with weapons. You don’t walk up to college kids and spray toxic crap in their faces because you want them to move. This is totally unacceptable to me, and God I hope it’s unacceptable to you too. It’s a horrible abuse of power by those policeman and it’s just lazy. They had too many other tools they could’ve used, and patience would’ve been a good one to try.

As someone pointed out to me on twitter yesterday, it reminds me of the pictures of fire hoses being aimed at civil rights protestors in the 1960s. It was horrible then, and this is horrible now.

I’m not going to lie, I have no problem with pepper spray being used on violent protestors. If you come at the cops with violence, you should expect an unpleasant reaction. If you’re a threat to a police officer’s safety, you have to expect that they’re going to use things to protect themselves. On the other hand, a non-violent protest should NEVER be met with violence.

I feel for these cops who are trying to maintain control, but I also see how nonchalant they are about the use of pepper spray on these kids and I am completely appalled. They didn’t pose a threat to anyone, they weren’t being violent or aggressive. They were sitting, completely still and quiet. And instead of handling things like professionals, like adults, those police officers used weapons. They caused bodily harm when there was absolutely no cause for it.

I don’t know who deserves to be punished at this point, but I know that we have to stop this. Just because you disagree with a cause does not mean that peaceful protestors should be harmed for supporting their cause. I firmly opposed every single Tea Party Protest, but I never would’ve been okay with police using pepper spray to control their non-violent protests. And you can argue that they were more respectful of authority and all that crap, but non-violence is non-violence, and these kids were not a threat to anyone.

I just feel like we all need to take a step back and look at what’s happening here, because I think too many people are not shocked by this, and we should be. We should be upset, we should be angry, and we should be making sure that this can’t happen again.

Jamey was a 14 year old boy who had just started high school. He was gay. And last weekend he killed himself because of bullying.

I cannot say enough how incredibly wrong this is. How wrong it is that a 14 year old boy is bullied so mercilessly that he feels that the best choice is to end his life. Can you imagine how horrible you have to feel to make that decision? Can you imagine feeling that way at 14? It just shatters my heart into millions of pieces.

The article I read quoted something that another student had written on one of his social media sites. And it makes my blood boil. “I wouldn’t care if you died. No one would. So just do it It would make everyone WAY more happier!”

Besides the horrific grammar, there is a sentiment that teenagers should not know. They should not know how to goad someone like that. They should not have that kind of power. My anger grows.

That child did not come up with that idea on his or her own. The only way a child is able to come up with something like that is if an adult has facilitated that kind of thinking. Children don’t learn to bully on their own. They follow examples in their lives. They hear their parents use foul words to describe someone they don’t like and they repeat it. They hear that homosexuals are wrong and weak and stupid, and they believe it and they spread that to others.

As much as I want to find the child who wrote that and prosecute them to the absolute highest extent, I also want to find their parent and punish them even more so. I don’t care if you think homosexuals are pure evil, I don’t care if you are the biggest racist on the earth, give your child the freedom of mind to make up their own decisions. Don’t call people names in front of your kids, don’t lose slurs or bully others. And if you do that, YOU are the problem. You have this boy’s death on your hands.

And if you have ever heard bullying and walked away, you shoulder a little of it too. Because Jamey said that he was being bullied. He told people, and nothing changed. This is unacceptable. It is unacceptable that there are no repercussions for those who bully. For those who torment.

It is unacceptable that the world is without this boy because of bullying. That we know that this has happened all around this country and we still haven’t done something to make it better. That we still haven’t made a change, haven’t talked to our kids, haven’t listened to them.

I do not understand. And I don’t know how anyone can. We have to do something. We have to make a change because this simply cannot keep happening. We cannot lose more children, more adults to bullying.

It can really only get better if first we do better.

The common thread behind the anti-sharers was that people who weren’t in New York or who didn’t lose anyone were being self-involved for assuming anyone cared where they were 10 years ago. After all, we weren’t a part of the tragedy. Some insinuated that we were making light of the tragedy of that day by sharing our trivial memories. Okay, maybe I added a little extra negativity, but that’s the gist.

But I disagree. I mean, you probably knew that since I just wrote about where I was that day, but I disagree even with that aside. I don’t think that people’s stories are trivial. Yes, most our lives were not changed like those people who lost loved ones that day, but our lives WERE changed. Everyone’s lives were changed. In many ways, that memory of where we were that day was one of our last memories of a life that no longer exists.

My dad sometimes talk about the Vietnam War, but he didn’t serve in it, does that mean that he’s being selfish in telling his stories? My grandma used to talk about the Korean War, but my grandpa made it home fine, does that mean that she is being self-aggrandizing in sharing her memories? No, they’re recalling an important time in their lives, just the same way that people have been talking about where they were on 9/11/01.

September 11th was a collective turning point in the lives of all Americans. Everyone who was older than 10 years old remembers where they were, remembers what they were doing. We all get the same horrible pit in our stomachs when we see pictures of the planes hitting the towers, when we see pictures of the rubble. We are all moved to tears at the clips on tv because it changed all of us. It changed this country.

I think that it’s more backwards to tell people not to share, not to remember, thank it is to share. I think that discouraging us from sharing our stories is the opposite of what we should be doing on 9/11. We should be remembering. We should be coming together and talking about what happened. We should be remembering life before these wars, before terror. We should be reminiscing. We should be REMEMBERING. Just because we’re not remembering a loved one who was lost does not mean our stories aren’t real. It doesn’t mean that our memories are insignificant.

9/11 happened to us as a country.

Remembering what we were doing that day does not make light of what happened. Talking about where we were when we heard doesn’t diminish anyone else’s personal tragedy. Sharing our story does not make light of others. It’s a way we remember. It’s a way we commemorate.

And personally, I think it’s far more selfish and self-aggrandizing to think that you should tell anyone else how to feel on any day of the year. That you should put people down for talking about something that meant a lot to them. That changed them, just because it didn’t change you the same way.

A small bit of compassion on such an anniversary seems appropriate, if not entirely needed.

I was a freshman in college 10 years ago and I walked into my 8am Econ class to find my usually jovial professor looking angry. And he had scrawled across the board, “Don’t let the bastards shut us down.” I had no idea what he was referring to at the time because I hadn’t checked the news, as I recall, I had barely made it to class on time after oversleeping my alarm.

When class was finally over, I ran to a tv and watched, slack jawed as the video played on endless loop. One plane hitting one tower, a second in the other. And then they fell. I couldn’t stop watching, it seemed unreal. It seemed like a horrible nightmare that played over and over on the news. How could that have happened?

I remember the next day crying as I read the newspaper, as I saw the pictures of people jumping out of the towers to escape from the fire. Those images still send shivers down my spine. I didn’t know anyone in New York, no one I loved was in danger, no one I love was hurt. But I hurt for this country, for people I didn’t know thousands of miles away. I was geographically removed from the tragedy 10 years ago, but my heart, my soul, was as entangled in the tragedy as it could possibly have been.

I was barely an adult when those towers came down, and 10 years later, it feels like the whole world has changed. And I think maybe it has.

My children will grow up in an entirely different world than I did. A world that has lost its innocence. We no longer wonder what awful things could happen, we remember them. We no longer wonder if an enemy will strike at us, we wonder which one, we wonder when and where.

The world has lost its peace, it has stood on the brink of war, if not in the middle of war, for 10 years. It hurts my heart to think of all the lives that have been lost overseas, fighting battles that will never be won. Fighting wars where there will never be winners. Only more tragedy. Only more loss.

I hold onto hope that someday we will rediscover peace in this world, that we will stop collecting foes and instead, learn to live and let live. I hope that war becomes a distant memory and that my children can live in a world where they don’t fear far off enemies. Where they love one another, love their neighbors and are loved in return.

September 11th will always be a day that we as a country come together to remember a great loss. A loss of lives, a loss of innocence. A loss of peace. And I can only hope that one day we can rediscover some of what was lost that day.

And even if that never happens, we still remember. We remember the men and women who perished in the Twin Towers, in the Pentagon and all those on the plane in Pennsylvania. We remember the men and women who have died for this country in wars since then. We hold their families close and we come together as a nation to mourn the day our collectives lives changed, the day we lost so much as a country.

We remember. Always.

You see, the man was an African-American and the woman was Caucasian. They were citizens of the United States, he was allowed to vote, to fight for his country, but he could not marry the woman he loved.

People called their love unnatural. They couldn’t explain it. It wasn’t something they chose, it was something they felt. They were in love just as every other couple they knew, and they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together in a marriage. Just as all other citizens of the US were allowed to.

Some people hated him. They quoted the bible. “When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites . . . you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them . . . Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son.” Deuteronomy 7:1-4 (Abridged)

But they pushed on. They fought on. And in 1967, the Supreme Court of the United States declared in the decision of Loving v. Virginia that:

“Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”

And so they married. And lived a long life together.

———–

The year is 2011. A man fell in love. His partner loved him back deeply, and they decided to commit their lives to one another. The only problem was that the government in the state they lived in forbade their marriage.

You see, the man was in love with another man. They were citizens of the United States, they were both allowed to vote, to fight for their country, but they could not marry the person they loved.

People called their love unnatural. They couldn’t explain it. It wasn’t something they chose, it was something they felt. They were in love just as every other couple they knew, and they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together in a marriage. Just as all other citizens of the US were allowed to.

Some people hated them. They quoted the bible. “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” Leviticus 20:13.

But they pushed on. They fought on. Only, unlike the African-American man, the hatred has not slowed, the progress has not been made. These men, in love with one another, not trying to convert any other men, not sexual deviants, just two men, in love, still cannot marry. The Supreme Court has not yet said that “Marriage is one the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival.”

Oh wait. Yes they have.

50 years ago the Supreme Court granted the right to marry to interracial couples, saying that the anti-miscegenation laws were a violation of the constitution, despite public outcries and outrage. And now, all this time later, we see how awful the earlier laws were. We see how unfair and discriminatory they were. We see how we have wrong. And yet, we continue to commit these wrongs even today.

I can only hope that in the next few years we wise up, we learn from our past mistakes and we expand marriage to include same sex couples. To let them have the “basic civil rights of man” granted to all other Americans.

Maybe then freedom will truly ring throughout this nation. Maybe then we will stop hating each other for our differences and celebrate those differences as the stuff makes our country great.

I don’t want to discuss the details because sometimes personal matters need to remain personal. This is one of those times. I’m sorry for the vagueness, but I need to protect myself right now.

Sometimes life astounds me with how quickly things change. Sometimes it’s from day to day, others from moment to moment. It makes it harder when the moments just before the crash were good ones, it makes the change harder, the adaptation slower.

The downward spiral is harder when you start higher.

What I realized today, amidst the struggles that I am wading through is that there cannot be a good day without a bad one. There would be no way to measure wonderful days if you also didn’t also have the miserable ones. There would be no way to be thankful for the good times if you couldn’t remember the bad ones. There would be no calibration, no scale. The good days might be more forgettable if we could not realize how truly good they are.

I am not thankful for today. I will not pretend to be, because that isn’t the truth. I am hoping just to go to sleep soon and therefore to have survived it. I expect the days will be hard for a while to come. And when I look back on these days, I hope I don’t remember them for the tears and frustration, but rather for the realization that times do get better. That things will improve.

The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears. -John Vance Cheney

I think Osama bin Laden was one of the greatest evils the world has seen. I think the lives he has cost both in our country and abroad represent the acts of a person who probably deserved to die. He was terror, in a human form. He was evil, personified.

But I cannot, in any sort of good conscience, celebrate his death. I don’t have ill will to those who do, I just can’t be one of them.

I have never been a proponent of an eye for an eye. I’m a turn the other cheeker, in the metaphorical sense. I certainly wouldn’t offer up more innocent American lives to terrorists, but I also wouldn’t turn to war, I wouldn’t add more killing. That’s just not how I am. I believe in peace, I believe in diplomacy and while I am not really sad that at least one terrorist leader is no longer walking this earth, I can’t be glad that we killed him, I can’t rejoice that we murdered another person, no matter how horrible he was.

If murder is wrong, I can’t stand up and be excited that we have become murderers. We can call it assassination and use big words, but the result is the same. A human life is gone. We may be better off without his presence in this earth, but when I cheer for this country, when I feel good to be American today, it’s not because we killed an evil man. It’s because I have hope that this will mark the beginning of the end of wars abroad, of death and destruction.

If you can’t understand that, that’s okay with me. I don’t expect it to be something that others jump on board with. I realize that for some, this brings closure, for others, a sense of justice. And I respect that. Just as I hope you will respect that I’m not jumping for joy today.

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

A back and forth rhetoric got us onto the topic of immigration and it took all that I had to stay quiet.

On my last clinical I had an opportunity to see a different view on immigration and all I want to do is stand up and scream about it. You see, one of my patients was an American citizen but his mother and father were not. He was 20 years old and undergoing strong chemo and radiation for a spinal cord tumor and had been in the hospital continuously since November. Alone.

He had some family in the general area, but they could only come by every few weeks and to make matters worse, he developed some infections that required him to be on isolation indefinitely. For months he was alone in his room, no roommates, nurses only allowed in when gowned and gloved. This kid could literally not have been more alone if he tried.

In a family meeting his aunt came to ask the doctor to write a note. She said that our patient’s mother had been trying, for weeks, to come up to visit him, but the United States government denied her the documentation that would make her trip legal. She wasn’t applying for citizenship, she just wanted to spend some time with her son. To take care of her child. And the government said no. They said she was not allowed to see her son unless a doctor sent a note saying that he was dying. Ironically, though he was in the hospital, with active cancer and several other problems, he was not sick enough to see his mother.

He was not sick enough TO SEE HIS MOTHER. I can’t wrap my mind around that at all.

It broke my heart and it made me disappointed because I think we’ve reached a sad and scary point. We won’t let mothers drive 4 hours from Mexico to see their sons in the hospital. It wasn’t an elaborate scheme to move here and stay illegally, she wasn’t going to collect social security or have a job and not pay taxes, she just wanted to care for her child. And we wouldn’t let her.

I am not silly enough to think that there aren’t others who have abused the system, but at what point did the almighty dollar, did our repudiation of immigration, the very thing that got all of us here, exceed our capacity to care? I was disappointed when Congress failed to pass the DREAM act which would’ve given immigrants living here already, being educated in our schools already, access to financial aid for college. While it was being deliberated, my facebook stream was filled with people who hated the idea because we didn’t need anymore people on Welfare and stealing jobs.

I feel like I might have missed something. We seem to have given up on giving anyone the benefit of the doubt anymore and last time I checked, plenty of American citizens were on Welfare, were not paying taxes. We live in a black and white world and apparently if you are an immigrant, then you must be here to steal resources, period.

And I’m calling bullshit.

We need immigration reform, absolutely, but we don’t need to close our borders, we don’t need to refuse to let mothers visit their critically ill, but not terminally ill, sons. We live in this country because our families were allowed to immigrate. We are not citizens because we passed a tests or did something extraordinary, we are here because at some point, someone in our family moved here. So why is it that we are now so willing to prevent others from doing the same?

I just wonder where we would be if hundreds of years ago, people had turned their back on my family when they came to this country for a better life. I wonder if they would’ve sat silently while mothers were kept from their sick sons, simply because of where they were born.