Hediya, age 9, enslaved by ISIS for 6 years. Photo: Adam Ferguson for the New York times

The children kept asking him: Why does ISIS do this to us? He didn’t have an answer, so he later went to a couple of prisons outside Kirkuk to interview captured fighters. "Over and over again, the fighters told him: We kill them because they are not human."

Because they are not human.

This. This is the answer to every "how could they" of our blood-drenched times. The "othering" into sub-humanity.

Awaiting death at Auschwitz. Image copyright Yad Vashem.How could they throw children into ovens in the camps?
Well, they were only Jews, you see. And gypsies. And mental defectives. They were "life unworthy of life." THEY WERE NOT HUMAN.

The lynching of Laura Nelson in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 19How could they sell human beings like cattle, torture them and string them up for sport?
They were blacks. THEY WERE NOT HUMAN.

How could the Japanese, a culture suffused with respect and delicacy, have made sex slaves of Korean women in wartime?
They weren't our women. THEY WERE NOT HUMAN.

Daniel Lee, white supremacist murderer on Death Row. Photo: Dan Pierce, The Courier, via Associated Press

How do we justify executing prisoners?
Do you know what they've done, those guys on Death Row? They are monsters. Animals. THEY ARE NOT HUMAN.

Human child, 20 weeks gestation. Photo: Lennart Nillson.How does an abortionist dismember a late-term unborn child limb from limb, count up the pieces in a pan, and wash up for the next procedure?
It's legal. As long as they dwell within their mothers' bodies, THEY ARE NOT HUMAN.

How can we ignore the suffering of children in border detention, when such conditions would be unthinkable for our own children?
They're not like our children, not really. They are poor, and innumerable, and brown. They're human, but not...AS human.

And how will we start to justify euthanizing the terminally ill, the profoundly disabled, the comatose?
They are without hope, without consciousness, and surely that's what makes us most fully human. And they're terribly expensive to maintain, with scarce resources. It's almost like THEY ARE NOT HUMAN. Not anymore, right?

In honor of all those deemed "unworthy of life," perhaps we all need to ask ourselves from time to time:
Who do you manage to view as just a little less than human?

The “future” used to be better, actually—the World’s Fair fantasies of housecleaning robots and flying cars. But as this Wonder Years kid approaches her AARP years, she notes a pattern: The World’s Fair stuff turns out to be largely bullshit, and the real surprises are rather hellish more often than not. We got Roombas and underwhelming electric cars. But hey, we also got cell phones and social media and Internet porn and cyberbullying and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And climate change. Didn’t see those coming, did you?

And with the Rise of the Machines comes the fall of...so much else. Although the poor millenials get blamed for “killing” things, from conversation to cursive writing, my fellow “Boomers” are responsible for their share of casualties. Some of these things may deserve to die. (I’m looking forward to an old age in which bingo and golf are extinct.) But no single demographic seems to have administered the coup de grâce to the familiar, the simple, the good. It’s as if post-modernism met the Internet and released a mutating virus with diverse hosts.

Just for the hell of it, being an old magazine editor (see #1), I've come up with a Top 10 List, off the top of my head, of things that matter terribly to me and have languished on my (quite recent) watch. What’s in your Top 10?

James Jarche, Science & Society1. Magazines. I always loved them, dreamed of writing and editing them, and studied journalism to make my dream come a little bit true, working for travel and health "books" and, once, getting a cover story for The American Spectator. (See #10, below.) Many magazines, of course, hang on, and digital "content" abounds. But opening a magazine freshly arrived through the mail slot is a joy that’s so last century.

2. Newspapers, the New York Times in particular. The Gray Lady was the air I breathed as a New Yorker. I reluctantly gave up the dead-tree Times when their erratic delivery service seemed to acknowledge its irrelevance, and I ditched the online edition when it morphed into a weird, elitist liberal echo chamber with near-zero Metro coverage. Now, with the tabloids reduced to tatters, there virtually is no Metro coverage. Some real journalism hangs on, under economic and political siege, but only just.

Ally Brosh, "Hyperbole and a Half"3. Blogs. If you’re reading this, I’ll bet you don’t have much company. There was a brief interlude, after the Internet but before social media, when it seemed as if citizen journalists, with a gloriously low bar to entry, would repopulate the media landscape, forming engaged communities and letting a thousand flowers bloom. Bloggers still blog, but any post bigger than a caption risks being “TLDR.” The firehose of social media, instead of watering blogs, has drowned them, with a numbing stream of pictures, GIFs, and memes. “Long form” posts now carry sheepish warnings: “Two-minute read.”

4. My beloved Catholic Church. Two waves of horror: the predator priests, and the preening demons in the hierarchy who covered them up or outdid them in corruption. It is my theology that the Church cannot die, but (at least in the West) it is withering and will rebloom, probably after my lifetime, looking very different. For this Caucasian mutt of dilute Irish-German extraction, the demise of the mid-century model of American Catholicism is quite literally the death of my culture.

5. Catholic education, its decline not wholly related to #4 above. Catholic "teaching" makes headlines when it zaps a third rail in the culture wars, but no one has "taught" it for decades. And now, after the long dark age of catechesis, they are literally turning out the lights in Catholic schools. Or at least they're doing so in the great cities where they served and formed generations of poor and working-class youth, for a host of despicably shoddy excuses. Colleges are doing alright, but only by burying their Catholic identity in the Zeitgeist. Where is the next generation of Catholics being formed? Oh, they're not. Among millenials, baptisms and weddings have slipped away as essential touchpoints; now even funerals are being made over into DIY secular "rituals." Jesus wept.

6. Television. Ah, TV: as simple as flipping a dial, a cultural force as unifying and ubiquitous as the air through which it traveled. Now it's just one more complicated private domain. We finally got a “smart” TV and now we struggle and argue and pay extra for this and that. Some of it is marvelous, but much of the best we can’t afford. I signed up for one cool-sounding “channel” only to find we couldn’t watch it on the only “platform” we use—an actual television set. The boob tube got smarter, we didn’t.

7. Food. I call it the “guilt list”: Is tuna killing the dolphins? Is red meat killing us? Are cage-free chickens really happier? Are carbs really the problem, or is it fat? I can’t afford organic, so that decision’s off the table, but everything else is a supermarket-aisle moral struggle. I worked the “healthy food” beat as an editor and writer for years, and even I can’t keep up. And of course, there’s the biggest struggle of all: being able to afford anything but pasta and the Dollar Menu. 

8. Travel. Even if some day I could “see the world,” it’s not the world I dreamed of seeing. “Globalized” destinations, including my own city, are blurring together, and not just thanks to McDonalds and Starbucks. Whether from entitled mobs of affluent tourists from rising economies or tragic encampments of migrant refugees from gutted ones (or both—see: Paris), so many legendary sites are culturally altered and reeling under the strain. (Selfish perspective, I know, but a moot point, since I can’t afford to go and fight the crowds anyway.)  Heck, even Notre Dame didn't wait for me.

9. Health care. My pediatrician made house calls with a shiny black bag. Back then, when we were boldly heading to the moon, it wasn't routine to go bankrupt from cancer (you just died from it). Now we have "health care networks," and insurers who decide what they can do for us. Ours offers “telemedicine,” wherein I can set up a webcam and, presumably, cough at my screen to a stranger. Most people I know, even those with insurance, live in terror of major illness or injury as the harbinger of economic catastrophe, and “GoFundMe” is the new normal for cancer care. How did we get here? (Oh, and still no cure for lots of cancers.)

10. Conservatism. Ah, the Right, dashing hearthrob of my youth. "We had brains then," to paraphrase Nora Desmond. I worked for National Review in college, revered Bill Buckley and James Burnham, was drawn to the intellectual rigor, feisty good humor and moral robustness of the Right—both the badass libertarians and the erudite cultural traditionalists. The so-called “Right” today? Need I say more? The bragging, ignorant pustule in the White House and his minions, fueled by the screeching blond harpies on Fox News, are killing conservatism and sowing the ground with salt for at least a generation. As I say to my agonizing liberal friends, if you think it’s hard to be a “progressive” these days, try holding your head up as a conservative.

So there you go, ten dust-biters without even trying too hard. I didn’t even get to global warming, the transformation of Brooklyn to Dubai, or the shitty hollowed-out job market that is sucking our kids’ souls. Or late-term abortion, the last fragile stumbling block to the deadened conscience of the West, now trampled under the onslaught of the culture of death.

And do not get me started on “gender.” Or Tinder. Or Fiverr. 

Urrr.

That's the Crazy Stable—at right, behind a Cambodian temple procession that passed by yesterday on a beautiful spring afternoon.

The folks from Watt Samakki on the next block had a festival going on, and I was unloading groceries as they came up the block, chanting, beating drums, and ringing bells. A masked reveler blew me kisses.

The fabulous little parade jolted me with nostalgia for the surreal kaleidoscope of cultures that glimmered around us 32 years ago. We moved to "Caribbean Flatbush," but actually, to a borderland where almost anything seemed possible. Our first next-door neighbors were from Trinidad on the left, Haiti on the right; the unofficial block "mayor" was a feisty Jewish bagel-baker who scoffed at white flight, as had at least a half-dozen other aging white homeowners.

Back then, emissaries from all over the globe would sweep by unpredictably. I once looked out the window to see a man dressed from head to foot in a shaman-like costume made of straw, dancing fiercely all alone and chanting in Kréyol. For several summers, a wild and glorious ra-ra band roamed the edges of Prospect Park on Sunday nights, making sonorous chaos. Also in summer would come a truck from Alabama, full of watermelons. It would stop on the corner and shy black men with deep Southern accents would emerge, selling the lot in an hour as word spread and neighbors hurried over on foot.

And that was only the block! Over in the Parade Grounds, the football (I mean football) players converged for their "beautiful game" daily, from Africa, South America, South Asia, playing their music afterwards on the sidelines to accompany epic picnics. Down on Church Avenue, Haitian ladies laid out herbs and spices on the sidewalk where everyone, even Russians from Brighton Beach, came to scour the bargain stores. Once, I waited at the check-out behind a Cambodian man who pushed forward a few dollar boxes of ramen with hands that appeared to have been crippled from torture.

From killing fields to playing fields, came our neighbor monks. So many others came, too, most recently a wave of house-proud Bangladeshi contractors. But every year, there are more white faces among the newcomers. Blessed with affluence, they tend to fix up a rambling wooden house impeccably in record time; so far, none of these old piles has fallen to the wrecking ball, unlike fast-changing precincts to the east of us convulsed by tear-downs. But this real-estate feeding frenzy has turned it all into a tense zero-sum game: Gentrification. Displacement. Air rights. Air BnB. "Privilege." "Pioneering." A whole vocabulary for being adversaries instead of neighbors; decades-old conversations with a sharp new edge. Our poor house, in the condition we found it, would now mark it for the wrecking ball. Brooklyn no longer has much room for those of modest means, unless you got in years ago and hung on. It offers no mercy to teachers, or artists, or home health aides, or our children, of any color, in its high-rise future. (Unless they are "in finance," apparently. Those "in finance" must be the ones who now populate the air by right.)

Luxury was not a word you would have associated with our block back in the day. Raw possibility, yes, and most of all, people, amazing people. Immigrants, mostly (those monstrous threats, we are warned) who brought us hot meals, carried trash to our dumpster, and assured us, "It's a good house, but it takes time." Their celebrations bubbled up in our lives like an underground stream, not curated by some museum but just happening on the street. We weren't invited, we weren't excluded. We waved. They waved back.

It seems like only yesterday.

Alfie Evans/Daily Mirror

Ah, "death with dignity."

For a long time, that was the "compassionate" crack in my armor in defense of life: end-of-life care, because I have seen it done so badly, over and over. Once, visiting my mother in hospital, I watched in horror as the staff roughly inserted an enteral feeding tube into an ancient, unconscious lady in the next bed; she lay curled in a fetal position, repeating, "Mama." I found myself nodding that we needed "death with dignity," since human dignity is my deepest value.

But some writer—I wish I could remember who—pointed out that human dignity is based on: being human. Not being alert, peaceful, or without pain, or able to toilet oneself, or being cognizant of one's surroundings. Just being...human.

Vanessa Redgrave, "Evening" (2007)Our dignity does not lay upon us like a garment, with our worth stripped away by externalities. I want to die like a luminous Vanessa Redgrave character, fading gracefully and quickly. With dignity. Without tubes. But my dignity is impressed upon me by my Creator; if I do wind up helpless and burdensome, or even in agony, He has given us His own Son as a template that I can never (in the words of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman) "be thrown away." His Son's earthly body, my church, stipulates that no one need degrade my dignity with "extraordinary means" to keep me alive—but neither may they dictate that my "dignity" be preserved by hustling me (or even helping me push myself) over the edge of death.

Fra Angelico, "Christ Crowned with Thorns"To care for those stripped of the world's signifiers of "dignity," whether intellectual capacity, sanity, continence, teeth, hygiene, material possessions, freedom, clothing, any of it, is to see (on His explicit instructions) the face of my Redeemer. To lose my world-approved dignity in any of those domains is to become one with Him in suffering. I saw this mutually conferred dignity many times at Calvary Hospice, where the staff tenderly fed and bathed and turned patients with cancer in their final weeks, sparing them brutal "interventions" but never, ever deliberately hastening death. Each, caregiver and patient, being Christ to the other.

How easy it is to rhapsodize over our sublime human dignity while gazing at a Rembrandt, or watching Misty Copeland dance, or hearing Martin Luther King orate.  How easy to treasure life when you hold a thriving baby or sit at the knee of a spry, healthy grandparent. It's even easy to marvel at the dignity of the frail, if they're heroic enough, a Mother Teresa here and a Stephen Hawking there. But how difficult it is, when life fades, or arrives broken, or leaks uncontrollably from various orifices.

Francesco Bassano, "Parable of the Good Samaritan" (detail)Bodily fluids, in fact, seem to be one of the breaking points in the world's definition of human dignity. For many of us, it's the ultimate taboo of vulnerability. For that reason, perhaps, this loss of control has become for me a stubborn sign that the crucified Christ is present, his side pouring forth its "water."  I have my own private heroes' gallery of human dignity:

• the gregarious owner of a guest farm in Pennsylvania whose lower jaw was lost to cancer, who communicated in cheerful notes and wore gauze pads sewn by his wife to absorb his saliva.
• The beloved art teacher at my daughter's high school who survived bladder cancer and made hilariously candid references to his "pee bag." (What an example to a classful of girls at the age when a blackhead seems like a catastrophe!)
• My cousin Rik, who returned to teaching periodonty after a spinal-cord injury deprived him of control of the lower half of his body at mid-life.

And I experienced it most vividly in caring for my Uncle Don in his very old age. (That's him, with a strawberry milkshake.) His care at the very end of life was exhausting and yes, to the "system" it was damned expensive. Yet he was radiant with joy, and delighted in receiving my ministrations. He did not need to be Vanessa Redgrave, fading elegantly. He was luminous in his own way. Can we see the light in others, that light of life that is the deepest dignity, from conception to something like natural death? Or can we only get an itchy trigger finger to put that light out forever, "for their own good"?

Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, Getty ImagesAs my 60th birthday loomed in the distance, I entertained crazy dreams of doing the Camino. I watched "The Way," a beautiful movie about lost souls drawn to the rough countryside, walking all day for at least a month to arrive at the cathedral of St. James, where the apostle is supposedly buried. I've made pilgrimages to the tomb of St. Peter in Rome, the Holy Shroud in Turin, and the cathedral at Canterbury; I've done a bike century and the Avon Three-Day walk for breast cancer. The Camino beckoned as the ultimate journey, mostly in bold defiance of getting older. Just put one foot in front of the other. Wear a scallop shell—the pilgrim's ancient badge—and stay in hostels. Eat tapas, pray, love.

Photo: Turismo AsturiasBut I didn't get in shape and save up money and go walk the Camino. I didn't really do anything special. Had a nice birthday dinner with my family in Brooklyn. No epic walk, no epiphanies in a distant land on ancient stones. 

But someone else walked a Camino of their own, and it was my privilege to walk some of the way alongside them.

My BFF, as the kids say in their texting. My Best Friend Forever. We met in freshman year of high school. She thought I was a prig. I thought she was a brat. We were both right. I loosened up, under her transgressive tutelage. She reined it in, under my watchful eye. We grew up.

We got married, maid and matron of honor for one another.

We had daughters, godmothers each to the other's.

We spoke just about every day for 45 years, our shared lives a room furnished with instant access to a thousand memories, created once we both entered it. Like the Holodeck on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," we could conjure up and frolic in any scene with a private shorthand.

Most of all, we ate together, and laughed together, and loved each other. A terrible thing, apparently, that laughter-for-two: It almost got us kicked out of places. Except comedy clubs, they loved us there. At chemo, the nurses said they looked forward to our coming, because the laughing would start.

And I guess chemo was our Camino. Hers, mostly, but I went along for the ride. Because we always got together once a week, so why not hang out together?

No tapas, though, just soup at Panera and, when she was too weak for that, the hospital panini we came to revile (and a snack pack of nuts from the cafeteria that we raucously dubbed our Nut Sack).

No ancient cathedral with swinging censer, but the beautiful little chapel on the hospital grounds. Then not even that; they moved chemo to an "infusion center" in a bland office park on Northern Boulevard in Glen Cove. Our Camino was now a stretch of mini-malls and parking lots, waiting rooms and treatment bays.

No pilgrim staff, but an endless succession of IV poles, monitors, tubes and needles.

No scallop-shell badge, but a port under her delicate skin below the clavicle. Four ports, actually; they kept getting infected, and once the surgeon screwed up and it moved.

No "Compostela," the age-old Latin certificate for completing the Camino, but a cupcake and card and jubilation from the nurses when she finished the first five months of weekly treatments. When cancer returned less than a year later, and chemo started again, there would be no finishing the regimen. Chemo was the new normal, and all its attendant miseries.

No rustic Spanish inns (those along the Camino helped originate the concept of "hospital"). But one whole summer in a hospital bed as cancer struggled, and failed, to take her away from us a year ago.

After that, there were days she needed a wheelchair. Last summer, pushing 60, I was crushed to discover that I could no longer push hers, at least not uphill. (And that's why I won't be seeing that inspiring movie.)

But every road ends. Two weeks ago, my friend reached the end of hers. It took three years. She walked the last bit without me, but her greatest champion, her beloved husband, walked her right to the end.

From "The Way," 2010Beyond the town and the cathedral of Saint James, many pilgrims walk further, to the westernmost coast of Spain, to a place called Finisterre—literally, Land's End. Overhead, the Milky Way is said to seem close, as if pointing out over the Atlantic. Compostela, in fact, means "field of stars." There, many pilgrims leave a souvenir of their travels, or burn the shoes they walked there in.

My friend has gone beyond Land's End. I know what she leaves behind, what we'd both burn: a bonfire of walkers, wheelchairs, tubing, pills, gauze and needles. But she also leaves us behind, we who revolved around her like planets around a sun. What's left at Land's End is a field of stars overhead. A glorious thing, but it's no daily, delicious phone call.

So, you look back and you see the road you walked, and it's where you meant to go all along. As if sent to me by Providence, I just found a poet who says in a TED talk that this place, Finisterre, is where the conversation happens. The conversation is precisely what is missing from me now, missing like an arm or a leg. So I'll keep talking. And listening for the stars to laugh.

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Daddy, center, with twin older siblings Vivian (Don) and ValeskaI have written often of my dad, a briliant handyman and sort of patron saint of the Crazy Stable, which he never saw. He was born to a pianist and an artist on Manhattan's Upper West Side on this day in 1917. A plump and mischievous little boy grew into a handsome and somewhat aimless young man, a championship swimmer who shrugged off college and drifted among jobs in various fields, including resorts and retail.

Private Becker, 240th MP BattalionLike so many other young men of his "Greatest Generation," World War II gave his life sudden purpose. As an Army MP, he made sharpshooter, and conscientiously guarded his president, FDR, at Hyde Park, then served in Reconstruction Japan. There, stationed approximately midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, could he have been exposed to radiation that would shorten his life by decades compared to his father and siblings, who all lived to be nearly 100? We'll never know. He brought home a kimono and a handful of Japanese coins, which I have to this day, and a GI phrasebook he memorized for life. He taught me to say arigato and to stand at attention and "at ease," and to properly fold an American flag.

After the war, he got a business degree on the GI Bill, and married the love of his live after an epic 15-year courtship. His sunny nature and chivalry carried my mother above the dark, tormented undercurrents of her nature and her past. Through her (and Fulton Sheen), he came to the Catholic Church as an adult convert, his personality drawn to and reflected in Christ's. Quentin Roland Becker was baptised in St. Paul's Church in Manhattan and became Richard Quentin Becker; old friends and my mother called him "Quen," while business associates called him "Dick." He settled down in the insurance industry, became a dad.

And as a dad, he shared with me so many things he loved: Gardening. Classical music. Science. Nature walks. But most of all, he taught me how to be happy. Or rather, how to choose to be happy--by turning outward, helping others, laughing gently at oneself. By "lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness."

I wonder what he would be like at 100. No, actually, I don't. However diminished in body or mind, he would be invincible summer. Today, on his hundredth birthday, my garden--having bloomed in glorious warmth--was socked with heavy, wet snow. Every tender bloom that had opened has prevailed, and now the sun is out again. These photos are my gift to him.

Miniature narcissus, battered but unbowed. My dad planted spring bulbs all around our childhood home in Little Neck; every spring, their resurgence seemed like a miracle for which he was personally responsible.

Up in the Poconos, Daddy would get out his folding army shovel and a garbage bag and dig out a mountain laurel in the woods, to nurture into bloom back in the city. Up in Maine, I rescued "Baby Groot" here as a tiny sapling from under another white spruce, and he's growing like a weed.

Crocus around my garden owl, which is actually a memorial mini-garden to our owlish gray cat Cocobop. Daddy was an epic rescuer, with needy stray cats and kittens drawn to him as if by magic.

Decades before foraging became fashionable, Daddy, ever a Boy Scout, taught me which weeds in a vacant lot were edible, like butter-and-eggs, pepper grass, and (above) onion grass, and I would dutifully nibble them. This always horrified my mother, who preferred her produce from a nice clean supermarket.

Sleeping lilac buds.

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. --Memorial acclamation, Roman Rite of the Mass

Plowing Martense Farm. Adrian Vanderveer Martense collection, Brooklyn Historical Society

In our hunt for the Crazy Stable 30 years ago, we had two "Ones That Got Away." We put a binder on one, a roach-filled frame house behind Our Lady of Refuge church, but pulled out of the deal when an inspector found a deeply split joist; we were game for a good exterminator, but not for a house collapse. 

Wyckoff House Museum, BrooklynThe other? For three decades, it has haunted me: The sort-of-Dutch Farmhouse somewhere in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, a neighborhood of mostly row houses east of our current one. It was a solidly Caribbean area of pristine side streets giving onto economically depressed avenues full of empty stores behind graffiti'd roll-down gates. But this was no row house: In memory, it is a tidy frame, with charming original door hardware. In the living room, the fireplace is surrounded by what appear to be original blue-and-white Delft tiles. There is a small, shaded back yard, a driveway and a garage, but the garage is a barn, with a hayloft and rusty farm tools. Was it built before any of its neighbors, when Flatbush was still farmland?

If only...if only it had not been squashed up against a big brick apartment building, whose side wall loomed tightly next door, blocking out light. If only the avenue around the corner had not been so despondent and menacing. We sought a "mother/daughter," and I couldn't picture the persnickety Irish mother faring forth along that commercial strip, whose sole bright outpost among the bodegas and hair salons was a Caribbean bakery and Catholic church a few blocks down. We let it pass, and wound up in the Crazy Stable—a house in vastly worse shape, but in a better location nearer the park.

But I never forgot the Delft tiles and the rusty plough. I kept scattered records of our house-hunt and no photos (people just didn't take pictures of everything back then), and could never remember where the house was. I even looked for it a few times, and began to suspect I'd dreamed it. But just now, in some old notes, there it was: 366 Rutland Road, between Nostrand and New York Avenues. I raced to Google Maps, and it's still there—looks almost the same, faded but dear, hunkered in the shadow of the apartment house. And that stretch of Nostrand still looks pretty sad, although there's a fancy-looking bakery around the corner now; gentrification is not on fire here yet, but the sparks will catch. Are the farm tools still in the garage? When was it built? How much land did the owners till?

I'll probably never know. The house sits just east of the site of the old Lefferts' farmstead (from which the Lefferts Historic House was moved to nearby Prospect Park). As of 1909, it was home base for two builders named Larsen and Anderson, who designed other Flatbush homes, according to this account; real-estate sites claim it was built in 1910, but I suspect it might be much older. I'm just glad it's still there. I hope whoever bought it has had as many happy years within as we have had here. And I hope they kept the farm tools.

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Thank God. That means I can vote for neither one. If it were close, I would feel obliged to vote for her, to keep him out. Hillary: the champion of unrestricted access to abortion at any stage of development. Not for her "safe, legal and rare," the catchphrase of her canny husband, who paid lip service to the pain and loss attendant upon killing the unborn. No, Hillary is the heroine of the #shoutyour abortion crowd, the patron saint of the corrupt butchers of Planned Parenthood. That's who I would have voted for, if the election in my state were close. That's how appallingly dangerous and vile Trump is.

And here's how that would make me feel: Do you remember the last episode of M*A*S*H*?

It was called "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen." In it, Hawkeye (Alan Alda) had a nervous breakdown and recounted to a psychotherapist the story of being on a bus with Vietnamese refugees, hiding from an enemy patrol. Their silence is imperative–but one poor terrified woman holds a chicken that won't stop squawking. Hawkeye furiously tells her to silence the chicken, or they will all be killed. To his horror, she does the only thing she can do–she strangles it.

Only it wasn't a chicken. The ghastly truth emerges from memory: The woman had been holding her baby. She smothered it, in desperation and fear for all their lives.

We cannot hand the nuclear codes to a madman, and our country to a loathsome demagogue–even one who claims a laughably implausible "conversion" to pro-life. But the cause of protecting the unborn has been strangled, the crying baby silenced, as the even greater and more immediate threat prowls outside the bus, locked and loaded.

And thus the odds seem good that the first woman president of the United States–a mother and a grandmother–will, in a repellent irony, enshrine as never before the "right" to silence the heartbeats of our most vulnerable brothers and sisters in the womb. Without remorse, without restriction, and–if she gets her dream–with our tax dollars to subsidize the heartbreak for the neediest women, who need real alternatives, not death for their children.

Ultra-blue-state New York, you will have done my dirty work for me. But if I lived in North Carolina or Florida, I'd do it. I'd vote for the "lesser of two evils"; I could even parlay it into a cheering welcome to the cool kids' table among my liberal friends. And I'd try to remember casting a ballot for the candidate who was just okay with killing chickens.

Bath, England, 2010 Photo by Brenda L. Becker

You're broken down and tired
Of living life on a merry-go-round
And you can't find the fighter

I've done my years as a caregiver--I know just where to reach for the brakes on a wheelchair, the safety belt in the back of an ambulance. I have "hacks" for full assisted transfers, bed shampoos, bedsore prevention. I've said a thousand versions of this, in nursing homes, ICUs, my mother's bedroom: 

But I see it in you so we gonna walk it out
And move mountains
We gonna walk it out
And move mountains

But now, in a heart-aching rush, so many people I love have been called upon to move mountains.

My beloved cousin, an irrepressible paraplegic, just marked a year since he fell from his wheelchair, sustaining a fresh injury that will not heal. His beautiful wife, an effervescent woman with a core of steel, manages his overwhelming medical and logistical needs (with help from their grown daughters) while never losing sight of the man she loves--a doctor, a gentleman farmer, an advocate for the disabled. This year, when he finally returned to their Michigan home, they created a new garden he could see from his window.

And I'll rise up
I'll rise like the day
I'll rise up
I'll rise unafraid

My old friend and colleague, a creative and brilliant medical writer, is on an epic journey with his wife, a mother and artist, as they battle her breast cancer together. With her fury and courage, and his agile mind and deep clinical knowledge, they continue to navigate through a labyrinth of oncologists, tests, treatments, seeking hope, and most of all, seeking compassion.

All we need, all we need is hope
And for that we have each other
And for that we have each other 

My two dear friends from church, who finally married when the law recognized their longtime love, now hold one another's hands in the coronary care unit of a Brooklyn hospital. They are adorable--a Tall Guy and a Short Guy, both theater-world veterans and devout Catholics. It was years ago, watching Tall Guy push Short Guy's wheelchair home from church, that I truly recognized the sacramentality of marriage beyond its traditional bounds--"an outward sign signifying God's grace." Now Tall Guy strokes his husband's silver hair when the pain and fear grow too much. "What do you see?" Short Guy asked him this week, terror in his eyes--the terror of vanishing, a look I know all too well. "I see the person I love," his love replied.

When the silence isn't quiet
And it feels like it's getting hard to breathe
And I know you feel like dying
But I promise we'll take the world to its feet
And move mountains

And now, my BFF, my best friend forever. Her love, too, is at her bedside night and day. Working the system. Making the nurse come faster. Adjusting the pillows and covers, the piece of the world she currently rules. Strategizing for discharge, rolling with the punches, and hoping for hope. Leaning over and seeing the person he loves, assuring her she is not, as she fears, disappearing from anything resembling the life she has known.

I'll rise up
In spite of the ache
I'll rise up
And I'll do it a thousand times again

And there we have the genius of this song. Whether the songwriters knew it or not, with this lyric they reach in and recognize the heart and soul of the caregiver journey.

The ache. In spite of the ache. A thousand times again. Where does it come from, that rising, every day? What refills the well a thousand times? It isn't just a well, if you're lucky, or blessed. It is a spring. A wellspring, for the well and the sick. It rises not from one of you but from both. Love dissolves your boundaries. You go past the place where the chattering advice absurdly says "Take time for yourself. Get a massage. Have a manicure. Relax over a special cup of coffee. Put the oxygen mask on yourself first, ha ha."

We once had a crazy old pastor--seriously, mad as a bat out of hell--who wagged a finger and told the congregation, "There are no coffee breaks on the Cross."

The caregiver journey goes past the Oprah-esque, treat-yourself-to-a-cappuccino stage at some point right to the foot of the Cross. "Me before you" or "you before me" ceases to be an issue; they are what Richard Rohr calls "false dualities." Things can actually seem lighter then, in a way. Light enough to rise.

I'll rise up
I'll rise unafraid
I'll rise up
And I'll do it a thousand times again
For you

"Rise Up" Written by Cassandra Monique Batie, Jennifer Decilveo • Copyright © BMG Rights Management US, LLC