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PERSONAL SPACE, PUBLIC TRANSGRESSIONS

Yesterday, while eating breakfast out, I had an experience that many people have had. Someone touched me in public, without my consent, not once but twice. Seated at a two-topper within inches of four people sitting next to me, I was drinking coffee reading something on my phone when a white man next to me touched my arm and asked "what did we do before we had those phones?" I was a little put-off at this uninvited invasion of my space but I remained pleasant, said something politely in response, and returned to my reading. At the end of their meal, as the four stood to leave, this same man touched me on my shoulder and told me to have a nice day. Perhaps this was a benign act for him I thought, just a friendly gesture. I struggled a little asking myself if I was uncomfortable because of some of my touch issues generally, perhaps even some internalized homophobia, or did I have a right be upset with this person. Of course, the answer is the latter. In the interim period, this...
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WE CONTAIN MULTITUDES

  (An occasional post written during my 25 years as a hospice social worker during which time I learned more about living than I did about the end game we all will experience): A patient of mine died last week. It was expected. She was 98 years old and her husband, who visited on the days when their only son could drive him to the nursing home, is 103. Despite the fact that she had been slowly slipping away for several years because of her Alzheimer's disease and no longer knew him he sat for hours at her bedside sometimes holding her hand. More often than not he would nap along with her. They had been married for 81 years and never had been able to save much so he asked for some help paying for her funeral and I was working on finding some funds for him. As I was sharing this story with co-workers one person commented that it's hard to imagine being with one person for 81 years. I suggested that over the span of 81 years she wasn't the same person. Even without cognitive ...
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MAGICAL TALES (for my companion Deborah) At first blush there was her spicy beauty, and a smile from a mouth shaped by frequent laughter. There was the shared anti-racist politics of class struggle with the insistence on queer and women’s rights. But the magic has been in her stories, when she comes alive with the spoken word. Every ordinary back and forth with doctors or friends gets woven into an adventure. It’s often a mystery plot in the audio book she is reading, prefaced to me with the question “do you want me to tell you about it?”. I always answer yes because no matter how hard her day has been she comes alive with the excitement of telling the tale. And I do too. The telling and the listening, both acts of love .
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