To the Veterans

Thank you.

I never really thought of my dad as a veteran until he got terminally ill. He was not an easy patient. He refused to accept that he had cancer because he’d been taking some kind of holistic medicine. I visited him every day for the last year of his life. He kept harassing the nurses and would be kicked out of every hospital.

Eventually, he landed in the VA hospice as he lived out the last year of his life. They mostly kept him drugged up and comfortable. One day, he had a moment of clarity and said, “I’m dying, aren’t I.”

I lied. “No, Dad. You’re just in the hospital. You’ll get better.” Did he believe me? I don’t know. In the last days of his life, it felt like a mercy killing. They pumped him so full of drugs he couldn’t harass them anymore. That would kill him within days.

My dad had the kind of life people like me pretended to have while we whined about our childhoods in therapy. His was the real deal. My grandmother didn’t want to be a mother. The eldest of 11, she was tired of raising children and wanted a career. Her marriage lasted only a year and she raised my dad, though she was working and couldn’t raise him.

He was also someone she could not control and was eventually sent off to disciplinary boarding schools where he was severely abused. He was in the biker gangs as a teenager, got mixed up in drugs, and eventually was sent to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, which was later shut down for brutal treatment of the patients. There, he received shock therapy, and he was never really the same after that.

My dad was a jazz drummer, the only thing he was ever known for. Here he was before he got sick.

My dad was not the “dad energy” I needed, but I loved him. He was the one person in my life I knew loved me unconditionally. It’s hard living without him, even if every visit was him zoned out on weed, staring at the TV.

He was there for my daughter when I was a third-generation single mother. He brought us groceries and took my daughter to pony rides and the movies. Here they are at the beach.

The day before he died, we watched It’s a Wonderful Life even though he wasn’t there anymore. I hope somewhere inside the message of the movie landed: no man is a failure who has friends. And he did.

When my dad was sick, his Jazz friends came to play for him in hospice. Here, my dad, looking very, very sick, managed to play on a drum pad.

My dad was a veteran of the Korean War, though he never saw combat. He was given a military send-off with a horn and a salute. I was given his flag, and when they handed it to me, the nurse said, “On behalf of Donald J. Trump, the President of the United States,” and I, being a psycho crazy lady of the Left, burst into hysterical laughter.

My sister and I even got into a screaming match about Bernie vs. Hillary. My best friend had to pull us apart and say, “Not in front of your father’s corpse!” That is what I think about when I think about what it’s like to be on the Left.

My Grand Uncle was a veteran of Pearl Harbor. He was one of the last remaining survivors for a time. I didn’t know how bad it was until I watched From Here to Eternity for the first time a while back. They show actual footage from that day. I can’t imagine how Americans would feel today, fragile as they are, if something like that happened now. They built them stronger back then.

Imagine thinking a riot at the Capitol was anything even remotely close to that, just another of the grand deceptions our leaders have given us.

Today is a day to remember the vets and leave the madness behind. Thank you to all of you who have served or are serving now. You are true American heroes. I offer a crisp salute in gratitude.