When the time comes, my dog wants to spend the afterlife with me.
It is a sad, difficult issue to think about, at least for me and my dog, Chance. The likelihood of my physical demise gets closer and closer. With another just ahead of me and my physical condition deteriorating, I need to think about “final wishes.”
The priority for me is Chance, who has been through so much with me and who counts on me for everything. Chance, too, is getting up there in years, although I think he is as smart and handsome as ever, the possibilities of adoption for an older dog, a “mutt” no less, is remote. More to the point, as much as Chance is the center of so much of my thinking, he turns to me for everything. I joke that I am just the “food guy,” but in truth when he is scared or worried or just wants company he comes to me. Even when other people are around, I am the one he counts on to protect and love him.
Chance is also the one that I turn to for love and kindness. He sleeps with me and sometimes when my demons are too frightening and the pills will not let me rest, I hold onto his paw and stroke his face until I fall asleep.
I also know that no one will care for me if I get seriously ill and take care of Chance, too. They will separate us — me in a hospital or SNF and Chance in a shelter waiting to die alone. I won’t let that happen.
As odd as this sounds Chance and I had this discussion one night, and in a clear voice he told me that if I died he would not want to be left behind. He wants to go with me. He does not want to have his life put in the hands of strangers who will not understand him, who might not revere his soul and heart as I do. He wants us to go quietly into that good night together.
Now I feel it is my duty, when the moment comes — and it could weeks, months, even longer — to have a plan for both of us. I want to die looking into his eyes and for him to see me looking at him with all the love and adoration that one creature can have for another.
I will figure it out. Of all the things I have fucked up in life, this will not be one of them.
– Frank
PS I am not allowing comments to this post. I know the killers and the hunters and the meat eaters are out there ready to slaughter with their hate another kind animal with more soul and heart than they will ever have. I also don’t want to hear from the do-gooders — the people who want to pretend we will all live forever and that none of this is necessary. They are living in a fantasy world. I am living in a real world with a real creature that I love and will care for until my very end.
Hillary Clinton’s high school yearbook photos.
Hillary Clinton's High School Yearbook
Friends and foes of Hillary Clinton have a fascination with the young Hillary, in particular her life as a high school student. In a past issue of the Hillary Clinton Quarterly, we ran a great story by Doug Kelley focusing on Hillary’s yearbook. The original story included all of Hillary’s pictures from the yearbook.
To order your own copies of HCQ back issues, including the famous high school yearbook issue, click here.
Here’s what Doug had to write –
Ever since 1965, when Hillary Rodham graduated from a brand-new high school in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois, the school’s first yearbook has provided advance clues about the First Lady. For anyone who scanned the book’s eight appealing photos documenting her trail of tireless activities, it should be no surprise she’s now a White House public affairs activist in the tradition of Eleanor Roosevelt.
After three years in Park Ridge’s “Maine Township East High,” Hillary was redistricted into newly-built Maine South High, for her 1964-65 senior year. During that year her combination of socially-conscious youth activities at First United Methodist Church, earning A’s in a high quality academic program, and the plethora of extra-curricular activities reported here must have produced a weekly schedule as tight as a political campaigner’s. But in the fall of 1964 she also found time to go door-to-door for Barry Goldwater—the last Republican Presidential contender she was to support (followed in 1968 first by Eugene McCarthy and then by Hubert Humphrey).
Turning the pages of the handsome black-and-gold-bound yearbook, entitled Eyrie (meaning the lofty dwelling of a large bird), you find a blonde, confidently smiling Hillary on numerous pages.
Here’s how the press reported the death of health care reform in 1994.
This morning I was trying to find some of my old Christmas cards from the Clinton White House when I stumbled upon this news story in my files. Read it. It is amazing to think how much progress we are making this time around. It is sad, as well, to see how similar the Republican attack strategy is today. A “socialist takeover of the health care system?” If nothing else, Republicans are consistently unimaginative.
What jumped out at me was the last sentence of the story: “Republicans, with no attempt to hide their glee, have been declaring health care dead for weeks. They hope to turn the issue to their advantage in the November congressional elections, where they are expected to pick up a number of Democratic-controlled seats.”
Glee? What’s changed from that cynical, self-serving objective in 1994 except that his time, thankfully, they will be on the losing side of history.
9-27-1994
U.S. senate leader abandons health reform for year
By Joanne Kenen
WASHINGTON (Reuter) – Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell Monday reluctantly abandoned health reform efforts for the year, sounding the death knell for President Clinton’s top domestic priority.
“It is clear that health insurance reform cannot be enacted this year,” Senator Mitchell told a news conference in which he tried to pin the blame unequivocally on die-hard Republican opposition to even modest health care reform.
The House of Representatives gave up any pretense at working on health reform in mid-summer. Both Democratic-controlled chambers are due to recess early next month without sending any health bill to Clinton.
The president had vowed to veto any health care bill that fell short of his campaign pledge to provide health insurance that could never be taken away to every single American. He never got close to that goal.
About 39 million Americans lack health insurance, a situation unparalleled in other industrialized democracies. The ranks of the uninsured are forecast to keep rising, but it will not be easy for Congress to make another concerted push for comprehensive reform after coming up empty-handed this year, many lawmakers and their staffs say.
Clinton unveiled his sweeping proposed overhaul of the American health care system just over a year ago.
But Republicans tore into the plan as tantamount to a socialist takeover of the health care system, and said it would bankrupt the country. Even many Democrats thought Clinton was aiming too high, and found the plan too bureaucratic and costly.
The public, subjected to a $100 million barrage of lobbying and advertising aimed in large part at killing comprehensive health reform, got more and more confused and apprehensive.
Clinton said he was willing to let Congress reshape the plan, and Congressional panels and the Democratic leadership in Congress began doing precisely that. But even though health reform got whittled down, and numerous alternative versions were offered, lawmakers never found a formula that could pass.
Mitchell had been expected to declare an end to health care efforts last week. But he opted for one final round of consultations with colleagues on the prospects on passing even a minor bill that could be a cornerstone for future legislation. Monday, he acknowledged there was no point in going on.
“We all agreed it would serve no purpose to go forward unless we had the necessary votes,” said the Maine Democrat, who had badly wanted a health bill before retiring this year.
Last week, the Republican leaders of the House and Senate said aloud what their colleagues had been saying privately; They will oppose any health care bill this year, modest or not, bipartisan or not.
Referring to Republicans’ ability to filibuster any bill, a stalling tactic that they have used with increasing frequency, Mitchell added, “Even though Republicans are a minority in Congress, in the Senate, they’re a minority with a veto. They have the ability to block legislation and they have chosen to do so on health care reform,” he said.
Republicans, with no attempt to hide their glee, have been declaring health care dead for weeks. They hope to turn the issue to their advantage in the November congressional elections, where they are expected to pick up a number of Democratic-controlled seats.
