I can't look at the stars

All those times we looked up at the sky
Looking out so far, we felt like we could fly
And now I'm all alone in the dark of night
The moon is shining, but I can't see the light

~ "Stars" by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

 * * * * *

I pray for the strength to accept
that lives most often end in tragedy,
that quests don’t always work,
that understanding is a long and lonely hunt,
that I can't reason my way to love,
eat gold,
or live forever,
And that none of this matters.

I pray to understand that I am here to find my way back to
God, whatever that takes, and all the rest save love and duty is
an illusion.

~ John Taylor Gatto, educator and author, New York
From the book, Prayers For A Thousand Years

Let me say right off the bat that this still-newish year of 2025 has been, so far, very rough for me. It has not been the fresh beginning that most of us are indoctrinated to believe, or at least to hope, nascent years should be. To the contrary, 2025 has been a continuation of the utter suckfest that was 2024. For me it has been a double whammy not of fresh beginnings but of sad endings.

First there has been my ongoing experience, shared by millions of others, of being witness to the accelerating demise of American democracy, which contrary to the Washington Post slogan is not dying in darkness, but is being hacked to death bit by bit in broad daylight. And on a much more personal level, I am dealing with the death of my soul mate, my best friend, and the love of my life, Ron Kaye.

Ron, also known as Reverend Ron, Rev Ron, or simply The Rev (on his own blog and on this one in its earlier days), passed peacefully on Monday night, February 24, 2025, a little before 11:00 PM. He and I had been together for going on 32 years.

I am, to put it mildly, devastated.

Ron had been struggling with Lewy body dementia, which while perhaps not quite as well known as Alzheimer's, is far from rare. The late actor and comedian Robin Williams was also a sufferer of LBD.

The disease was a total nightmare for both Ron and me because he suffered from hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia in addition to the cognitive and functional issues more commonly associated with dementia, such as memory loss and a significant decline in skills. The hallucinations and delusions and paranoia increasingly caused erratic behavior that at first was merely disruptive in dozens of different ways, but later became frightening, violent, and dangerous. It came to the point where it was no longer safe for him to live at home with me.

Accordingly, for the last few months of his life, Ron was in the locked memory care unit at a nursing home, through arrangements made by the VA, under whose care he had been. Despite his deteriorating cognition, he remained surprisingly healthy physically, and he was constantly trying to find ways to escape his confinement.

But in more recent weeks he developed serious medical problems that he'd not had before, and he was in and out of hospitals. Some of the problems he faced towards the end were a sudden and very puzzling loss of his ability to walk, serious heart rhythm issues, and life-threatening respiratory problems brought on by a combination of pulmonary blood clots and pneumonia.

It became more and more apparent that he was not coming back from this, so during his last hospitalization I signed him up for hospice care. That was on Saturday, February 22, and that evening he was discharged back to the nursing home, where he died two nights later.

Despite repeated efforts to get to his bedside on that last day, I was not with my love when he passed. I have no transportation and very little money, and my edge-of-nowhere location, which is more than 80 miles away from the nursing home, seriously limits my rideshare choices. The two taxi services available out here charge at least 50 percent more than Uber or Lyft.

I had been taking Uber with few problems, but on Ron's last day, a series of glitches prevented me from doing so. First there were no drivers available. I tried a little later and a driver was available, but my payment wouldn't go through. After repeated efforts I finally contacted my bank, and they said my card had been temporarily frozen because there had been a series of Uber-related frauds and they were erring on the side of safety and security. I assured them that this transaction was legit, got them to unfreeze everything, and then went back to trying to secure a ride. But once again, no drivers were available. I tried over and over and over and over throughout the day and into the evening, with no luck.

In case you're wondering why I didn't try Lyft, it's because the phone app is not compatible with my older model phone, and unlike Uber, Lyft does not offer a web alternative.

I was frustrated and anxious, because I knew Ron didn't have much time left. I felt an urgent need to be with him at the end, even if he didn't know I was there. So I kept on trying. Then at about 11:30 PM, I got a call from the nursing home. He was gone.

I felt terrible for not being there with him, and I expressed my regret to the kind and caring nursing home staff member, as well as to the hospice nurse a little later. Each one suggested in her own way that my inability to get there was actually a gift to me. The nursing home staff member said that perhaps a higher power had intervened, knowing that I might be too devastated by being in the room with him when he passed. The hospice nurse, though choosing her words carefully, was a little more graphic about the reasons that I might not have wanted to be there.

And later on, a few of Ron's and my close friends said that it was possible Ron himself did not want me to watch him die, and that maybe he somehow had something to do with the glitches that kept me from doing so. I did remember him saying to me, in another context back when he was in the VA hospital in November of last year, "I don't want you to see me die." So I don't know.

What I do know is that my world will never be the same. Right now if feels as if I will never be happy again.

* * * * *

Ron was a kind and gentle and brilliant person, until the brutal disease snatched almost all of that away from him. Even towards the end, however, up until the point that he would no longer open his eyes, I could look into their depths and see that he was still in there, somewhere. But it was also painfully clear that he knew, at some deep level, how trapped he was in his dysfunctional brain and increasingly malfunctioning body.

I was in despair, knowing that he knew, and knowing also that despite his problems he could possibly linger on for years, with his brain continuing to deteriorate. What kind of existence could that possibly be? Just thinking about it was horrifying. So it was not lost on me, nor on the other people who love him the most, that the numerous medical crises that hurried his passing were in their own way a blessing.

It seems forever ago that I wrote this blog post about Ron back in 2009, in observance of Veterans Day. It barely scratched the surface of the kind and gentle and considerate and brave man he was. In due time, I will have more, much more to write about him and about this sorrowful road we stumbled down together until we reached the inevitable pass that he had to go through alone. I have plans to start a separate blog or a Substack, not only with the narrative of our own journey, but also with information and links that I hope can help others who are facing the same ordeal. I will link to it when it's launched.

For the time being, though, I am alternately numb and deeply weary and overcome with grief, which comes in waves. I let the waves wash over me as I hold on to something sturdy and then continue trudging through the hours and days, knowing that there is a way past grief, eventually, but that, like so many things in life, the only way past it is through it.

I would be remiss were I not to acknowledge the people who have helped and are continuing to help me through my grief: Ron's beautiful daughter; close friends who have been Ron's and my family of choice; and many other friends whom we only knew from social media. I love all of you.

Then of course there is the team of providers who recognized what an essentially lonely journey this is and did everything they could to make it a little easier: the kind and compassionate doctors, physician's assistants, nurses, nurse practitioners, technicians, sitters, aids, and social workers at the DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston; the staff at the nursing home; and the hospice care providers, the latter of whom I only knew for a few days but whose professionalism and kindness helped make Ron's passing easier for both him and me. These people all deal with tragic stories every day of their professional lives, and yet they act in the knowledge that every story is different, and that the individuals living through that story are more than just names and numbers in a file.

There will come a time, I know, when I will be able to walk out at night and look up at the stars again without being overcome by the vast and terrible sadness of Ron's absence, and without the inevitable flood of "where-are-you" questions. Or when I can bear to simply watch one of Ron's and my favorite movies, and there are quite a few that we viewed so many times together over the years that we practically knew the whole script by heart. And maybe there will even be a time when I can get through a whole day and night without crying. But I'm not there yet.

For now, I need rest, so much rest. There's too much to deal with in this new life without him, from emotional issues to scary financial ones. With lots of help, I think I'll be able to handle them.

But I miss you, Ronnie Kaye.

Related on this Whirled:

• For those who have served (November 11, 2009): I'm linking again here to my tribute to Ron, written on a long-ago Veterans Day. He was always a little embarrassed by this post, and it wasn't false modesty; he just didn't like people making a big fuss over him. From my perspective, however, I didn't make enough of a fuss over him.
• Veterans Day: Those who have served will be ill-served by Trump and Project 2025 (and/or Elon & Vivek's austerity cartel (November 11, 2024): Vivek is long gone, but E(vil)on is still out there running wild and slashing and burning, and Trump and the Trumpublicans are going right along with it. Ron no longer has to worry about this, but I fear for the millions of veterans whose care will either be seriously compromised, or cut altogether, if the wrecking crew has its way.
• Election Day musings: overall the US is actually better off than it was 4 years ago, but it will be much WORSE off if 45 becomes 47 (November 5, 2024): By the time I published this, I was pretty sure that 45 would indeed become 47, but I thought there still might be a smidgen of hope left. In this post, I recap a conversation I had with a small group of veterans on a VA shuttle bus. They were all in for Trump. I will probably never see these gentlemen again, and in any case I would never tell them, "I told you so," because I didn't actually tell them so (they'd already early-voted for Trump). But I fear for them now.

Before you leave...
While money cannot make some personal nightmares go away, it can make them far easier to bear. With Ron's passing, I will be facing significant income loss and am scrambling to find more work, but in an industry increasingly being taken over by AI, it has been a challenge. Now more than ever, donations are urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to do it:

• New: Venmo -- username @Connie-Schmidt-42. Here is a direct link to the Venmo page.
• New: PayPal -- Here is a direct link to my PayPal page.
• Old but still good: You can click on the "Donate" icon that currently appears on the right-hand side of every page of this blog on the Web version. There's also a donation link at the end of many of my older blog posts. In the case of both the icon and the links on the older posts, as well as the link in this sentence, this is also a PayPal link, but it references the email account RevRon -- which is cool, because it all ultimately goes to the same place.

NOTE: If you are donating by PayPal, please specify that your contribution is for "friends and family," which will waive PayPal's substantial transaction fee.

Whether you can donate or not, thank you for visiting this Whirled.

Vote. Just vote.

Tomorrow, November 8, is the big day when US voters who haven't voted early make their trek to the polls for the midterm elections. At stake is nothing less than the future of American democracy. I'm nervous to the point of losing sleep about that future, as, I suspect, are millions of other folks, not least among them former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who, in a November 6 opinion piece in The Guardian, wrote:

Today I’m not particularly worried about Republicans’ policy preferences. Today I’m worried about the survival of our democracy.

I’m worried that a majority of Republican candidates are telling voters, without any basis in fact, that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

I’m worried that if elected, many of these Republicans will make it harder to conduct elections in the future, allow or encourage endless audits of election results, and even refuse to sign off on them.

I’m worried that Republicans have been spending millions to recruit partisan poll workers and watchers in the upcoming election, who could disrupt the counting process or raise false claims about it. (Michigan Republican secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo rose to prominence as a Detroit poll watcher who made false claims about election fraud.)

I’m worried that thousands of Trump supporters have been calling their local election offices requesting all kinds of public records, often using suspiciously similar wording, leading officials to believe this is a coordinated effort to prevent them from holding an election.

I’m worried that violent thugs are on the prowl, and that Republican leaders – starting with Trump – have been quietly encouraging them.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that republican policies and platforms aren't concerning. To the contrary, there's plenty to worry about, including but certainly not limited to the republicans' determination to annihilate health care coverage, benefits, and protections for millions of Americans; the reckless and dangerous forced-birth movement that is pushing the country towards an all-out abortion ban; the party's stubborn climate change denialism; and a relentless culture-war mentality that threatens to reverse important and hard-gained civil rights.

But overshadowing all of these issues is the GQP's fundamental threat to democracy.

The new owner of Twitter, Moscow Musk, has a take on the midterms that, to put it mildly, differs from Dr. Reich's and mine. Despite a previous declaration that Twitter should be politically neutral (a tweet for which he was roundly and soundly trolled, mostly for his hypocrisy), today he tweeted that he wants all of you "independent-minded voters" out there to vote for a republican Congress. Why? Well, it's because, according to his expert political analysis, "shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties" -- and since "the Presidency is Democratic," rethuglicans will provide a much-needed balance.

As absurd as Musk's advice is in light of American politix in the age of Trump, it's hardly shocking, and it's certainly nothing new for him. Nikki McCann Ramirez wrote today in a piece for Rolling Stone:

Musk’s overtures to right-wingers are not a new development. He announced that he had voted Republican for the first time earlier this year, tweeting that he had “voted for Mayra Flores – first time I ever voted Republican,” and predicting a “Massive red wave in 2022.” Musk also recently moved from California to Texas, posturing the change as the “last straw” regarding California’s Covid restrictions.

Flores has aligned herself with the QAnon conspiracy theory, and scores of the Republican candidates Musk wants his followers to vote for on Tuesday have peddled lies about the 2020 election. His push to put the party in control of Congress seems to be at odds with his vision for the future of the platform he now owns. “Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world,” he tweeted Sunday night. “That’s our mission.”

Even though Musk has felt compelled to 'splain on Twitter that he is an independent, mind you, and that until recently he always voted Democratic, you have to wonder what took him so long to find his new home, politically speaking. After all, it's the republicans who famously hate regulations and laws that rein in big businesses. It's the repubs whose primary mission is to help billionaires and big corporations avoid paying taxes (which is why Elon picked up his toys and moved to Texas). In addition, repubs overall seem to be pretty tolerant of grifters and scammers (professional courtesy, perhaps?), and they're the party of greed. No doubt about it: Elon and the Red Menace are a match made in purgatory.

Musk or no Musk, the rethuglican party is rapidly becoming the new American Fascist party, fueled by "The Big Lie" about the 2020 election. Here is voting rights expert Marc Elias, writing for the Democracy Docket site in October:

Republican election deniers, vote suppressors, “Big Lie” advocates and their political and legal enablers spread misinformation about elections because they believe that without public confidence, elections are easier to overturn and the results are easier to ignore. Denying the truth about the 2020 election does not just allow past grievances to fester. It lays the groundwork for Republicans to seize power in the future...

...The GOP no longer presents voter suppression and election subversion with a wink and a nod. It enthusiastically embraces these anti-democratic tactics. There are no dog whistles left in the GOP; they have been replaced by blaring sirens of authoritarianism.

No matter which party prevails tomorrow, we're in for a rough ride leading up to, and beyond, 2024. This November 4 piece in the Harvard Gazette -- in which three scholars of government and politics share their views about the future of American politics and democracy -- is worth a read. One of the interviewees, Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol, summed up what many of us are feeling:

We’re in a very serious crisis, in my opinion, the most serious since the coming of the Civil War. The reason for that is there are a lot of levers that, if pulled together and combined with violence and threats of violence, make it possible for minority authoritarians who feel threatened to change the regime — really change the system — in de facto and quasi-legal ways. I point to the fact that a minority of the country — particularly those living outside of metropolitan and more racially and ethnically diverse areas — do feel profoundly threatened by the changes that have occurred in American society. They can obstruct things or even control court appointments through the Senate with a third or less of the American population. Gerrymandering is now an art and, combined with the Republican sweeps of state legislatures in 2010, allows anti-majoritarianism there, and the federal courts have really bowed out of defending any kind of voting rights and access, and, probably worse than that, may be on the verge of strengthening the hand of minority authoritarians. Combine all that with the fact that people are now threatening violence at the local election workers that most Americans take for granted and that most Americans, I think, choose between two parties according to current economic conditions. They don’t perceive the threat, and they won’t perceive it until it’s too late.

That's exactly right. Candidates from both major political parties have been gabbing nonstop about "kitchen table issues," purported to be the matters that voters really care about. Generally these are the issues that affect them directly on a day to day basis, and, yes, they usually are economic issues. It would appear that in this election cycle, the republicans are scoring the most points by pounding their fists on that proverbial kitchen table as they scream about record-breaking inflation and high gas prices and soaring food prices and, for good measure, rising crime and shaky border security. It's all framed in a spurious blame-the-Dems narrative, of course, with inflation and high gas prices being the most popular bogus GQP talking points.

But you want to know what my husband Ron Kaye and I talk about the most at our actual kitchen table? Sure, we're concerned about higher costs, as is nearly everyone we know, but what we talk about the most at our table is the growing threat to democracy in America, courtesy of the GQP's love affair with right-wing authoritarianism (as demonstrated by, among other things, their yuuuge crush on Hungary's Viktor Orban). We're also worried about the global expansion of authoritarianism. And I seriously doubt that we are the only ones who are deeply concerned about these matters, and who feel that President Biden was spot-on in his warnings about MAGApublicans.

Ron and I voted last week -- not that our votes will do a lot of good in our deeply toxic red state of Texas, aka Gilead. Texas, unfortunately, has become a leader in the headlong race to an illiberal dystopia. But we continue to vote anyway, because we still have hopes for the future of our state and the country.

And if you're eligible (and registered), I hope you vote too.