Life After Death

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-future-mourn.html

("This Is Who We Are Now")

This has been a very hard year for me. I lost a cousin, followed in quick succession by my sister and then my mother in law. Three people who had my heart. And when they passed there was within me an immediate overriding sadness.

I was always told that bad happens to us in threes. And with my mother in law's death, it was my hope that this most difficult of periods had passed.

But Tuesday felt once again for me, and I am certain for millions of others, as if death had reached our collective doorstep. That suffocating pain, that hurt that reaches the core of one's being. When the results first became evident I literally could not speak of my feelings, my thoughts. My first communication, by email to those within my orbit, was "no words."

Muhammad Ali after one of his brutal battles with Joe Frazier said "it was the closest thing to death" he had ever experienced. And this election, in how we fear it may do lasting damage to our democracy, harm the existence of our children and our children's children, could more than appropriately find ample meaning in Mr. Ali's statement.

We are, we Democrats, in a period of mourning. But I firmly believe we will be able, as I have with each loss I sustained this year, recover and move forward. There is a light in the distance, a life ahead, different than it was before, but still there. Still important, still giving us reason to hope, to laugh, to do good. To do well.

There is, in the tomorrow's that beckon, life after death.