FIGHT LIKE A GLADIATOR!

 

 

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

It was late July of 1991. I steered my car into an open parking space near the front door of the funeral home, and then stepped out into the balmy Columbus night. As I approached the sprawling building, I saw my parents standing side by side at the edge of the half-moon court that opened onto the entrance. They were turned toward the parking lot, perhaps because they saw my car, or maybe because they were reluctant to face the situation that awaited them inside the place. We were there for the memorial of my father’s older brother—my father’s favorite brother. Upon their retirement three years before, my parents had relocated to Hawthorne, a little town in northcentral Florida. It had been several months since I had seen them, for the reason that both my mother and I had been ill and unable to travel. My father was largely unchanged. But my mother was almost unrecognizable. In all my 46 years, my mother was tall, erect, and put together in her appealingly unpolished way. This person appeared a half foot shorter, undone, and convex, as if the upper portion of her body were curled in on itself, as if to protect itself from an evil force. My heart sank to my toes. I knew intuitively that my mother was dying. Two weeks later, the diagnosis confirmed it.

            My mother was settling in to her retirement so beautifully—living in her Florida paradise for which she had worked like a dog, for which she had scrimped and saved and sacrificed and planned year after year. She had reined in a life in Ohio that had long been too big for her and the trimmed-down Florida version was so much more manageable and enjoyable. Due to the fact that they were underfoot 24/7, she and my father were finally coming to terms with unspoken issues of their 48 year-marriage. And then came the unspeakable tragedy: just as she had made of herself the person for which she had always striven, had created her best life in important ways, had fought her illness like a gladiator, eleven months after her diagnosis, she died.

            “What an awful mockery death makes of life, of an individual’s significance! Death renders a person’s accomplishments, beliefs, and attachments as transitory, hollow, pointless!” These were the thoughts that flooded my mind. I still have to fight against them, at times.

March 6, 2020, the day I began to quarantine because of coronavirus, set in motion for me a period similar to that slice of time in which my mother faded away—but now, it is my country that faces the threat. If nothing else, coronavirus has brought to light America’s glaring deficiencies, but still, in her best days, America set the standard in the world for greatness, and for a long while she lived up to it—not fully and certainly imperfectly, but she has always struggled for excellence when given a fair chance by her leaders—and/or, when forced into it by arbitrary circumstances. America has earned the opportunity and the right to finish her work, and not to go down in a blaze of horrible mockery of her efforts.

There is an underlying strength and bravery to America of the kind that formed my mother’s core. Actually, it was the other way around. America shaped my mother—the America of the Great Depression; the construction of the Empire State Building and its ilk; World War II; the founding of the United Nations; the Nuremberg trials; the formation of NATO; the Korean Conflict; the Bay of Pigs; the John F. Kennedy assassination; Civil Rights; the Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations; the Moon Landing; the Vietnam War; Women’s Rights, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more, so much more, and so often it was two steps forward and one step back. All of it honed my mother to the ethic of, “Getting up every morning and going to work until she just couldn’t make it anymore.”        

Forces are trying to kill the United States of America. Forces have always tried to kill the United States of America—but she has fought them off. Come together again, my fellow Americans! Come together with me and fight for America like gladiators!©

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase at Amazon.com.