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O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Not surprisingly, what he wrote wasn’t published until twenty years later, after his death. On this Memorial Day, take a moment to consider this aspect of the feeling called patriotism, and ask yourself: can one truly serve both God and country?

H/T to Kevin Drum for a link to this animation of The War Prayer.

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Plato’s Cave

A little over a year ago she was diagnosed with diabetes. We guessed at the time that she’d had it for a while, since, when we put her on “kitty Atkins” (Fancy Feast cat food) and Glipizide (an oral glucose-control medication), she changed from a sedentary cat with tendency towards nasal infections to a much more active and healthy feline, chasing around the house at high speed with Cleo, our other cat.

Then, two days ago, she stopped eating, and her belly felt taut. She’d always been somewhat overweight, but this wasn’t right, and she was obviously uncomfortable, so we took her in to the vet. An x-ray showed an enormous mass of some sort almost filling her abdomen. Since she didn’t have “the look” that cats get when they’re ready to give up, we decided on exploratory surgery (laparoscopic). The vet was astonished at what she found: an enormous malignancy, no trace of her pancreas, one kidney compromised, and metastases everywhere. Her guess was pancreatic cancer, the probable cause of her diabetes. But she had never seen so advanced a tumor in a cat who had been apparently healthy until only days before.

So, as we’d discussed, Ranae never woke up from the anesthesia. We’ll get her ashes in a couple of weeks, to join the other cats in the little kitty cemetery at the side of the house.

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• Why voting is wrong
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It was my father.

I. O, Fortuna

I am both fortunate and unfortunate in being able to say that. Fortunate in that, for much of the rest of the world, the sight of death is likely to come both too early and too often, and certainly not in the relative comfort of a skilled nursing facility, or at home under hospice care, as had been our plan.

Unfortunate in that, as a member of a society devoted to denying age, dying, and death, I really have no place to put the experience—or rather, it will take me a lot longer to encompass the reality than it would had I grown up in a culture where dying is understood as a part of life. I saw this with particular poignancy among the Latino women who served as drop-in caregivers for my father during his sudden, final decline. Many of them had grown up caring for their elderly parents or grandparents, and they evinced a matter-of-fact tenderness and competency that was both reassuring and shaming. If this is what “multiculturalism” brings to our country, I want more of it.

II. The Paths of the Dead

The curtains were drawn about his bed when Deborah and I walked into his room about an hour after his death. One of his roommates was outside in the hall, the other sitting in bed. I half-smiled and nodded at him as he silently indicated his condolences. My father had only been in that room for a day; he had been transferred from a transitional unit when he refused to continue radiation treatments. So I don’t know the man’s story. Is he waiting for death to find him there, or does he hope and expect to go home? What was it like for him to hear that death had visited so close, to wait there until the mortuary came to take away the body?

Another first for me came when I pulled aside the curtain and saw the white-shrouded form upon the bed: a visceral understanding of what the word “uncanny” points to. For just a moment I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it sit up or float into the air. Terrified, of course. But not surprised.

It was hard to draw back the sheet from his face. The woman who called on the phone had said he looked “peaceful.” I suppose so—there were no signs of pain. As a child I was fascinated by the illustration of Jacob Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol, for I didn’t understand why he had that band of cloth under his jaw and over the top of his head. Now I knew, for my father’s gaping mouth opened on the darkness that awaits us all, and his eyes, half-lidded, gazed with milky unsight upon the undiscovered country. As I am, so shall you be. And there was nothing left of the handsome, powerful man I remembered from my childhood.

Chuck Trowbridge with his children, 1956

III. Time Enough for Love

What killed my father was prostate cancer, which metastasized into his spine. While his doctor had no hesitation in prescribing whatever level of opiates was necessary to control his pain (fentanyl patches and hydromorphone), his sudden death was nonetheless a mercy. There was nothing to look forward to except increasing pain, higher doses of opiates, and decreasing awareness of his surrounding. His collapse was quite sudden, from “independent living” to the hospital to death in the skilled nursing facility in about two weeks.

But there was time enough for love. Our relationship had not been good for many years, for he could never acknowledge the damage my mother’s alcoholism did to him, my sister, and me—not, at least, until she died in December of 2006. Then, slowly, faint signs of who he might have been without her—the merchant mariner who gave up the sea he loved when she told him to choose—began to emerge, even though he never stopped loving her. And I had a little time to discover the man I could have loved far more than I did, and understand how much he gave me.

Just four days before he died a memory surfaced, of a song I’d heard years before. I didn’t know the title, only that it was by Mike and the Mechanics. It was, of course, easy to find: The Living Years. I listened, weeping, and two days later finally told my adoptive father what I needed to say, and what he needed to hear:

I learned a lot from you, Dad. I was lucky to have you as a father.

Two days later, he was dead.

Say it loud. Say it clear.

Don’t wait.

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“Moreover, as Jason Zengerle reminds us, Clinton has written two books, both with ghostwriters, one in which she didn’t even credit the ghostwrite in the acknowledgments, which seems like a rather worse sin than Obama grabbing a line from his buddy.

I’ve done more than a little ghostwriting in my career as a professional writer, and I can tell you that’s a complete non-issue, and in no way a “sin.” Ghostwriters exist because many people, perhaps most people, can think better than they can write. The whole point of hiring a ghostwriter is to have a professional put your thoughts into readable prose. He or she is not in it for the credit, but for the money. Yes, it’s nice if you get a mention, but it is not something a professional expects.

And anyway, haven’t we had enough of the “yeah, but the other guy did something worse” style of political argument?

You’re right. Silly question.

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