Here I lived. Almost. About 40 miles north. In Abiquiu. Where Georgia O’Keeffe visited in the 1920s. Captivated by the rawest of beauty, she never returned to NYC.
In March, I saw a piece in my local paper, The LA Times. Written and photographed by Pulitzer finalists. Why, I thought, is the LA Times writing about Española — a dusty “city” of 10,000, thirty minutes south of Santa Fe? New Mexico?
Then I read it.
Francine Orr, Los Angles Times, 2023, Española Pathways Shelter
I decided to drive south — meet those gritty souls sacrificing to save a city ransacked for decades with generational trauma and infamous for its drug culture.
My heart is there now. I go back and forth. Hop from Orange County to Española.
I work with the shelter. And the schools. The teens. The ones who look into my eyes with disbelief. “Why would you want to come work HERE?”
“It’s a hobo town.”
“Because I want to. You inspire me to be a better person.”
I don’t wear my faith on my sleeve. A couple of times, they’ve asked.
“Are you religious?”
“No, but I follow Jesus.”
Week by week, transformation. I see it— glimmers of hope, recovery, healing.
I want to touch her so badly. It’s Mother’s Day, but I can’t.
People have lauded me for the love I have for my mother, Maria Luiga Zeppetella Martin, or “Louise.” They see the all the photos and videos and terms of endearment that I’ve posted on social media since her massive and unexpected hemorrhagic stroke in the evening on August 21, 2015. I wrote about it here.
But I can’t see her today. And I’d be lying if I denied my urge to run past the security guard, the one who sits outside the entrance — one of those kinds who gets to carry a gun — at her skilled nursing facility, just to see that look of joy on her face.
Then she would caress my face.
Later we would sit, and I’d hold her hand.
When one suddenly dies, or in my case, suffers a mentally debilitating stroke, for the first time ever, you appreciate her as you never have. This is loss, defined. In the case of death, the qualities of the loved one exist only in your mind; in the case of mental impairment, you still get to see and touch and listen, but it’s not the same as before.
Not even close.
I haven’t had a conversation with my mother since her stroke.
In addition to Mom, today I think of the millions who have no mother. Or of those estranged from their mothers because of addiction or mental illness. Children in foster care have lost their mothers, temporarily, and oftentimes, permanently.
I relate with them: grief.
My love for my mom is deep. Inside my body. My chest. Real pain — a somatic reality completely different than the emotional pain.
I want to touch her so badly.
Some have said, “Just think about what an amazing woman she was and all the good memories.”
That doesn’t work with me in times like this.
The thing about Mom was that she wasn’t really amazing in the sense of being one of those super-moms. She didn’t care about my grades, as long as I passed my classes. We never took “Mother-Son” trips or have dates or do any of that stuff.
She didn’t care whether I sat on the bench or played quarterback.
Her expectations were simply: help others, respect people, respect the planet.
But she’d always be there. Wearing whatever team pin or t-shirt. And when I finally got up to bat, I’d hear this distinct faint voice, “Go Paul!” And I’d look and you could see the expression that blended smile and joy and pride – her living and loving me, caught up at that moment.
That same faint voice sang flat at every Sunday at mass, or later at the Protestant services. But she’d sing with all her being. And she meant what she sang. You could just tell.
In every season of my life — when I was succeeding and all those times I was failing — she loved me the same.
Mom is gone. The nurses will let us FaceTime with her, but I won’t. It will only confuse her, and I’m almost certain, in spite of her mental fragility, at least possibly, cause her to wonder why I’ve abandoned her.
If she doesn’t see me, she’s not thinking about me.
I want to touch her so badly.
Three mental realities bring a tinge of solace.
First, I am a lucky man to have a mother like Luigia Maria Zeppetella Martin. I was loved, unconditionally, from the time she bore me, to the day I kissed her and told her I loved her and went on vacation. (She had the stroke while I was on vacation.)
Second, I think of the hundreds of thousands of children in the United States (and millions around the world) that either have no mother or have lost them because of neglect and abuse. I work for those children. I’ve been with hundreds. I’m blessed to have that which I…had.
Third, Mom’s real name is Maria. When she immigrated to the U.S. with her family, she didn’t want to be called “Maria” because back in those days Italians weren’t liked much. So her aunt used her middle name, Luiga, and gave it an American twist: Louise.
But I think of the name Maria. And, growing-up Roman Catholic, I think of the respect they have for Maria, Mary, Jesus’ mother.
Mother Teresa was once asked about why Catholics make such a big deal about Mary. She replied, “No Mary, no Jesus.”
Mom’s name in English would have been Mary.
So no Mary, no Paul. No me. That’s the thing about mothers, without them, we wouldn’t be here.
I would be crying if I was with her. But I won’t be with her.
Her home — that skilled nursing facility — is on lockdown.
I hope this virus goes away so I can go hug mom. That stroke.
I haven’t seen her in a month. I usually sit with her twice a week. But I had a two-week work trip. Then I was stranded in DC thinking I had the damned Coronavirus. I’m still not sure whether I didn’t. I finally came home on Tuesday.
Mom’s bed is right next to a large French window with shutters. I could show-up and get one of the nurses to put her in her wheelchair. We could sit a few feet apart, separated by glass. I’m afraid it would confuse her more. (I decided after I wrote this to drive and look into her window but not let her see me. At least I’d get to see her on her birthday and feel closer to her.)
Every single time — every single time — I visit her she reaches out and touches and caresses my face and laughs and cries, kind of at the same time. It’s a joyous kind of cry with a hint of sadness if that makes sense. I’m told she responds to me unlike anyone else. I’m not boasting or anything. I’m really not. I just think it’s the only son of an Italian immigrant mother kind of thing.
I didn’t know this for most of my life, but I really was the apple of her eye. This photo was from two years ago. You see what I mean?
I remember those throbbing growing pains around my knees when I was 11 or 12. I’d be moaning late at night because it hurt so badly. She’d come into my room and rub Ben Gay on my legs and bring a hot water bottle and then the pain would subside and I would fall back asleep.
One of the hard parts of being a parent is when your child needs you in the middle of the night and you have to get out of bed – even though you’re super tired.
Every single sports game I played — she’d be there. It wasn’t Dad’s thing to come to my games much. He did come to one flag football game when I was in 6th grade. Then one tackle football game when I was a sophomore and we played against the high school he went to (and dropped out of). He had other strengths.
How she’d care for the destitute. It came naturally to her. She didn’t flout it. It wasn’t some “cause.” She didn’t go to any swanky galas or anything like that. Her unconditional love — not only for me but for countless orphans and poor people — propelled me to my new role as an advocate for children of neglect, abuse, and abandonment.
Without her genuine compassion for those in need — like her mother, my Nonna, who also truly felt the pain of others — I’d be in the business of moneymaking today.
My heart hurts today.
But hurt isn’t damage.
We all need to know this in this time of Coronavirus.
Inconvenience. Pain. Damage. They are not the same.
Inconvenience. Too many are whining because they have to stay home and watch Netflix. But nobody here is starving. No bombs are traumatizing our children in the way Nazi bombs traumatized Mom and her family in Umbria in the early 1940s. Trauma as a child, damages the human brain, forever.
This Coronavirus is entirely inconvenient. But for the overwhelming 99.9% of our population, it’s a mere inconvenience. Yes, people are scared. And fear has the capacity to bring pain. That’s legit, but it’s still nothing like living in London during WWII.
Pain. Today this virus causes me pain. Emotional pain. Sadness. I can’t hug and caress and listen to Pavarotti and eat Trader Joe’s fig bars with mom — the one who brought me into this world and loved me, without condition — and it causes me pain.
We don’t like inconvenience. We don’t like pain.
And I’m fairly sure that we are all pretty spoiled here in the richest country in the history of the world — that we can’t even cope with either of them very well.
Some believe pain makes us stronger, which is why we push our bodies and push our minds and meditate and go to 12 step groups.
The Marines say that pain is weakness leaving your body. I’m not sure I disagree. All the good biographies are about people who experienced great pain and adversity and overcame odds, not about those wimpy kinds of folks.
Damage. I work with children who are victims — young children — of patent neglect, abuse, abandonment. Children who are locked in closets and thrown against the wall and whipped with bicycle chains. That causes damage. Trauma causes damage.
Damage sticks with you, forever in most cases. It etches literal lines into the carbon of your brain. Damage is due to a physical state of affairs. Literally you have to think of a car after a collision. Damaged.
Aristotle said that the youth are steered by the rudders of pain and pleasure. We crave pleasure; pain, we resist. We can’t help it.
But we can acknowledge the fact that social isolation (when you are well fed and warm and with your loved ones in the comfort of your home) is not going to kill anyone. It’s not even going to hurt anyone.
Mom understood pain. Those who grow up poor understand pain. Those who immigrate from war-torn countries understand pain. The over five million Syrian refugees freezing in the desert would trade places with you and me in a second, even with our Coronavirus situation. They wouldn’t give a rip about the stock market.
Life expectancy in Afghanistan is just over 50 years of age today.
Approximately 15,000 Americans die each year from gun violence. That doesn’t include suicides, just homicides.
Pol Pot oversaw the deaths of an estimated one to two million people from starvation, overwork or execution.
Just over 100 people in the U.S. have died from COVID_19.
I am stuck in DC maybe with Coronavirus. I am not afraid of Coronavirus — not one bit.
Funny thing. I met yesterday here at The Department of Health and Human Services. We met regarding how the organization I run should respond given our extensive national and international work, with children.
While I was sitting in the Hubert Humphrey building, taking notes, asking questions, developing a communication plan, I started to sniffle. A few minutes later, a dry cough. A few hours later, in my hotel room, my body temperature seemed a bit off.
Slept nine hours without waking-up once — rare for me. Had bad dreams, too. One was about our pet German Shepherd. We actually don’t own a German Shepherd, we own a Maltese/poodle mix. I used to raise German Shepherds. Anyway, people today want to call mutts fancy names these days, like Maltipoo. I don’t go for it; Luna is a mutt. Plus, maltypooh just kind of sounds off.
Back to the dream. The German Shepherd ran away. We searched and searched. We found him at a park. Some big bald hairy guy wearing overalls was holding her above his head, running toward me, then body slammed our dog to the ground and killed her.
So there was that.
I was to fly home at 5:14 this afternoon. I spoke to Gina for a while. I read and re-read CDC’s website. Please, if you are going to read anything about the Coronavirus, read this, even though some swear by wacky conspiracies from emails or random websites.
I decided to stay in DC for (at least) another day. Airlines are working with potential carriers of the virus, so the flight change was just fifty bucks.
In my room now. I have a beautiful view this trip. The cherry blossoms in DC captivate me. I took a photo of them on Sunday, during a run, and posted on Instagram. I took this photo with my Leica just now.
Outside, it’s in the mid-sixties. I have the patio door open. There’s a gentle breeze.
I’ve been away from home for 11 days.
It used to be that when I was stuck in a city I really couldn’t get any work done. You probably remember. Now with Slack and Zoom and email, there’s just about anything you can get done from a hotel room.
Bree attends Columbia Medical School. They just shut the school down, and she might come home for a few weeks, or longer.
Avery (my stepdaughter) is doing a semester in London, via Pepperdine University. All those are being sent home immediately.
If one decides to look at history, and the way most of the world lives — today — this anxiety of Coronavirus is indicative not of a health crisis. The anxiety is a symptom of a society addicted to data and certainty, and focused on pathology.
I’m not in any way saying we shouldn’t take precautions. We should read what the CDC says, and WHO, daily. Again, I’m staying in DC, as a precaution. I am instructing our staff and tens of thousands of our volunteers, around the world, to educate themselves.
But let’s get serious — hundreds of people in lines a mile long buying a year’s worth of toilet paper at Costo? I am not afraid of Coronavirus — not one bit.
There are so many kinds of anxiety. Or fear. One, of course, is death. Another is of being embarrassed, publicly. I wrote about that horror here.
I will close with a quote from a man who changed my life over ten years ago. I’m serious, he did. His name is Edwin Friedman. He was a Jewish rabbi who died in 1996. He was a counselor to corporations, presidents, families.
Consider his words. Let me say it again, in light of the Coronavirus crisis, consider Friedman’s words. And stay informed.
I will remain stuck in DC maybe with Coronavirus. And we will all be fine.
“Chronic anxiety is systemic; it is deeper and more embracing than community nervousness. Rather than something that resides within the psyche of each one, it is something that can envelop, if not actually connect, people. It is a regressive emotional process that is quite different from the more familiar, acute anxiety we experience over specific concerns. Its expression is not dependent on time or events, even though specific happenings could seem to trigger it, and it has a way of reinforcing its own momentum. Chronic anxiety might be compared to the volatile atmosphere of a room filled with gas fumes, where any sparking incident could set off a conflagration and where people would then blame the person who struck the match rather trying to disperse the fumes. The issues over which chronically anxious systems become concerned, therefore, are more likely to be the focus of their anxiety rather than its cause.”
Last week I trudged through Terminal C at Dallas Fort Worth airport. Our plane broke down. We were headed to DC. We sat in a 95-degree airplane on the tarmac, for three hours. They returned us to the gate. I rushed to see if I could grab another flight; I had an important meeting on Friday morning. The lady at the gate — head down, typing — mumbled, “Go to American Airlines Customer Service at C25.”
I am rushing to C25. I’m zig-zagging through hundreds of other stranded travelers. I looked up and I saw this woman, crying. Not just kinda crying — like, crying. I first noticed her when she was about 15 feet in front of me, walking in my direction. She had dishwater blonde hair. Shoulder length. Wearing a black blouse, she looked to be in her 40’s.
I got that “I wonder what’s wrong?” thought in my head. You start feeling sad inside; it always happens when you see a person crying in public. If a baby is crying it can agitate you. But when an adult cries, you just immediately feel for them. You know what I’m talking about.
It would have been completely awkward to ask her what’s wrong. Especially given that we are all rushing around a hot airport. We were all going somewhere. It’s not like she was alone on a park bench or something. Even then, it would still be weird for a 54-year-old man to interrupt some woman, crying alone on a park bench. But not as weird as it would be in a crowded airport, while she’s rushing to get somewhere.
After I passed the crying lady, and while I was feeling that “I wonder what’s wrong?” feeling, I thought about this yoga class I took a few years ago. At my studio, after class ends, you lie in savasana. You are instructed to be quiet. You are instructed to lie still for a least a few minutes. (I always stay longer than anyone else, for at least 10 minutes, because when else do you ever get to lie on your back in a public place in total silence without people think you are a freak, unless you are at the park or the beach or something?) First I heard just sniffles. Then you could hear really soft crying. Then, that sound of someone holding back tears — it’s kind of a gasping holding your breath sound. Deep breaths. Clandestinely, I peered out of the corner of my right eye. I saw her. She was on her knees, in an upright position, facing the front mirror. I watched the whole thing. Then, she started this slow, pathetic sob. I don’t mean that she was pathetic; I just mean that deep sobs are such a sad sound that it can leave you feeling pathetically hopeless. Especially if you’re in the same room alone with heartbroken woman, but you are a 50-something male and it would be awkward to interrupt and try to help.
I passed the crying lady in the Dallas airport, and then I just prayed a little prayer for her.
Physicalists would like to reduce crying to a physiological state of affairs, in the same way they do with pain. “No such thing as pain” — there is only the firing of c-fibers. To the physicalist, everything reduces to the physical: only atoms exist.
But crying and pain must be more than mere physical activity. Maybe physicalists want to reduce all human emotion to physics because they are afraid (another phenomenon they reduce to physics lol) of the powerful reality of human emotions.
We all feel sadness. We all feel pain. So, sometimes, we cry. That subjective experience of ours — itself — cannot be explained, scientifically. You can’t view the experience of feeling sadness under a microscope.
My flight to DC was canceled. I arrived the next day. Took 27 hours to get from LA to DC. I missed my Friday morning meeting. I went for a run. I ended up standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
And I cried.
I cried because he stood for truth and justice. I cried because our nation today doesn’t seem like it stands for truth and justice.
I’ve been told that I seem aloof or hard on the inside. But I’m a crier. My mom was a crier. Her father was a crier.
My father seems hard on the inside. He is a crier.
I don’t know why crying should be embarrassing.
You don’t really ever see men crying in public. You really don’t really ever see men cry at all.
