Following Orders

 I have been thinking about the sailors and pilots carrying out the orders of Operation Southern Spear.

I was a staff sergeant in the Air Force. I know something about military discipline and I know how difficult it is to refuse an order from a superior. The whole institution is built around obedience, trust and the chain of command. Refusing an order is not without consequences and it is not something service members take lightly or their superiors for that matter.

But there is another principle that is just as important: service members are required to obey lawful orders, not illegal ones. In fact, military law requires them to refuse a manifestly unlawful order.

That principle is not new. After World War II, Nuremberg established that “I was only following orders” is not, by itself, a defense for criminal conduct. That principle has been incorporated into modern military law.

In my opinion, Operation Southern Spear is illegal.

If these killings are determined to have been unlawful extrajudicial killings, responsibility does not stop with the people who gave the orders. But neither does it mean that every young pilot or sailor who carried it out is equally guilty.

Responsibility follows the chain of command.

The President and Secretary of Defense who establish the policy bear the greatest responsibility. So do the senior generals and admirals who carry it out. I believe their decisions should be investigated and if criminal conduct is established, prosecuted and adjudicated in an appropriate court.

There is another thing that troubles me. Trump and Hegseth are putting our own sailors, pilots and officers in a terrible moral position. They are asking people who have sworn to uphold the law to carry out orders that may themselves be unlawful. They are compromising the very people who have entrusted their lives to the military and asking them to choose between obedience to their commanders and obedience to their oath.

That is a disservice to the military and to the patriotism of the people who serve. I am sure there are people in uniform thinking seriously about this. What a terrible burden to place on them.

Below the senior commanders are the officers and enlisted personnel who actually carry out the orders. I have sympathy for them. I have worn the uniform. I know how powerful the obligation to obey can be. Refusing a superior in a military organization is a test of courage and character that I can’t say I would have had the courage to pass.    

But sympathy does not mean that nothing happened.

If these were unlawful orders, the military should acknowledge that those who carried them out failed in their responsibility to refuse them. Their participation should be recorded in their service records and considered in evaluating them for promotion, particularly to positions of command and responsibility.

We do not need a purge of the military; we need a reckoning.

After a serious safety crisis, the military stops, investigates and determines how to keep it from happening again. Operation Southern Spear deserves that same kind of examination: the oath, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the law of armed conflict and the responsibility of every service member to refuse a manifestly unlawful order.

I know that would be a hard thing to do.  

That is precisely why the lesson has to be unmistakable.

Following orders is not a defense.

The people at the top who create an unlawful policy must be held responsible. But the principle has to reach all the way down the chain of command.

Otherwise the next unlawful order will be that much easier to give.

Will it happen again?  It has happened once. 

US Military Complicit In Crimes Against Humanity

On August 24, the United States military struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific and killed the two people aboard. It was not an isolated incident. According to U.S. Southern Command, the campaign had by then killed at least 223 people in 67 strikes against boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Operation Southern Spear.  Brown University's Costs of War project says Southern Spear has cost at least $4.7 billion through March 31.

I am seventy-nine years old and I have lived through enough American history to know that our government has done terrible things before. What is happening now is different.  There is no reasonable argument to be made that these actions are  not war crimes or crimes against humanity.  I have seen some questionable decisions in the past, but I have never seen military commanders order their pilots and sailors to execute what is so obviously a crime. 

The administration says the boats are carrying drugs and the people aboard are members of cartels or “narco-terrorist” organizations. Perhaps some are. Drug smuggling is a crime, and people who engage in it should be arrested and prosecuted.

But the United States knows how to do that.

The Coast Guard regularly intercepts suspected smuggling vessels in international waters, disables them when necessary, boards them, seizes the drugs and arrests the people aboard. In June, for example, the Coast Guard reported three interdictions in the eastern Pacific that produced roughly 7,720 pounds of cocaine and 4,000 pounds of marijuana, with the vessels boarded and the crews apprehended. In January, another interdiction north of Puerto Rico seized more than 1,100 pounds of cocaine and arrested three men.

That is law enforcement.

Southern Spear is something different. The military approaches small vessels and destroys them, killing the people aboard. They are civilians, maybe criminals, though no proof has been shown.  There is no arrest, no courtroom and no opportunity to surrender.

And the available evidence raises questions about who some of these people actually were.

In December 2025, a burned-out boat from one of the strikes washed ashore on Colombia's Guajira Peninsula. Two bodies were recovered. Most of the packets found among the wreckage were empty; several contained traces of what appeared to be marijuana. Colombian experts told the New York Times that marijuana and cocaine smuggling in the region is often conducted by small, community-based operations rather than large cartels. One researcher described people who might carry marijuana one day, cocaine another day, and fish another.

That does not make them innocent. If the occupants of that boat were criminals, at best they were petty criminals. 

A fisherman or a small-time smuggler is still a civilian.  He is not part of an armed conflict. There is little difference between Trump and Hegseth and Bukele of El Salvador or Duterte of the Philippines, who is now imprisoned in the Hague awaiting trial for his crimes.  This is state sponsored vigilanteism ordered by the President of the United States.  A crime does not automatically become an act of war because the government gives it a military name.

The part that bothers me the most is that Trump has ordered military officers to be complicit in committing crimes, crimes prohibited by their military oath and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  In press conferences Hegseth and Trump present their crimes like snuff films.   

The New York Times has also reported on Ecuadorian fishermen who described attacks by English-speaking men wearing U.S. flag insignia. One fishing vessel disappeared with eight of its ten crew members still missing. The Times found evidence consistent with U.S. surveillance of the boats, although it could not establish who carried out the attacks.

I have no doubt that Americans were involved. Whether they were acting for the CIA, the Defense Department or the DEA.  I can’t prove it but it’s pretty obvious.  If we had a Congress I would demand they open an investigation.  Who are these people?  And who's paying them?   

For most of my lifetime, the United States has argued that there are laws governing war and rules protecting civilians and prisoners. We have violated those principles before. The Bush administration's torture program and indefinite detention after September 11 were enormous breaches of American law and international norms. The Obama administration's drone campaign raised grave questions about civilian casualties and targeted killings outside conventional battlefields.

These previous events make it more important than ever to acknowledge it now and take action.  We are further down the road to being a pariah state than ever before. 

Legal specialists cited by the Times have argued that these strikes amount to extrajudicial killings because the military may not deliberately kill civilians, including suspected criminals, who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Perhaps the administration has a legal theory that will persuade the courts or historians.

But I look at the pictures of small boats exploding in the Caribbean and Pacific, and I see something much simpler.

The United States and its military are using the language of war to justify killing people accused of crimes, without arrest, trial or any opportunity to surrender. Whatever legal theory is offered, I believe the killings are wrong.

I am witnessing it. I am recording it. I object. 

And I will vote.

Let the Machines Do the Work

At the North Oakland Senior Center the other day, a group of us fell into the very common conversation about AI.  A couple of us actually use it.  We like it; we're cautious but optimistic.  Most of the other Seniors were uneasy.  They worried about jobs disappearing, about machines replacing human contact, about a world where you press buttons and never reach a person, where machines make decisions affecting our lives.  

The anxiety wasn’t abstract. It was personal, children, grandchildren, the future. AI is not the first time we’ve had fears like these. When television arrived in our homes, when calculators appeared in classrooms, when computers entered offices, when cellphones became universal, people said the same thing.  This will ruin us. Children wouldn’t be able to think. We won’t be able to concentrate. People today will lose basic skills. Our minds will turn to mush or worse yet our children’s minds. 

AI is different in one important way. It isn’t replacing muscle or just making an existing task faster. It is beginning to do routine brain work; work that required clerks and procedural work by professionals: entering information, sorting it, finding it, organizing it, producing reports. It can write routine documents, compare information, and interpret it. The changes won’t stop at the bottom. They are already reaching into the cubicles of lawyers, accountants, the examining rooms of doctors, and the work of radiologists, any job that requires routine analysis. 

During my transition from banker to Park Ranger I got to work as a temp in Morrison and Foerster’s mail room.  On my mail rounds I passed cell like offices of associates who spent their days cutting and pasting boilerplate language for briefs and contracts. It reminded me of medieval copyists. Much of that work is already automated. AI will finish the job once it is made foolproof from fictional citations.We have been using technology for centuries to do more work with less labor. Computers eliminated filing cabinets and much of the clerical work force. Every time we make jobs more productive, we create the possibility of having more of what we need with less work.

The question isn't whether AI will eliminate certain kinds of work.  It will.  The question is what we do with our time and the increase in productivity after those jobs are gone.  When we buy a dishwasher do we complain about the time we no longer spend washing dishes.  No, we use that time to do things we enjoy; watch TV, read a book, do macrame or maybe more time at our job.  

For a number of decades now it doesn’t seem like we’ve been using that saved time to live better.  We’ve been using it to produce more, consume more, work more, and make more money for those of us with the new skills required. We were once told that technological progress would give us leisure. Instead, we found ways to make more products working harder and longer. 

AI today gives us an opportunity to make that choice again.  To revisit the question we haven’t really addressed adequately.  What to do with our new productivity?

Where machines can handle more of the basic work of feeding, clothing, housing and organizing schedules, increasing productivity by doing more work with less labor, we create more profit from the same amount of human effort. We can spend that increased wealth on doing other things. It is a remarkable opportunity. If it takes less actual work to provide the things we need, we have more time and resources for things that machines cannot give us: caring for elders, teaching children, restoring wetlands, maintaining public spaces and parks, supporting communities, cooking, making things with our hands, making art, writing poems, welcoming strangers, comforting someone who is frightened.

Some years ago I got to be an EMT in a State Park.  When there was a road accident, I showed up.  The first thing I did was tell the patient “You’re going to be alright,” and then I gave them what first aid I could and got them ready to go the hospital. Then we waited for the distant ambulance to arrive.  Sometimes I would hold their hand or put my hand on their shoulder. Today AI can assess the situation, recommend treatment, come up with a plan, and alert an ambulance.  But AI can’t put it’s hand on someone’s shoulder or hold someone’s hand. 

The promise of AI should be to free us from work that machines do better, not to eliminate humans but to redirect our efforts to things that only humans can do.

The movie industry is especially anxious about AI, perhaps because AI can already produce the same formulaic, explosion‑heavy content that studios churn out. But that only proves the point: AI threatens the mechanical parts of creativity, not the human ones. The great films, the ones with real imagination, aren’t formulaic, and they aren’t threatened. AI can clear away the tedium, but it won’t replace inspiration.

The gains from increased productivity aren’t shared.  If AI eliminates 10 jobs that used to be required, the savings seem to go to the few, the owners, instead of the people making the sacrifice.  AI can be used to make life better for everyone.

It’s a political decision. I come from a long line of wage laborers. I’m not opposed to private enterprise. Ownership and markets drive innovation and make economies more efficient. But productivity should strengthen the Commonwealth, not just the ownership class. If the gains from technology are concentrated at the top while everyone else is told to work harder to keep up, we have used innovation to make a few people extraordinarily wealthy rather than to improve the quality of life for all of us.

We can imagine something better.

The Commonwealth is more than the economy. It is the quality of the life we share. If technology gives us more productive capacity and more time, we can choose to live better rather than simply produce more.  

Yes, I’m idealistic. But if we don’t have ideals, what do we have?

AI is here and more is coming. We cannot stop it, and I don’t think we should want to. The question is who is in charge of what happens next?  Corporations? Investors?  Or the voters.

Productivity should serve life. Innovation should raise the floor for everyone. If machines can do more of the work required to sustain us, then the measure of progress should not be how much harder we work. It should be how much better we can make life for all of us. 

 

 

This essay was written with AI assistance. Editing is like sanding. I used an electric sander to get there and then finished it by hand.

The Mojave Rock, a Buddha of Deep Time

On a road trip to Boulder City near Las Vegas, I stopped just past Baker looking for a place to nap, maybe stay overnight. I drove ¾ of a mile off the highway around a bend where there were no cars, no buildings and just a valley surrounded by hills, a deep bowl in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I love the Mojave.

The next morning as I looked around, there were volcanic buttes and outcroppings, alluvial black and red soil, washes and a few scrub trees. I was on a flattened and cleared area, where people had stopped for decades, to camp, drink beer, shoot guns, whatever people do in the desert. I walked around looking at the ground and seeing plants I’d never seen, an ant nest, the debris of previous visitors. To the side was a dry rivulet, a path where water runs when a rare storm passes.  Sitting in the middle of the cleared space away from the wash was a white and gray crystalline rock with green veins in it. All around it were red and black rocks and outcrops, the stuff of volcanoes, but here was a half buried, crystalline, igneous granite rock formed deep in the earth and different from anything in sight.

I picked it up to look at it.  Millions of years in formation, it was not rounded or a polished stone, not shaped by water or tumbling, not softened by an intermittent stream. It looked as if it had dropped out of the sky to this spot. It was angular, fractured, and rough. It had flat faces from ancient faults, jagged edges from recent fractures, and surfaces textured by desert weathering. It was not a cobble, not a river stone, it was an old rock, newly arrived from somewhere, a piece of the Earth that had never been touched by human intention until that moment. Like me it felt like a visitor in an ancient landscape.    

Of course, another story could be that someone collected it somewhere else in the valley and then decided it was not worth taking home and discarded it where I found it. 

This rock is now part of my personal mandala.  It is different from the other forms on my shelf, Shakyamuni, Guadalupe, Francis of Assisi, and Shiva the Hindu embodiment of transformation. These were shaped by human hands, carved, cast or molded to represent stories and traditions, expressions of devotion and imagination. To me they have meaning and power. But the Mojave rock is something else entirely. It is a manifestation of the Buddha that predates humanity, predates religion, predates culture, predates even the continents as we know them. It is the Buddha of deep time.

To hold this rock is to hold stardust. Every atom in it, silicon, oxygen, iron, calcium, was forged in ancient stars, scattered in supernovae, gathered into the early solar nebula, and drawn by gravity into forming the Earth nearly 5 billion years ago. Before it was granite, it was cosmic dust drifting in the darkness. Before it was a rock, it was part of the Earth’s inner chemistry. Its journey to the desert floor began billions of years before the Buddha Shakyamuni taught his fellow monks in Deer Park, before Mary appeared in Mexico, before Francis preached in Italy. 

Between 90 and 70 million years ago, this interior stardust had melted into magma deep beneath what would one day become the Mojave Desert. As the magma cooled, crystals formed, quartz, feldspar, biotite, each emerging from the molten mixture as conditions allowed. This was the rock’s first form, its first arising, its first suchness. It was not yet a rock you could hold, but it was becoming itself. To me crystallization is awakening: form emerging from formlessness, structure arising from potential.

As millions of years passed, the granite solidified completely. It became part of a vast batholith, a massive body of intrusive igneous rock buried miles underground. It was whole, unbroken, untouched. Then tectonic forces lifted it, fractured it, exposed it. Volcanic eruptions covered parts of it. Lakes and alluvial basins buried it and then revealed it. Hydrothermal fluids seeped into its cracks, depositing epidote and quartz, altering its chemistry, writing new stories into its veins. Weathering broke it into fragments. Freeze-thaw cycles cracked it further. Desert heat and cooling expanded and contracted it. Wind and time softened its exposed surfaces.

Eventually, a flash flood, decades ago or even centuries, carried this fragment downslope. Not far, but far enough to rest among volcanic debris where no granite outcrop was visible. It was moved quickly, violently, not tumbled and polished in a stream. It remained angular, raw, unrounded. It waited there, on the slope. On May 27, 2026 I walked by and saw it, an entity apart, a separate manifestation of the oneness that is the universe. It felt like a meeting arranged by time itself.

My karma met the rock’s karma. My life, my walking, my need for quiet, my curiosity, my attraction to the desert intersected the billions-year journey of the rock. I picked it up. I carried it home. I placed it on my shelf in Oakland, among representations of the Buddha as I understand the One.

But the rock is different. It is not a symbol of the Buddha. It is not a representation. It is not a crafted form. It is the Buddha in its own right, a manifestation of impermanence, interdependence, and suchness that has not been human-shaped. It is the dharma in mineral form. It is the teaching that does not require a story. It is Francis’ kinship with all beings extended to geology. It is Siddhartha’s insight into impermanence written in crystal and fracture.

The rock teaches without words. It shows that form arises from conditions, that nothing is permanent, that everything is interbeing, a part of the whole, interconnected. I see the Buddha not limited to human form or human stories. The Buddha is stardust, magma, crystal, fracture, weathering, movement, presence. The Buddha is the Earth itself.

One day, someone will take my rock from its shelf. They may throw it out. They may place it somewhere else. It may become part of the soil in Oakland or Mexico City. It may be buried, broken, dissolved, uplifted, melted, and returned to stardust. Its journey will continue long after my life has ended. It will be part of the Earth’s story for millions of years to come. Its future is as open as its past is vast.

This rock is a powerful manifestation on my shelf because it is not a symbol; it is reality. It is the Buddha, one with the universe itself. It is the dharma written in deep time. It is the truth of impermanence made visible. It is a reminder that awakening is not limited to human beings. It is, like everything we experience, Buddha nature.

President Donald J. Trump

March 25, 2026

This week the United States is at war with Iran. The President, Donald J. Trump, actively directing this war is a television celebrity who does not read books, long reports, or anything of real substance. He is listening to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Our allies and most Americans oppose the conflict. Gas prices are rising, unemployment is climbing, and the markets are tumbling. Money and munitions are being spent at an unsustainable rate. More importantly, thousands of Iranians and Lebanese are dying in US and Israeli bombing attacks.

Trump is a transactional man with a short memory. His information sources are tabloids, television, his friends, and social media. As a television celebrity he was promoted as a dynamic business genius, but in reality he risked and lost millions, family money, bank loans, and investor funds. He declared bankruptcy six times. He bankrupted a casino and is known for failing to pay contractors.

Before winning his first election, he claimed to be a billionaire. He was underwater. His only real financial success is as a television star. His business empire depended heavily on outside financing, including loans from Deutsche Bank. Even after he had defaulted and sued them the bank extended him a line of credit of $800 million. Deutsche Bank is known to be Putin’s bank and has repeatedly faced investigations and fines for money laundering and questionable practices.

Trump is a self‑promoter with a talent for manipulation and an instinctive feral genius for bullying people. He defeated a weak Republican primary field in 2016. To his own surprise he was elected President of the United States. The Republicans used the moment to push through tax cuts and deregulation. They built a conventional Republican administration around him that kept him in check while he made himself the center of attention. Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society reshaped the Supreme Court into a conservative majority.

How Trump became President will be studied for generations. It is part of the American Story, rooted in contradictions that go back to the founding of the Republic. Trump was the wrong man showing up at the wrong time with the exact talents to seize the moment. He wasn’t a fluke, and he wasn’t inevitable, and he wasn’t a surprise. America has been wrestling with these contradictions since the Civil War, and in 2016 we lost our footing. In 2024, the pattern deepened. The pandemic, media ecosystems, unresolved historical wounds, populism, foreign interference, all played a role. Trump is not the illness; he is the most obvious symptom.

And the future? I don’t know. Will this be the start of things worse or the beginning of a new America. Has America lost its way? Or will we learn from this and confront the deep issues that have kept us from our ideals? And beyond Trump, will we rise to the challenge of climate change, the most important existential threat to humanity since people first stood upright?

I am nearly 80 years old. Even if I live another fifteen years, I doubt our current political turmoil will be resolved. It may take decades, even generations, for Americans to regain their footing and become a positive force in the world again. It is painful to reach this age and live in an America where a narcissist wields executive power like a king, where children are in cages, masked police roam our cities, a devastating war rages in the Middle East, and the economy stumbles under misdirection, corruption, and half-baked ideas. Today America is an obstacle to progress rather than the leader we thought we were.

In my life I have tried to be an informed and active citizen. I have not done everything I could but I have tried. I have contributed. I take responsibility for supporting efforts that seemed right at the time but contributed to this moment. I tried to make the world better. It was not enough. I hope that the readers of this, especially my great‑grandchildren, will see a future that is brighter and more hopeful. I am still working toward that future, still participating, even if I am uncertain of the results. I am not optimistic. I am not pessimistic. I do not know. But I wish you well, and I hope, if not my generation then yours.

Ellen

Ellen was born on August 29, 1940, less than 7 months after my parents were married. We always celebrated Ellen’s birthday on October 31. The story I heard from Joan is Ellen learned the truth when at nineteen she joined the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and she had to produce a birth certificate.

She was six years older than I was, a tomboy and the senior partner in “Ellen and Joan.” Growing up, we didn’t have much of a relationship. Joan and Ellen were in a different world, older, already the “big kids” by the time I started school. Ellen taught me how to ride a bicycle and once hoisting me up on her feet doing acrobatics, I fell and broke my arm. She was my big sister but far removed.

At school Ellen was the star and Joan was a year behind her. In 1955 she went on to high school across the street at Bellarmine Jefferson. At 16 Ellen learned to drive. She got a summer job at Local Loan downtown. She drove whenever she could. She was a driver from then on, willing to drive wherever and whenever she could.

She and Joan were involved in a youth group under Father Coffield in Boyle Heights, where she was part of an activist community organization. There were good things and bad things about the Church in those days. I think Ellen’s social activism began then. Coffield’s name was on the list of predator priests released in 2000.

In 1959 Ellen entered the BVMs; their Motherhouse was in Dubuque, Iowa. She returned home for a visit after the first year. She and another new nun in her class stayed in a convent nearby. They split time between families, us in Burbank and the Coughlins in Glassell Park. That visit set the pattern between Ellen and our mother. My mother treated her as a kind of saint and was desperate to tell Ellen how much she loved her and to hold her close, jealous of any time she wasn’t home. Mom couldn’t let Ellen be herself.

I think Ellen was desperate for our father’s love. There were flashes of affection, but mostly he seemed to act like we were all a burden he had to bear. I think he thought if we hadn’t come along, he would have been the star he should have been. To me it seemed he was never much of father. We had to be quiet when he was home, not to disturb him while he sat in his back room studying and listening to music. I think Ellen particularly suffered trying to please him, to feel the love he seemed to never show.

The summer of 1959 I got to go to Missouri with my mother’s cousin. We went by train and it took 3 days. I stayed with our grandmother in St. Louis. Ellen was on her way to the convent in Dubuque and she stopped by grandma’s house. We traveled together by segregated bus to visit our grandfather in the Ozarks. On the trip we were both shocked by the segregated bathrooms and drinking fountains, Colored and White. From California we thought we came from an open society; it wasn’t. Its racism hid beneath politeness. That trip was an early moment when Ellen and I saw the world together, two young people discovering harsh realities.

Our paths separated. While I went to high school Ellen taught in BVM schools for a time, including Wichita, Kansas, and later in Stockton. Teaching was never her love; she was a community organizer at heart. The BVMs were progressive, and by the late 1960s their habits had softened into simple skirts, white blouses, and comfortable shoes and Ellen was working as a Community Organizer in a Chicago parish.

When I returned from the Air Force in 1971, I visited Ellen in Chicago. I think she had left the nuns by then. She drove us to St. Louis and the Ozarks again, visiting our uncle in his tar paper shack. He was showing us his shotgun and accidentally blew out a window in the kitchen, an incident no one commented on afterwards.

Ellen went to work for Jenner & Block, the law firm that represented the Contract Buyers’ League pro bono. With community groups organized by the parishes they fought predatory lending and red lining in South Chicago and won major victories. She lived for a time in a Lakeside condo in South Chicago, where I stayed during the blizzard of 1978.

Our relationship became strained when my marriage to Cathy failed. In late 1983 Cathy and I were breaking apart and I was newly sober, Ellen and Joan sided with Cathy. For a time I was an outsider to my own sisters.

Ellen was working in Chicago for a few years and then sometime in the 1980s she decided to join a contemplative order of nuns in Iowa. There she met Karen. Karen was having health problems and Ellen took care of her and together they moved to Arizona for Karen’s health. It became apparent they were a couple and so no surprise when they got married in Canada in the 1990s. Karen and I never became good friends but she loved Ellen deeply. They built a life in Arizona, went to community college together and became nurses. They accumulated a modest nest egg, and created a home. Ellen became a hospice nurse and loved the work. Karen was a visiting nurse. In a conversation before their marriage, I asked Ellen if she was a lesbian.  She admitted she was.  I thought it would be good just to say the word, but she never said it again. Their relationship was loving and equal, and it was good for both of them.

Ellen was Ted’s godmother and she took that relationship very seriously. Ellen and Karen helped Ted during his lost years after college in 1995 steering him toward language programs. Ted taught English in Japan and then in Saudi Arabia. After three years Ted came home and met Ellen Clancy in Monterey and Karen and Ellen came to the wedding. They gave them money for their first house. They told me to follow their example and make my intended loan a gift. Ellen and Karen came when Ted received his doctorate at the University of Oregon.

Ellen loved that I became a Park Ranger. Like Hopalong Cassidy I wore a cowboy hat and a gunbelt. Ellen and Karen visited me on Mount Diablo and later on Angel Island. When they came to the island crossing Raccoon Strait at night in a pontoon boat it was a moment of high adventure for Ellen.

After my retirement Ellen and I began to develop a closeness and a friendship we had never quite had. I would call her during my long commute on I-80 to Richmond to pick up Paloma. Those long unhurried conversations became a rhythm of our relationship.  We talked about everything: family, music, books, politics, memories. We became peers, not older sister and younger brother, two adults, brother and sister and friends.

When Ellen and Karen retired they moved from Arizona to Dubuque, Iowa. Karen was from Clinton down the river and for Ellen it was familiar territory near the Mother House of the BVMs and Clarke College where for a short time she and Joan had been students together.

One conversation stands out. A year or two before her seizures began, I casually said that if I had my life to do over, I would have more confidence and take better advantage of opportunities. Ellen said she would be more forceful and effective in serving the community. She wanted to be better at helping people, more focused on making things better for others. I was an ordinary guy with ordinary goals. Joan was a warrior. Ellen was a saint.

When they moved to Iowa, they joined the local Orthodox Church. Ellen found a deep spirituality in Eastern Christianity and the Orthodox traditions. When they joined a few members of the Congregation objected to Ellen and Karen’s membership together in the Church and the resistance had gone to the local Metropolitan. He had welcomed them when they came and when it became an issue later he told the objectors he had made his decision and it was final. God bless the Orthodox Church and its local Metropolitan.

In February 2019 Ellen had a terrible seizure. The diagnosis was Alzheimer’s. Paloma and I came to visit in June. She was still Ellen, I was relieved. She was shakier, less precise, but herself. She still belonged to a book club. She said they were reading Tommy Orange’s There There. It was very hard for her and she was having trouble making sense of it. I told I had read it and that it was hard for me too. Orange’s style is to tell fragmented stories that seem unrelated and confusing. And then he wraps it all up in the end. She was relieved, it wasn’t just her.

Her biggest disappointment seemed to be that she was not going to live into her 90s. She had really wanted to grow very old and 79 plus just wasn’t enough. We had a good time, going out to eat, long drives with Karen and her to show Paloma Wisconsin and a trip to a State Park with waterfalls and caves. The dementia she had wasn’t devastating; she still enjoyed life. Paloma and I enjoyed our time with her and Karen. So in February 2020 we visited again. I wanted to show Paloma Iowa in winter when it wasn’t so beautiful and green. It was cold, but it was beautiful and we had a good time with Ellen and Karen.

Unrelated to Ellen at the time the Covid-19 Pandemic started in China in November, 2019 and by February it had begun to spread worldwide. None of us thought much about it while we were there. At the Chicago airport on our way home a few people were wearing masks, but the Pandemic was far away and people didn’t seem concerned. Our flight was canceled and we stayed overnight in a hotel near the airport. From the airport we stuffed ourselves into a taxi with two other people, one a GI visiting home from Korea. A month later the lockdowns began and March 17 we began our Shelter in Place in California. That first weekend of concern I calculated the incubation time from our Chicago trip. At it passed we were OK.

Ellen began to weaken in the fall of 2021 and in November she had hospice care. I came in November. Laurie, Joan’s daughter came and Ted. Ellen hung on longer than we expected and they had to go home to their jobs and families. Father John came from St. George’s Orthodox Church in Cedar Rapids and did a service for the sick at the foot of Ellen’s bed. For the time the service took, Ellen was quiet and at peace. I stayed on for a few more days keeping vigil with her but she just hung on and finally I had to leave too. I drove to the Chicago airport and Karen called me. Ellen had died.

I miss Ellen. Writing about her brings her back to life a little bit, the girl who taught me to ride a bike, the nun who searched for meaning, the activist, the driver, the sister who struggled for our father’s unreachable love, and the friend she became. I was very fortunate to have both of my sisters. Joan and I were close when she was young; Ellen and I became close in retirement.

We like to believe that how we die will reflect how we lived, that there is some moral symmetry at the end. My experience has been that this is mostly untrue. We have very little control over how we leave the world.

My father died peacefully. He was old, sober, reconciled, and surrounded by his children. He seemed ready. There was no struggle, no unfinished business he felt compelled to resolve. He let go when it was time. It looked orderly, as if dying were the final task of his life.

Ellen’s death was the opposite. She was younger, in terrible physical pain, and seemed unable to rest. Even as her body was failing, something in her would not release its grip on responsibility. Ellen had always been someone who took care of others, who made things okay for everyone else. Near the end, it seemed a compulsion that trapped her.

I believe she could not let go while I was there, and that once I left she died with Karen holding her.

We do not die as we deserve. We die as we are. My father’s gift was peace. Ellen’s burden was love that she could not stop giving. 

Google Jack Duggan

OK I admit it, occasionally I Google myself to see what people might find.  My favorite answer:

When I Googled "Jack Duggan."  

What happened to Jack Duggan?

Duggan died on 19 June 1993 at Toowoomba. His wife had predeceased him in 1984 and his son and daughter survived him. Following a Catholic funeral, he was buried in the Drayton and Toowoomba lawn cemetery. 

Now you know.