Category Archives: democracy

Signs: 10/18/26

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Two friends of Danny’s got married yesterday. The three of them were roommates for many years. Close friends, in other words. I wondered: would they feel his presence in any way? I wondered what it would’ve been like for Danny to attend (still heartbroken, with Ella there). I wondered what thoughtful, generous gift he might’ve have gotten them, because he was amazing that way.

I also put it out there that I’d love to hear from Danny here, though in Newton it is mostly business as usual. Grief central. Fall activities. A No Kings Protest.

So he showed up. Twice.

First, it was the puzzle piece. Danny has appeared in puzzle pieces before (here and here), so when we finished this month’s puzzle and a piece was missing, I wondered — will he show up? I was prepared to be disappointed.

The nearly complete puzzle sat out for days. I vacuumed the rug underneath the table at least three times, each time scrutinizing the surface for that lone remaining piece and not finding it.

Then yesterday, there it was. Blue side up. Not six inches from the edge of the rug. Plain as day. Huh?

Hello, Dan!

Even if I didn’t subscribe to supernatural influences, I’d be hard pressed to explain how that piece got there. Stuck to the underside of the table and later fell? Stuck to the bottom of a shoe and somehow ended up there? No and no.

Then, early in last evening’s walk, we saw either a young hawk or a falcon directly overhead and quite near. This is unusual. Normally we see them around the corner and up the hill, not here near the house.

Moments ago that raptor flew right into the living room window — not ten feet from where I’m sitting. That has never happened before. Other birds, yes. A hawk? Absolutely not.

Oh my. Dan?

This is the usual hawk territory.

In other news, poor Finn had an anxiety attack in the middle of the night when yet another smoke alarm started chirping its low-battery signal. Chirp. Chirp. Oh, how it frightens him! Typically he pants hard and endures whole body shakes for at least an hour after the noise stops. And it always takes a minute to figure out which device is going off. Fortunately, Ken takes care of removing the battery, otherwise you’d have me swinging at the ceiling with a broom, cursing.

Last night we gave Finn a trazadone. It helped. I might’ve said, I’d rather the house burned down than put him through that again.

Poor guy.

The Newton Center protest wasn’t huge, though it was bigger than usual. What was notable was all the honking. So much honking!

Early October Saturday

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Beauty abides. There is comfort in this.

Weekly protests matter even if small. I sat this one out in the coffee shop across the street.

There a friend and I talked about a journalist named Ryan Hatch and his discovery of Danny’s obituary through a CU alumnae magazine. What a sensitive response! It knocked me down, honestly.

https://ryanhatch.co/company-blog/2026/9/28/about-daniel-potochnik

Some of you have read it already.

One of my main takeaways is this: we do not know what our legacy will be. The fact that Danny’s life, including his love of Stephen King, moved a perfect stranger to such eloquence is amazing to me.

I hope kindness is part of my legacy. I hope my acts of generosity and sharing of insight will offset the impatience and frothing rants that punctuate my days.

Something to think about.

In closing, let me say that the Jack Smith memes on threads almost make the poisonous idiocy of this week’s hearing before the Senate worthwhile. Here are a few.

PS In one of the posts Jetpack spit up in the memory batch yesterday, there was one that referenced Danny calling to tell us (on October 4, seven years ago) that it was snowing hard in Boulder. I will forever miss these kinds of updates.

Bodies and minds

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I just had the worst massage I’ve ever paid money for. This guy used the same somewhat frenetic sweeping gesture on my back, over and over and over. He’d insert a little neck action or a quick rub of my arms and then return to sweeping, sweeping my back. Big circles. Nothing along the spine. No delicious pressure in the lumbar region. Not really relaxing.

And then there was how he sometimes used hot oil, which eventually felt good but was at first too hot and that of course made me tense up every time he went for more oil. At the end, he used a rough, hot towel to wipe my skin, which I actually liked but again it was initially too hot. WTF?

My thoughts didn’t help. I kept hearing in my head: I have a body and Danny does not. I have a body and Danny does not. Over and over the thought went through my mind like the masseuse’s ineffective and boring back sweeps. I have a body and Danny does not. At one point, I wondered about the Reiki session I’d set up for Danny the week before he died. Did he relax? Did she touch him?

On the table today I found it a little hard to breathe because the face hole was lined with a cloth that shrank the opening. My mind wandered. What if my masseuse was sloppy and inattentive because he was attuned to the ether? Any minute, he might ask, “Who’s Danny?” And then he’d tell me my son was near.

Ha! Such are the disordered experiences of bereavement, I guess.

We got a lot of rain last night

I slept like shit last night. Apparently all I had to do was publicize my gratitude for decent sleep to bollocks things up. I was busy, busy, busy telling myself that I’d out and out failed at creating a family, because, well, look!

Ken woke up long enough to tell me that wasn’t true but I stuck with it as if a self-trouncing was the commandment of the wee hours.

Eventually in that wounding perseveration, I remembered Danny’s despair. Suddenly compassion entered the bedroom and bloomed in my chest. This wasn’t about me at all. Danny had not been able to handle how fully life had disappointed him. My poor sweet child could see no path forward. He was sick of trying.

Collection of collages about surrender, the solstice, death, and indigo

Last night I attended some Dem-blue organization’s zoom call because Jamie Raskin was slated to appear. I admire him deeply, but I’ll freely admit that I showed up at least in part because Raskin also lost a son to suicide. His 25 year-old Tommy left behind a note that said: “Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”

Paper collage dble-x’d with Paris Collage prompt

Danny quoted Stephen King: “Monsters are real, ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

Paper collage made in Assisi, 2019

Because I don’t want to end with such darkness, I’ll leave you with a saying of Roberto Frega that Raskin quoted last night: “The solution to the ills of Democracy is more democracy.”

So LFG Maine. A new candidate — now.

Bomb cyclone Feb 2026

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Screens so caked with snow, I had to open the door to see the accumulation.

So far, we have only four or five inches but it’s supposed to snow all day. Today’s plans cancelled, of course.

I left the writing retreat early yesterday and so did two others. They were predicting snow for much later in the day for Amherst and even later than that for Boston, but it was already doing SOMETHING at nine a.m. and anyway I was gonna be too tense to be able to write or listen well. It was the right decision.

What I wrote on Saturday and Sunday morning was disappointing in any case. For instance, the scene I produced yesterday started in Henderson, Kentucky and somehow ended up in West Feliciana, Louisiana. Oops. People didn’t know if the daughter was the mother or the daughter or dead or alive. Ha! This kind of feedback is helpful.

Other off-the-cuff writing didn’t land either. One narrator (um, that would be me) was dubbed “smug.” Yikes.

Listening was the best though. It often is at these things. Many phrases and characters will stay with me for a long time (I’m looking at you, Ronna!)

I drove briefly around the UMass campus on Sunday and there were so many new buildings that I barely recognized the place. Oh, there was the library (I liked a carrel on the 11th floor). There was the art complex (topped with solar panels — yeah!) And there was the ugly concrete Campus Center. There memory held — it was ugly in 1978 and remains ugly today.

Didn’t feel a lick of nostalgia.

Speaking of snow and blizzards and memory and the 70’s, I would’ve been at UMass during the Blizzard of 1978. Hmm. I don’t seem to have much memory of it and let me just say that is as good a descriptor of me back in the day as anything.

As for the tariff decision, I’ve been schooled by Hubbell. Let’s take the win, he says. Marshall got it wrong, he points out. Don’t be so defeatist, etc.

Yes, it could have been worse because in this timeline EVERYTHING can be worse. The SCOTUS could have, for whatever reason, hallucinated all over the relevant statute and invented more (MORE!) broad and sweeping executive powers. They properly read and applied the law. Hoo-hey!

Let me emphatically state that I am thrilled Trump lost on this.