WHAT NOW?

Almost a year ago, we had to start clearing out my parents’ house, as they were both turning 90, and preparing to move to an independent living facility. It was not a move they wanted to make, but life at home had become unsustainable. In January, we had an estate sale to clear out decades of belongings. It was hard work, but it went pretty well, except for the annoying shoppers who wanted to negotiate the price of fifty-cent items, the middle-aged punks who stole an edger/trimmer, and the Baptist preacher who tried to weave his pitch for eternal life into his cash offer on the Snapper riding mower. 

“It’s $900, huh?”

“Yep.”

“I can get one of my church members to come by with his truck to help me get it home.”

“Okay, great.”

Brief pause. 

“Hey, if you died tonight, do you know where you would spend eternity?”

I thought about saying, “Nope. And neither do you,” but instead I gambled on a longer answer, “Well, my father is a retired Baptist pastor, and I spent 19 years as a professor at a Baptist university up the road in Bolivar.”

He smiled and nodded eagerly, having identified me as one of the brethren. “Ohhh. Ahhh.”

“And all of that has left me with a healthy skepticism and a complicated answer to questions like yours.”

His eyebrows rose, as he shifted his feet and girded his loins for spiritual warfare. 

He raised his finger to continue his Sunday School lesson, but I preempted him, “Having spent my whole life either around church or in the study of political and religious rhetoric, I also know my own mind on the subject. I’m not likely to be easily persuaded. Also, I don’t really want to talk about it.”

I could tell he wanted to keep going. Needed to. After all, he was commissioned to fight a war against principalities and powers, not make friends. I gave him a raised eyebrow that I hoped would say, “I will sell this goddamn mower to someone else, if you keep it up, buddy.” 

He got the message and seemed to retreat to our original buyer-seller relationship, instead of the midwifery he was ready to lay down on my soon-to-be-rebirthed ass.

After everything was sold, the trash was hauled away, and the house was under contract, I had to contend with the stacks of memorabilia I couldn’t bring myself to throw away. I filled storage tubs with scrapbooks, diaries, and bibles. Oh so many bibles. There were letters, keepsakes, documents, and stacks and stacks of pictures. I spent days going through them, haunted with the realization that many of these objects were bookends of history. Once they were gone, the memories and stories they represented would vanish. Forever. 

All of us have hundreds or thousands of tributaries that run through our lives. Some flow together, adding to the weight and significance of who we are in the world, but most are dammed up or dried out over time. The experiences they represent are eventually lost, forgotten by everyone – no evidence they ever happened. As I was going through these things, the historical (in)significance of it all started to terrify me. Every decision to keep or throw away something was a choice to save a memory, or to murder it. 

It was freaking me out. Maybe I was dealing with my own sense of mortality and the fact that all of us will cease to exist one day, and the things that happened to us are impermanent, eventually lost forever. Maybe I was just feeling crushed by the narrative overload.

I kept about 6-8 boxes of stuff that I stored in my garage. I haven’t gone through them again, and it’s likely I won’t. Eventually they’ll end up in my childrens’ homes, or in the trash. For now, they just sit there, like inmates on death row. 

It’s silly, the things we keep in our lives for weird reasons. I’m holding on to these boxes of leftovers, because it seems wrong to toss them, even though they do me no good, and I’m just delaying the inevitable. Those boxes are kind of like some friendships. I’ve collected a lot of them that are no longer meaningful or important to me, but I feel the need to hold on to them. And I don’t know why.

The last week or so I’ve started interrogating my reasons for including people in my life, and my understanding of friendship. What is a friend? I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to that question, we have to decide for ourselves what our criteria are. I’m sure behavioral scientists would poke at me for my superficial analysis, but here’s where I am currently on the topic: A friend is someone with whom you have a satisfying connection – a result of intellectual agreements, common values, emotional experiences, or shared history, for instance. A friend is someone with whom you can be vulnerable, who is safe, honest, and trustworthy. Of course, friendship is a continuum. No one meets all of these standards all the time, and some friendships are stronger than others, but there seems to be a boundary between what makes a friend and what constitutes an acquaintance, not to mention strangers or enemies. 

Family is a related concept; although, there are entanglements that reach deeper and are more complex than friendship. Lineage and proximity matter. If you aren’t feeling particularly friendly with a child, a parent, or a sibling, you might still be bound to them for a variety of reasons, like obligation, or their inability to care for themselves. However, the more distant the relative, the less those ties bind.

I grew up with a cocktail of evangelical theology and Midwest niceness mixing in my brain. I was guided by the belief that I was supposed to love everyone – “in God’s way” – or, I was a bad person.

For several years, I’ve been committed to listening to the political and ideological ideas of others, and being friendly with them, despite our differences. I’ve spent countless hours on social media platforms and in real life, taking people seriously and engaging in conversation with people who hold reprehensible ideas. I even traveled the country for over a year, seeking out perspectives other than my own. I have only cut people out of my life or blocked them on the socials in cases of their extremely aggressive rhetoric. 

I’m done accommodating. 

My “friends” and “family” who voted for Trump, and his fascist, vulgar, felonious, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic agenda have crossed the Rubicon. They are either sadists who know what they’re doing and take joy in the pain of others, or they’re willfully ignorant in a way that has moved from good faith mistake to bad faith malice. There’s no coming back from this, and I have no room in my life for them anymore. They officially endorsed the most dehumanizing figure in modern public life. I’m doing this on behalf of the people I love who are most likely to be harmed by him and his lawless agenda. I’m not storing “friends” like keepsakes in the Rubbermaid tubs of my life anymore. You’ve shown me who you are, and I believe you. Now, I’m showing you the door.

This is a big deal for me. I have actively worked to avoid this for years, believing every relationship could be salvaged if we tried hard enough. I don’t believe that anymore. And, holding on to that belief has become unhealthy for me – toxins that do me nothing but harm. 

Persuasion is dead, and rhetoric is hopeless…at least across the divides. We can still disagree constructively within our communities, but the big things that separate us will likely remain, until great evil or tragedy wakes us up.

I recognize that everyone’s situation is unique. I do not recommend anyone else follow my example. You have to look at your own lives, with all their complexities and nuances, and make your own decisions. I am privileged. I don’t have employers or co-workers to speak of. I’m retired, so none of my relationships have control over my financial well-being. And, none of my close family members voted for Trump. I recognize your life might be far more complicated than mine. We all have to take care of ourselves first.

At the moment I am reeling, moving in and out of focus. I can’t promise I’ll be a consistently helpful presence along the way. But, this is where I’m at today. I hope to take on more topics as we move through the madness. 

Hold on to your people. They’re all you have.