<\/p>\n
So far, their hopes and ours had not been realized.\u00a0 Nothing had worked, but Bob was still determined to keep trying every possible avenue.\u00a0 He even talked about flying to Mexico to visit a shaman I\u2019d once mentioned, semi-facetiously, which was somehow when I realized we would not be coming back from this downhill slide we were on.\u00a0 He was such a brilliant and analytical thinker.\u00a0 For some people, the mention of such a far out option might have been a sign they were opening to more possibilities in the universe.\u00a0 When Bob brought it up, I looked at his gray face and knew he was grasping at straws.<\/p>\n We didn\u2019t speak of the hopelessness that had descended on us.\u00a0 We just kept going through the medical motions.\u00a0 So I was sitting at his side, reading a book I\u2019d lifted, more or less randomly, from our bookcase, just because it was small enough to fit in my purse.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t one of mine, but something Bob must have picked up along the way, a thin, small volume titled Ten Bulls<\/i>.<\/p>\n Zen and The Ten Bulls<\/a><\/p>\n It was a Zen concept.\u00a0 The ten bulls represent the stages of enlightenment, the process of mastering our own rampaging minds.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t a Zen Buddhist, but I could recognize the stages: the search for the bull, yep, been there.\u00a0 Discovering the footprints, then perceiving the bull?\u00a0 That, too, I could identify with.<\/p>\n The next couple of stages were catching the bull and taming him.\u00a0 Well, there you are.\u00a0 If I could look at the first few steps and feel like I had made some progress, when it came to these steps, they expressed exactly what I was wrestling with.\u00a0 My own bull seemed to be constantly either just out of reach or trampling me with gleeful abandon, while I lay there, exhausted, helpless, confused.<\/p>\n And yet, through it all, I kept getting these inklings of just how miraculous it was that I could perceive a bull in my life at all.\u00a0 About the same odds as spotting Sasquatch, only with more potential as a long-term companion.<\/p>\n As to what came after that, the next stages were:\u00a0 riding the bull home, transcending the bull, then transcending both the bull and the Self, reaching the Source, and, finally, going back into the world, transformed.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t begin to imagine those steps.\u00a0 From where I sat, it all sounded as alien as life on Mars.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t like nothing was going on inside.\u00a0 I got random hits of insight and even that irrational experience of love that comes on suddenly and for no reason at all.\u00a0 I studied karma and knew I was up to my ass in it.\u00a0 And even though I knew I was not in any way graceful or serene or wise about, well, anything, I knew I had no choice but to keep slogging through the challenges of my life, knew that eventually, eventually, I would see a light at the end of this tunnel.<\/p>\n I remembered people I\u2019d come across in Colorado, the ones who always walked around giving off a kind of \u201coh, like wow, man\u201d vibe.<\/p>\n That wasn\u2019t me.\u00a0 I was in the depths, holding it together on the outside \u2013 barely \u2013 while on the inside, I was fighting for my life with all the darker angels.\u00a0 I sat in waiting rooms, I waited in pharmacy lines, all the while wrestling with all kinds of mental and emotional bulls and their related bullshit, getting just enough glimpses, just often enough, to remind me there really was something higher I was working toward.\u00a0 I could no more stop grasping for it than I could walk away from the burdens in my life.<\/p>\n Frustrated, I put the book aside and pulled out my own laptop, trying to shift my focus back onto work.\u00a0 Yes, I was still working. \u00a0I didn\u2019t really want to admit it, but at that point, work was a much more effective means of distracting my attention from Bob, or Mom, than my spiritual practice often was.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t realize then that it was all part of the same picture.<\/p>\n From the very onset of his illness, Bob insisted I shouldn\u2019t give up my job, though I don\u2019t think he really had any idea how much time and energy I was spending on everyone else.\u00a0 NOW very nicely agreed to sponsor me to do a blog, and Bob, in between doctor visits, re-did the whole NOW website, including my page.\u00a0 He bought me the latest laptop.<\/p>\n And, in spite of the craziness of my personal life, or possibly as the one source of escape from it I could justify, I got more and more drawn into the political scene.\u00a0 Granted, it was mostly as an outside observer, reporter and commentator.\u00a0 After decades of progress, the culture suddenly seemed to be sliding backward on women\u2019s rights, abortion rights, health care, all of it.\u00a0 The wing nuts and their ilk were getting louder and better funded, somehow getting the rhetorical leap on any issue, turning and twisting the facts or simply denying or creating facts at their own whim.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the kind of research I was good at.\u00a0 I\u2019d had a lot of experience.\u00a0 And now, even while spending hours on end sitting in doctors\u2019 waiting rooms, sitting in surgical waiting rooms, I worked.\u00a0 Sitting with Mom in her new private care room, I watched her slipping away, as she alternated between a child-like sweetness and a new and vicious anger there was no countering.\u00a0 I watched, and plied my electronic trade; worked my contacts, surfed the obscure corners of the web, tracking the lies and the innuendos, and reporting what I found.<\/p>\n I was a ghost on-line.\u00a0 I was a ghost in real life.<\/p>\n It became clear to me that there was one locus of all this in particular: Lester Worsham, a radio talk show host I\u2019d always written off as simply another blow-hard.\u00a0 But once I started doing my obsessive cyber investigating, once I started tracking the subtle shifts over time, I started seeing the coordination of efforts across different organizations, the PACs springing up, the money trail, the shell companies and the straw men.\u00a0 Worsham came up again and again.<\/p>\n I\u2019d grab a bit of information and write about it.\u00a0 At first, I went under his radar \u2013 I\u2019m sure he dismissed NOW as beneath his contempt.\u00a0 But gradually, I realized he was getting uncomfortable with me.\u00a0 He needled NOW more, without referring to me specifically.\u00a0 He constantly discredited us, along with every other women\u2019s advocacy group around.\u00a0 He called us sluts and whores on the air.\u00a0 He belittled women everywhere, painting females as hysterical, untrustworthy.\u00a0 He himself seemed to have had no success with women.\u00a0 He kept to his own, as far as I could detect.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t only women, it was how he\u2019d played up Wall Street, mocked tax reform and health care, promoted mindless video games, defended the \u201crights\u201d of the people to obesity and heart disease, debunking scientific facts, global warming, at every turn, mocking anyone who used logic and reason to try to inject sanity into the public debate.<\/p>\n He proposed that public schools as a whole concept were obsolete, raving on every day, a kind of Darwinian eagerness to let the unfortunate fall away, die away, get what they deserved, which was to serve as the economic foil for the Powers That Be.\u00a0 It seemed like no matter what came up, he was ahead of it, on top of it.\u00a0 Like he was always one step ahead of everyone else on the planet.<\/p>\n And he seemed to have come out of nowhere.\u00a0 His paper trail was almost impossible to trace.\u00a0 I kept digging.\u00a0 I guess it was a kind of feverish focus that helped distract me from the fact that my beloved husband was dying and my mother no longer knew who I was.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n < previous\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 next ><\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" < previous\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 next > I was sitting beside Bob, who was settled into a recliner, covered with a blanket, while some new medicinal poison dripped through his veins, something the doctors hoped would be more … Continue reading ![\"escape](\"https:\/\/hanilives.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/photo8-150x200.jpg\")
<\/a>I was sitting beside Bob, who was settled into a recliner, covered with a blanket, while some new medicinal poison dripped through his veins, something the doctors hoped would be more lethal than the cancer that was killing him.<\/p>\n