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The Exhausting Quest of the Moving Target
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Inherent Flaws in the System
My mother was a brilliant, loving, indefatigable person. All she wanted was world peace and global prosperity and an end to climate change. No big deal. I joke, but she also did everything in her power to look out for other people even when they hated her. Seriously, there is a woman out there who threatened my mom and was emotionally abusive towards her and would spend hours berating her just because … because. Mom saved her life. There was a moment when this woman who was evil to my mother would have died of mom hadn’t intervened. Mom knew she was a bad person and knew she would never stop trying to hurt others, but recognizing her humanity, mom stepped in and saved her life. And this woman repaid that unpayable debt by continuing to harass, belittle, and abuse my mom until mom passed away at 62 years of age.
Mom gave endlessly of herself and all she wanted was peace. She worked in medical ethics and cared deeply for other people’s health and comfort. She had wanted to be a nurse, but gave it up for my father. She did manage to work her way up the medical ethics ladder from Institutional Review Boards at the local hospital to the Pentagon, but at every turn people who didn’t know her doubted her simply on the basis of…
