On December 1st 1995 my mother died. It was a terrible year for 10th graders at my highschool. The first day of school a tree fell on the father of one of my classmates. He died at the scene. That November it was unseasonably warm. A friend of my mother, and the mother of a classmate, went to clean the part of her porch that wrapped around the house. Her asthma was triggered and they did not find her for half an hour. She was brain dead, but lingered on a respirator for a week.
Three days before my mother died they took my mother's friend off of the respirator and she passed on. It was at her viewing that my mother started to feel the first signs of the heart attack that would kill her. She started to drive herself to the hospital, but her heart didn't last. She careened through a parking lot and crashed into a parked truck. They rushed her to the hospital where she worked as an RN in the orthopedic ward. It was her friends in ER that tried to revive her long after, I am told, it was possible for her to be revived. It was my friend's father that pronounced her dead.
I remember writing in a college essay that there are events in your life that do more than change you. They take the glass of your former sell, smash it, and then leave you to assemble a mosaic in memory of what has passed. No matter how much you search through the wreckage and no matter how faithfully you try to fit the pieces back together there will always be holes and there will always be fragility. The death of a parent at a young age is just such an event. It is a clean break from stability and a scattered, terrible time.
I was fifteen when this all happened, and I was sheltered. I vaguely knew what Social Security was. My grandparents talked about how they had just started to get it. I knew it was a government program and I knew it helped people that I loved. I did not know that it provided for children when their parents died. But I found that out shortly after the funeral.
We were never a wealthy family. In fact I think we were lower middle class at best. My father only had a highschool education but managed to work as plant control operator. He'd gotten the job through sheer tenacity two years after my older brother was born. My mother was an RN, but had only been one for two years by the time she died. She had wanted to be a nurse for a very long time, but Southern realities had prevented her from being able to do so. Her family had been blunt about the fact that she could just get married while her brother would have to have an education to provide for his family. Marriage and children ensued, but she kept the dream alive. When I was in fifth grade she started back to school to get her PCA certificate. The next year she got her LPN license and then sailed through her RN program on an accelerated track.
Nurses in my hometown didn't make a lot, but no one really did. It was more than we had previously, and for a brief period it looked as though we could move up in the world. We had finally gotten boots, it seemed. Now we'd be pulling ourselves up by their straps.
Then her heart burst and ours all broke.
A few days after the funeral--events are still a bit mixed up in my memory--a man came to the house to talk about survivor benefits. My hometown was small and parental death was thankfully rare. It seemed the office was sensitive to these situations and sent an agent out in lieu of having us come in. He came to explain that since my mother was a contributing member of society, the government would be providing her surviving underage child with benefits.
It wasn't extravagant, by any means. I received five hundred dollars a month from that terrible December until the month I graduated in 1998. It helped, though. It meant my dad could go to band competitions instead of working overtime. It meant he could still go see my older brother play football instead of worrying about how he was going to clothe us. It gave us a little stability in an uncertain and painful time.
That is the purpose of Social Security. As FDR's grandson says in the video below, Social Security is a compact between citizens. It is a belief that people should not suffer because they have grown old and can no longer work, or because a parent dies far too soon. Social Security is one of the better angels of our national character because it says that poverty is to be mitigated through the contributions of citizens.
McCain says it is a disagrace. I say it would be a disgrace for such a program to be placed in the hands of a man so foolish. It would also be a disgrace if children who will face the loss of a parent at a young age were left with no government support; if their parents could not grieve with them because they had to work more to make up the loss of income.
Survivor benefits had a very real impact on my quality of life. The program must be continued so that others can be given this small measure of stability, just as I was.