I knew the night before. I had no doubt. He had turned gray, and was breathing shallowly, but just a few days before he had been sent home by the VA Hospital.
On Saturday, April 8th, 1989, he asked to have his estranged children contacted.
On Sunday, he asked to be baptized.
It didn’t take a genius.
Grandpa was going to die.
So it was left to me, at 12 years-old, to steel myself for what I sensed was coming. But it was coming up on Monday so I had to be at school. But I could not be at school. There was no way I could step from my grandpa’s side in his last moments. So, I prepared a ruse.
I feigned being sick. This is the first and only time I had done this. In fact I considered it only one other time, and that is when I faced death threats for giving a Valentine to a classmate.
Only thing was I was kind of sick. I was nervous and depressed. I was a catatonical kind of sad. I really did not have to feign much. As I discussed previously, this VA openly, or at least without too much regard for what was heard, made it clear that $$ were at stake and they could save some by sending him home.
The problem with that is my grandma was not in a position to spend for his burial. They did not care. People ask me sometimes, “When did I lose trust in society?” The answer was that day. That very day, knowing that this hospital showed no concern, no effort, no respect for a man that risked his life to keep us free from megalomaniacs and win WWII.
I had never seen him so down. I hope to never hear a pronouncement of my own death, because for all intents and purposes, they pronounced him dead, to his face, while still breathing. It is the closest real life example I have ever seen of throwing dirt on someone still writhing. This is what that VA thought he was worth. And there was not a person in that administration fit to make his bed.
One of the reasons I feel so beaten down, is that in the time since then, I have never gained back that ability to trust. When you are constantly keeping your back to the wall, it is hard to connect.
However sometimes, just sometimes, persistence and effort are rewarded gloriously.
And perhaps owing to Democratic administrations, veteran patient satisfaction has risen in the years since then.
Patient satisfaction and care access are on the rise at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), an agency previously under fire for its shortcomings in patient care, according to a new survey from the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).
After years of industry and government scrutiny, the VA has heard some positive feedback from the veterans who utilize its healthcare services. A patient satisfaction survey related to VA care quality, community care access, and the VA MISSION Act showed that the agency might be on the right track to improving veteran healthcare.
But those issues may be working themselves out, as 82 percent of veterans report being at least somewhat satisfied with the healthcare they have received through the agency, the VFW report showed.
Or perhaps it is owed to an audacious then-Senator of color with a “funny name.”
Or the former Secretary of State that lost primarily due to a media obsession with Chelsea’s wedding.
Problems at the facility have caused public outrage and prompted 2008 presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., to offer a bill today that aims to resolve the site's problems.
"That can't be the proper response, silencing and punishing our injured soldiers for trying to get the mold off their walls," Obama said.
Minutes later, rival candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., called for an independent investigation to determine "what senior Army officials knew about the conditions and treatment of patients at Walter Reed and when they knew it" in a letter to the Army inspector general.
The point is good things do happen. We can from time to time make a positive difference when united and actually running a Congress looking out for people. The idea it got better does assuage some pain.
Some.
But not to the 12 year-old boy who held his grandpa’s hand as he lay dying of cancer. You see that kid had been told that “if you play by the rules, if you do the right things” it would work out. This was obivously just one of the loads of snipe meat designed to keep laborers treated like hamsters on a wheel. After you are lied to as a child, it all sounds like propaganda.
You become jaded and detached. You become angry and rebellious.
You don’t much care for songs or flags that represent a false piety but little actual loyalty to those who died for those songs to be sung and flags to be flown.
As you watch the lights fade on the only man who represented a much needed, and beloved father figure to you, as you go from a Lego obsessed Garfield watching 12 year-old, to a cigarette sneaking, black leather jacket wearing teen, seemingly overnight, you perform an act of abandonment of your own.
You disavow phony rhetoric and pointless traditions with the goal of mainting a lock step march, you rebel against what seems like a human meme, the Brylcreemed passive aggressive Super-Suburbo-Dad rock ribbed ignorant Republican who just happened to, for some reason, contribute DNA to one of the most beautiful girls you have ever seen.
You know the type this fella is. A human incarnation of a Reagan meme. The kind of guy who promised the moon but delivered the tide. A man so full of malarkey he would fail a weight scale driving an empty rig.
Well this is what those guys who wrote off my Grandpa looked like. So anytime I see one, I assume there are trying to sell me a sandpaper toothbrush.
During the rise of conservatism in the late 20th, earth 21st century, America became the ultimate used car dealer. No longer selling, or even trying to sell new, every trick in the book was being used to move junker policies. “Runs like new.” “Psst..Hey Buddy, this 1948 Dixiecrat is just right for you! It has anti-progress braking, Jim Crow acceleration, white power steering, and redline tires.”
“Don’t need that much car? Try this 1972 Nixon! It drafts smoothly, has an iron glove compartment, stick up your a— manual transmission and Kent State surround.”
Sadly the car that the electorate let the Republicans sell the VA was a 1980 Reagan. It had all of the above, plus Veteran Wind Noise reduction.
Veterans organizations say they will oppose Reagan administration proposals to charge veterans more money when they buy a home with a VA loan.
Veterans groups also voiced concern that the fiscal 1988 budget President Reagan proposed Monday would scale back VA medical care, with small cuts in employee ranks and numbers of patients treated.
″If they propose that, we’ll meet them in the halls of Congress,″ said Cooper Holt, executive director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Washington. ″I still happen to think we have more friends over there than they do.″
It was a luxury model. It wouldn’t be until 1992 when a brand new car came onto the market, the 1992 Clinton. It came with a 5 star economic safety rating and a more progressive transmission.
But people continue to buy this junk unabated. They continue to repair cars with no policy blue book value and refresh paint jobs with a rusted undercarriage. But so long as the white flighters still have their picket fences, their manicured lawns, and their self-righteous worthless dake patriotism, they will keep licensing them.
It does not matter that real patriotism, the kind my grandpa and so many like him selflessly displayed gets ignored and shelved in priority behind Pinto level quality policy.
No America is a very successful used car lot precisely because they make sure the thing drives just long enough for you to think it is someone else’s fault. “Maybe a Mexican built it. Perhaps a black person designed the grill. You know what I bet? I bet ya a feminist was responsible for the fuel pump!”
America let my grandfather die, and my grandma suffer financial hardship for it, because it lied to itself about what it really cared about. That is the truth. And though cancer would have almost assuredly taken him anyway, it could have at least showed him the respect and honor to allow him to die of it with something other than extra strength Tylenol in a fit of pain and fear. Yeah, for a man that helped save a ship and get her home to San Francisco, it could have sprung for some f----— morphine or some dilaudid.
It seems for most of my life aside from junk policy, the top domestic product is self-delusion.
One thing about growing up fast, you have no ability to fall prey to such cartoonish caricatures of a nation. I saw the truth, I spread the truth, and if one can’t handle it, then they have no idea what patriotism truly is.
I watched grandpa fade, then, waiting for an ambulance, I held his hand as he took his last breath.
Then I wondered if the pain would ever stop.
Over 32 years later-
I still wonder.
-ROC
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-ROC