War and My Mother

This week I dreamed about my mother. And I dreamed about war.

I am in a car with my mother, running errands. I am driving, and she sits in the passenger seat. She’s young, with a beautiful face and dark, curly hair. As I look at her, I see clearly the ways I look like her.

I always think of my mother around Summer Solstice. She was born on June 22, 1915—110 years ago now—and died on June 20, 1982 of metastatic breast cancer, two days before her 67^th birthday.

When Mom was born, the Great War raged in Europe. Though the United States did not officially enter the war until April, 1917, it provided supplies, raw materials, and funds to Allied countries well before that. The war affected my mother in a direct and terrible way. The influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 spread around the US partly through the movement of soldiers and sailors from one base to another. Influenza was rapidly transmitted through the troops and from them to the civilian population. The outbreak infected soldiers in bases close to Philadelphia, where my mother’s family lived. Ignoring public health advice, Philadelphia city leaders allowed a huge parade, designed to boost morale and raise funds for the war, to proceed in September, 1918. Within days, the epidemic hit Philadelphia hard. My mother’s mother, my grandmother, died in that epidemic at the age of 26, leaving my three-year-old mother and her baby brother motherless.

Three months after my parents married in December, 1943, my father shipped out to Europe to serve as a doctor treating injured troops in World War II. He traveled with the Army’s Third Armored Division across France, Belgium, and Germany. He didn’t return to his new bride until the spring of 1946. My cousin, who knew him before he left and heard the stories about him from family, tells us that although he survived, he was not the same when he returned as when he left. Another war-related loss for my mother. The harm from disease and emotional and psychological trauma caused by war ripples out far beyond the counts of the dead and wounded.

And now we are in another war, this time not to defeat fascism but to allow our aging, addled, avaricious president to boost his own sagging morale and distract from his abject failures to govern, his betrayal of his oath of office, and his attempts to destroy our democracy and create a fascist state.

On June 16, I dreamed that a mattress on the first floor of a friend’s home caught on fire one night. My friend lit a tiny section of the mattress on fire as a spiritual practice, not thinking about how it would spread, and soon the entire bottom surface of the mattress was ablaze. We were terrified that the mattress would fall through the floor to the basement, where there was a full oil tank. If the flames reached the tank, it would explode. We ran out of the house and up a hill, trying to calculate how far force and debris from the explosion would reach. Only later did I think that we should call the fire department and warn the neighbors to evacuate.

I woke up from this dream terrified. What did it mean? I often have dreams that presage events. Were we in danger? As I began to learn more about the Administration’s plans to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities buried deep in bunkers, I realized that this dream might be a warning about war. I hoped and prayed that cooler heads would prevail. But they did not. Today, in the middle of the night in Iran, the bombs dropped.

I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know the best way to fight fascism and warmongering in this country. I only know that I need to do what I can to stop this war, stop the lawlessness and killing here and abroad, and preserve our democracy. My mother’s Irish ancestors knew how to survive and fight a brutal colonial regime. May she and they be with me. May your ancestors be with you as you do the same. And may we all take care of our bodies, minds, souls, families, and communities during this dangerous time. I hold close the image of my mother’s face, her beauty, love, and presence. Last night, between a memorial for a community member who recently died and the terrible news this afternoon, a friend and I went into the old-growth forest in Seattle’s Seward Park and communed with baby barred owls. Owls are natural predators. B-2 stealth planes are not.