Until We Meet Again

Goodbyes and Farewells Just Won't Cut it

Hello friends,

We are heavy hearted and impossibly sodden-eyed as we write this. The news is not good. And it is now obvious to us that the odds were always against it. The doctors and the nurses and the paramedics have all done their best. But at some point, one realizes they just couldn’t crush our hearts while we hoped and prayed for a miracle.

Our mother has struggled her last.

She died Wednesday afternoon, in the company of her youngest son, after tear-filled visits from every member of the family able to be present.

Seeing her reaction as our father entered the room wasn’t worth the terrible price of admission, but it was beautiful. Incredibly beautiful. One could never imagine the eloquence possible in someone so paralyzed. And yet, we witnessed such a thing.

Such a thing.

Somehow, for an instant, it was as if so much of the weight pounding down upon her was lifted. For an instant, she became golden and beautiful. As if she could somehow smile and shine again despite the stroke. Torn, we stepped away to give them privacy. Almost as quickly, we felt a greedy urge to come closer again and eavesdrop. A horrible, desperate and fascinated curiosity. An interior demand to know how these people we’ve looked up to and admired throughout a child’s years and a child’s understandings could possibly face this moment. This horrible departure.

We heard some of his words. And they were good. They belong in a script. And if anyone thinks to doubt what we heard, well, that’s fine.

“Sport,” as he sometimes called her, “We’ve both looked a whole lot better.”

She seemed to somehow smile even wider, even though we couldn’t see her eyes, and her mouth was covered by an oxygen mask, we could see her hand lift to try and comfort him— stroking his hand and arm, and at one point before our vision blurred— we swear, she was reaching for his face.

It was if he were the one in a hospital bed in need of comfort.

Couldn’t stay any closer. The moment burned. Our eyes. Our ears. Our emotions. And our sense of right and wrong— of propriety which governs eavesdropping on private moments reasserted itself. We moved far away again, back to the nurse’s station.

Seeing the visible change in her manner and posture as he entered her room and spoke those words and the others we have denied ourselves the knowledge of seemed almost priceless. But, in truth, the price is known, and it feels so terrible.

It is a struggle just to write what we have so far, knowing that it may not be of interest to many of our subscribers who simply want what is advertised on the label: “Routine Posts on the Reality of the Southern Border Crisis.”

Well, here you go: Nothing makes any sense. And it hasn’t for a while. The lies about why so many people are trying to cross the border and the lies about why nothing can be done about it have been stacked so high, the filth of their stink threatens to choke us all. And it well might, if the crisis itself doesn’t do us in somehow first.

We do not speak of some imaginary scent that the activists seem to assume opponents of this crisis believe is carried by migrants. No. We speak of the cupidity, the greed, and the naked evil on display by those enabling this crisis. Some are in the White House right now, we think. We also think some are in the halls of business and might frequently donate to blue causes, when they aren’t donating to red causes.

Some readers will surely find our words hyperbolic.

But we have been consistent these last three years of publication in expressing our feelings of despair over how cruelly these migrants are being used and deceived. How they represent an attempt at importing a new slave class. We have been consistent in distinguishing between relatively harmless seeming migrants and the criminal traffickers that are actually those currently overwhelming Kinney County.

At this point, some readers may wish for some kind of sources and links.

Sources exist.

They’re right here in our archives. And also, all over the internet. It is no accident that the Cavalry - Dispatch for much of its existence has made a point of linking to reporting by the Texas Tribune, Houston Chronicle, and others— even the Texas Observer and NPR on occasion as well as FOX News and the Center Square.

If our arguments over these years can be buttressed by even the most left-leaning of sources— and many have— then even the most optimistic of journalistic “takes” on the border crisis must paint a troubled mosaic and so it is.

So, ask for sources. And be returned the most sullen deafness, as one asks and asks for the impossible return of a mother, an educator, and beloved spouse. As selfishly concerned as we are with our own misery and grief, we must also worry now for the sake of our 84-year-old father.

He will miss her terribly. So will we all.

Readers may recall from our last dispatch, our tale of our mother’s horrible stroke and subsequent brain bleed and swelling. And, while one cannot know all of fate’s paths and possibilities and the intersections of choice and circumstance— it is a fact that every ambulance in the County was out in the Countryside trying to assist illegal aliens, while Mom was on the floor waiting for transport from the next county over.

It is a fact.

It is also a fact that she may not have survived even if an ambulance had been next door waiting, in a feat of some kind of prophecy or prediction. But surely any reasonable person can see that this is a bad situation. And something has to change. How long before someone somewhere suffers a disaster that truly *is* directly attributable to this crisis?

The fact is we already have. Many times over.

The most recent and most visible of course was named Laken Riley— the Georgia University student who was murdered while jogging by a suspect some say was affiliated somehow with the international criminal gang Tren de Aragua. This was many miles from the Border, like so many other cases.

By now, anyone reading this newsletter surely recognizes the name and some of the details. And it is a fact that there have already been many others. Many Americans shot, stabbed, raped, murdered, beaten and robbed by criminal aliens left to roam in the United States, judged somehow as ‘nonthreatening’ by the most ridiculous of new procedures and guidelines imposed on the US Border Patrol and ICE by the White House and others.

We say it again: The lies about why so many people are trying to cross the border and the lies about why nothing can be done about it have been stacked so high, the filth of their stink threatens to choke us all.

In 1884, Teddy Roosevelt famously wrote in his daily journal, “the light has gone out of my life.” The words appeared beneath a giant and bold black X. The X marked the date he lost both his mother to Typhoid and his wife to undiagnosed Bright’s Disease.

Image From Vintage News Daily.com

Bright’s Disease is basically a condition that leads to kidney failure. By the time Roosevelt’s beloved wife passed, she could barely recognize him.

He was in his 20s. Suddenly a new parent and a single father.

Roosevelt was away when the tragedy began to coil itself ‘round his home and his life. He rushed home at the first word of illness. He was met at the door to the family home by a younger brother named Elliott, who told him “There is a curse on this house.”

Roosevelt proceeded up the stairs in time to watch his mother expire, followed by his wife hours later.

He never spoke of his wife again. He even left her out of his autobiography. The pain was apparently too great to casually face again.

The aftermath of all of this is what led to his westward journey— losing himself in the American West where he earned his reputation as a hunter and outdoorsman, before eventually finding his way back into American politics and territory that may be more familiar to readers.

The Presidency. Conservation. The Rough Riders and the Spanish - American War, etc.

We have been fascinated by Teddy Roosevelt for many years, thanks to tales about him and others told by our own now-departed mother.

Remember Elliott Roosevelt? He once traveled to Texas on a hunting trip. His party lost their horses to Comanches. They had to walk all the way back to civilization and as you might imagine, nearly died.

Despite our grief, it must be said that the light is not gone from our lives, though it is dimmed. There remain many hopes and many opportunities and dreams for the future.

We have some soul-searching to do about the future of the newsletter. Our original mission— trying to put a message into a bottle about how the crisis was real, despite attempts in national and some statewide press to paint it as fiction seems well and done. Accomplished by circumstances and many others all toiling away elsewhere, in parallel or not.

What form this new chapter in the newsletter’s life will take, we cannot predict, though more than likely it will remain border and politics focused in some fashion or another, once the grieving will allow.

For now, we will be busy conferencing with family members as we help plan a funeral and all of what else follows.

Thank you for reading. We’ll be back again, though we don’t know when.