Today is three weeks after I held my father’s hand as the life left his body when the nurse pushed in the morphine to stop his strong heart which kept beating long after his brain was dead.

Today is three hundred years after the birth of Benjamin Franklin, the founding father of the United States with whom I most identify, a man both idealistic and earthy.

Today I strive to continue to tread the narrow path between rage and despair that is illuminated by both of my heroes.

A good friend who will remain anonymous unless they tell me differently recently wrote to me that grief is not a simple, linear process of “stages” as is so commonly expressed but instead a whirlpool where the different emotions that are incorrectly labeled as “stages” are swirled together in a maelstrom that while it defies the conventional wisdom of a “process” can indeed be overcome in the same way a hurricane is survived, by experiencing the feelings instead of rejecting them and bending to the storm instead of trying to stand straight and risk breaking.

Given my personality, I doubt I’ll experience the “bargaining” emotions that many feel after a deep loss, for whom do I have to “bargain” with in my scientific, practical mindset?

However, I do feel the rage and the despair that accompany a deep grief, emotions I first felt as a teenager when I recognized that I both understood many concepts and comprehended interactions between people far more deeply than the rednecks and druggies and bible-thumpers with whom I attended high school in northern Mississippi.

At the time I did not have the wisdom of experience to understand the origins of the rage and despair I felt, and I often wonder now after 25 years if I really have gained the wisdom of experience to truly understand the refusal by others to understand, to me an incomprehensible refusal that prompted my rage and despair.

The rage and despair I feel now is a mixture of the emotions prompted by a loss so deep that it is almost impossible to comprehend, much less to describe, along with what I see as the willful ignorance of others who stake out their partisan positions, repeating the talking points instead of thinking for themselves, choosing to reject the ideals and concepts they claim to believe in, regardless of if they are self-labeled as on the “left” or the “right” because they are all so frightened they are sacrificing freedoms on the altar of expediency.

I have refrained from posting my writings that I know are arising from the rage and the despair I have felt, and I am trying very hard now not to express in the most vulgar, vile terms the disgust I feel when reading what passes for “commentary” in blogworld, whether in posts or in the “hallelujah” comments I read from the worshiping acolytes that accumulate around the most damaged personality types that write weblogs, hate-brigades that spew vile vituperation upon anyone who has the temerity to disagree with the object of worship, the damaged personality that does the thinking for the self-selected minions since they have chosen to not think for themselves.

This tendency to prefer others to think instead of doing the hard work themselves existed long before the Internet, note that President Lyndon Johnson once said, “If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.” Unfortunately for us all, the Internet has allowed many thoughts not worth even the glucose molecules to power them to flourish and take hold among the many who are too lazy to think and prefer to have others think FOR them.

My rage and despair may be accentuated by recent events in my life, but the fundamental origins have not changed in the quarter of a century since I first felt them.