There was a time Before. We’re in the After now. On this point, we can generally agree. Where we differ wildly is in where we place the dividing line between the two. The moment in time when things changed forever is dependent on your age, your health, trauma, reproductive status, political leaning, on your gender, the color of your skin, on who you love, on who you’ve lost, on where you were born. On a million different things.
On October 15th, 2024, NUP published my first book, a collection of essays titled Here, Now. Most of the essays were written during the grief-soaked years immediately following the death of my 3-year-old son, Lev, on November 3, 2010. This is the moment that marks my Before and After. I wrote the essay that leads off Here, Now ten years later, in pandemic lockdown, pre-vaccine. I wrote about using grief as a lens and marking time by voting in elections and published the piece in the lead up to election day, November 3, 2020: the 10th anniversary of my son Lev’s death:
The zebrawood urn that holds Lev’s ashes sits in the office on the ground floor, where I write, less than one mile from the hospital. In a few days, it will be Election Day. November 3, 2020. I took the day off from work even though I cast my vote early. So many reasons for sorrow and fear connected to this single day. Ten years. Four years. Voids and vessels. Prismatic days, whole years that bend the light away.
This year, November 3rd marks the end of daylight savings time. In the dark hours of the morning, during the same span where Lev lay dying years ago, I fall back. Approaching this first Tuesday in November, the contours of a familiarly pitched battle have taken shape. The 2024 election is, again, a contest between Donald Trump and a woman who would be the first female president. The margins, again, are razor thin.. Sometimes it seems as if the world has barely turned. But it has. It’s been 8 years since the 2016 election led us to march in the streets, 6 years since the blue wave gave us change, 4 years since George Floyd’s murder devastated and galvanized the country, since COVID-19 took the lives of over a million Americans, since the 2020 election led to the near destruction of our republic. The Harris-Walz lawn signs in my neighborhood say, in all caps, WE ARE NOT GOING BACK. I hope like hell they’re right.
My 50th birthday was a few days ago. In June of the year I turned 47, my father was in the hospital. I’d flown East to support my mom and to be with my dad when my mom needed a break. I was steering my dad’s car into the long driveway of St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, NY, the same hospital where I was born, when the car radio told me the Dobbs Supreme Court decision had taken rights away from all American women for the first time in my lifetime. I have less bodily autonomy at 50 than I did when I was born in 1974. Pregnant women and infants are dying in my adopted home state of Texas and across the country.. We’re banning books again. We’re eroding the line between church and state. We’re considering children’s genitals as a prerequisite to playing school sports. We’re forcing parents to travel out of state to get healthcare for their children. We’re forcing women to travel out of state to get healthcare for themselves.
8 years have passed since the 2016 election. As the events of that season unfolded in real time, I was hopeful. I was all but certain the nation was headed into another four years of a Democratic White House led by our first woman president. At the end of November 2016, a few weeks after Trump was elected to the presidency, I started a new job in city government, where I still work. As I sat with the unexpected reality of Hillary Clinton’s loss after winning the popular vote, I met my co-workers and settled into the rhythm of a new workplace. One of the women on my team, a bright and charming spitfire from a suburb in North Texas, asked me if I understood why, after the election, “Everyone was acting like somebody died.” She was earnestly asking for help in understanding why people would take all of it so seriously. I didn’t know her very well. She and I shared a cubicle wall and chatted some. She had papered the whole inside of her cube with photos of her two young sons. She volunteered as a mentor to the children of incarcerated folks. As I tried to explain the implications of the election results without letting my own rage seep out, she listened, but ultimately, she couldn’t or wouldn’t see what I saw.
Last week, I took my 19-year-old son, Joss, to vote early in his first presidential election. The poll workers made a fuss, cheering for the first-time voter, ginning up the room in support of his youthful civic duty. We cast our votes, slid our ballots into the counting box and stuck ‘I voted’ stickers on our lapels. As we filed out of our polling place, we ran into another pair of mother-son voters, friends of ours, and I felt the glee and gravity of this absurd moment in which we find ourselves. Afterward, my son and I took selfies outside. He chose his outfit carefully so he could post the photos later, prove to his friends that he’d voted. As I wrote in the opening essay of Here, Now, “Of all of the things I’ve done and lived through, raising a healthy teenaged son is the most challenging, the most devastating, the most hopeful.” The kids are, as ever, alright.
Today, we hold our breath as the presidential election unfolds. Last time we were here, the result became the dividing line between Before and After for large swaths of the American electorate. I believe in not going back. I believe in taking a hard look at the worst we’ve done and learning from the past, even if the lessons are ugly. Especially if the lessons are ugly. I hope Kamala Harris wins the presidency; she has damn well earned it. Vice president Harris has learned from the missteps and successes of those that came before her. She has learned to keep going through grief and pain and impossible odds. I hope we all have learned the same. If this election turns out to be your line between Before and After, I hope your After is filled with determination and forward motion, as mine has been. I hope you continue to love the only life you have in a burning world, as I do. Please, go vote, if you haven’t already.
Xo, Mirsky.
Here, Now
Grateful Hearts and Minds at NUP