Reflections on the past year

I haven't added to this blog since Inauguration Day - and since then a lot has happened.

Obama hasn't walked on water, but he's still trying to do what we elected him to do. Sometimes he doesn't make the choices I would prefer, but I trust his long term goals.

The world looks different to me than it did on Inauguration Day.

My husband Don died last March 25th. We'd been married for 53 years. He once introduced himself to a group of people: "My name's Don West and I've been married all my life." Now I'm trying to learn to live without my lifetime best friend and dear love. And the world does go on.

In 1963 I was a young wife with three small children.I saw the assassination of JFK on TV. I watched Walter Cronkite struggle for composure as he announced his death. David was only 2 1/2, just about the same age as JFK's small son whom we watched saluting his father's casket as it passed.

I watched the Civil Rights Movement on my black and white TV - and stayed at home in the country with my family while I longed to join the March to Selma. I served coffee in the Democratic Headquarters in Arbuckle, CA and hoped and prayed that Bobby Kennedy might lead us to a better America. I was watching TV when he was murdered. Then I watched Martin Luther King die. I saw all these deaths in real time, and I shed a lot of tears.

Now my children are all grown. My son and one daughter are grandparents. I have 8 grandchildren, most of whom are grown, and 3 great-grandchildren. The world isn't the world I had hoped to have given them.

Today I am mourning the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy. I was very fond of Teddy Kennedy. I saw him grow to greatness.

I knew people Ted Kennedy helped - including a California friend who worked for the military schools in Europe and who needed to take early medical retirement and come back to California. He's the one who cut through the red tape and made it possible for her to do that. It wasn't just folks from Massachusetts who got help from him; he was ready to listen to anyone who needed help.

I trusted Senator Kennedy to be the Senator for all Americans. I wrote his office frequently, as I do many senators, to share my legislative concerns. I was honored a couple of years ago to be invited to a fund-raising dinner for him in Seattle, but I felt I couldn't afford what it would cost to sit at that table. Now I wished I'd just taken a chunk out of my investments and gone. I get angry with our political process, but Teddy Kennedy's legislative leadership gave me confidence that we could get past the small-mindedness and ignorance and still get things done. I received an email yesterday from his family thanking me for my support over the years.

It was Ted Kennedy's speech last year that convinced me to support Barack Obama for President. I had become very cynical about politics in America. But Teddy made me believe that the dream I'd had in my 20's had not died - that there was still hope that we could become the country we should be.

I had so hoped that he'd live to see health care reform legislation would pass. Today, August 27, I have been watching the crowds walk past his casket, lying in state at the Kennedy Library in NY. Teddy was 77. Camelot is a wonderful dream - that power should be used to accomplish good things, that truth and justice will prevail against ignorance and selfishness, that ordinary people can achieve greatness in the pursuit of great goals. But the fall of heroes is very painful whether in their prime or in the diminishment of old age and illness.

I'm not sure why I am weeping today - whether it is for my own personal loss of my beloved Don. Or for Teddy, Or old griefs for lost idealism when Bobby and Martin were struck down. Or disappointment when I see the mean-spiritedness of those who are working against health care reform, immigration reform, and social justice The world seems bleaker without Don, without Walter Cronkite, without Teddy Kennedy.. But the world feels a little less safe to me today than it did last week, last year. And I am keenly aware that even a full lifetime is a brief time in which to accomplish very much.

But I'm glad that there are those who have used their lives to such full purpose as Ted Kennedy. I'm on my way to church this afternoon where I'll light a candle for him and for my other beloved dead. And for passage of health care reform! And for President Obama who really must provide the leadership to achieve the unfinished work of the 60's.