You’ve got to hand it to President Trump. Some people love him so much he can almost literally do no wrong. But for others, Trump hatred runs so deep that even death itself can’t kill it. So when word came on a sunny Saturday morning that the president got his two-months' notice, the first “call” many people made was to beyond the grave.
“Dad, I’ve got some really good news,” Mimi Fachersaid out loud, standing alone in her Waltham apartment, speaking to her late father.
In Andover, Linda Foley mixed a Dewar’s and water — her late mother’s drink — and raised a toast. “They just announced Pennsylvania,” she told mom.
“I don’t know if there’s an afterlife,” said Nelle Douville, of Gilford, N.H., but she spoke to her late mom anyway. “We got rid of him,” she said.
In 2004, when the Red Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino to capture the World Series, families famously flocked to the graves of fans who didn’t live to see the day. A similar phenomenon is under way with Trump’s loss, said psychologist Elaine Espada, executive director of the Beacon Therapy Group.
“People want to share it with their deceased loved ones,” she said.
She has clients who brought photos of late parents to the polling stations, so Mom or Dad could be there when the vote was cast for Joe Biden, and others who tagged their late parents in social media posts.
Delighting in Trump’s defeat — if that’s your political bent — is part of a healthy grieving process, Espada said, noting that the new modern theory of grieving, called the continuing bond theory, encourages an emotional connection to a lost loved one.
In Woburn, when CNN called Pennsylvania and the election for Biden, Raj Melkote thought of how his late father would have wanted to share the news with his mother, and as an homage, took a picture of the TV screen and texted it to his mom.
He imagined his father calling out to his mother, in his loud, energetic voice. “Come Chinna, come look at the TV, look at what they’re saying.”
Many adult children and their parents have spent years bashing Trump, so what better way to stay connected than to keep the trash talk going, posthumously though it may be?
“I want my father to know that his convictions were validated — that there were other people who sensed Trump’s immorality,” Melkote said.
Presidents from both parties have been reviled before, of course. But antipathy toward Trump is so strong that people were literally thinking about him on their deathbeds, and fighting to stay alive to see him defeated.
“I need to be here for Nov. 3,” Linda Foley’s mother, Patricia Foley, the former Head Start director for the Greater Brockton area, said as she slipped in and out of wakefulness during the second presidential debate — four days before her death.
“I checked online and your ballot was received and accepted, so your vote is in,” Foley told her mother. “If you need to go now, it’s OK.”
Elaine Meehan’s mother didn’t get to vote before she died, in April. But Meehan, of Brighton, feels that her mother played a role in Biden’s victory nonetheless.
“If you believe in heaven, there is this group of people up there who didn’t like Trump" — including her mother, John McCain, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, she said — "and it almost feels like divine intervention.”
Jennifer Cuneo, of New Salem, was so intent on honoring her mother’s negative feelings about Trump that she lead her obituary that way.
“Rosemarie Mary Veronica McKenna Gowen succumbed to natural causes exacerbated by the stress of the occupant of the White House for the last four years,” the death notice read.
Reached on the cusp of Biden’s victory, Cuneo noted that her mother died on Sept. 28, but that she had waited more than a month — until early November — to place the obituary “so that any newspapers that are saved she’s part of it.”
The Trump conversations, of course, are just part of the ongoing, never-ending conversation many people have with lost loved ones.
Mimi Facher regularly shares all sort of news with her father, Jerome Facher, a major influence on her life, she said, and a well-known civil litigator who was portrayed by Robert Duvall in “A Civil Action.”
Recently, she’s told him about Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett’s to the Supreme Court (“It would have appalled him”); the Red Sox’ horrible season (ditto); and the pandemic, which she’s very glad he missed.
“In some ways I haven’t adjusted to the fact that he’s gone,” she said.
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @bethteitell.
"hear" - Google News
November 14, 2020 at 03:38AM
https://ift.tt/3pCAeTE
Mom, if you can hear me in heaven, I have great news: Trump lost! - The Boston Globe
"hear" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2KTiH6k
https://ift.tt/2Wh3f9n
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Mom, if you can hear me in heaven, I have great news: Trump lost! - The Boston Globe"
Post a Comment