Its 2am and I am awake flipping through YouTube. Its how I get my news these days. It is while I am flipping that I recall it has been a year since I faced deliberating pain and tumors in my left leg. It has definitely been a year of great pain. Of many tears and horrific losses.

In my perusal, I come across a clip of the song “Separate Lives,” performed by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin in the movie White Nights. Years back White Nights was a favorite movie, largely because of the way the song fitted the narrative of the movie. I would play that part of the movie over and over again. I recall during that time people near me were swimming in various forms of heartaches in their lives. Separate Lives felt like a true theme song to the present grief.

So, as I played the movie scene over and over again I wept unceasing tears. I could feel that grief deep within the pit of my stomach. I cried for all that was lost. For all the shared pain. For all my disappointment watching people, I loved torpedo their own existence.

For a moment I reflect and I am grateful that such disastrous living was not happening now, then I remembered how my family has torpedoed their lives beginning in 2019. And the tears rise in my throat; for all, I saw lost in 2019. Then my GOD I remember its 2020 and soon I am howling with the deep misery that grips my friends and family, my community, my state, and Lord, my country, As Phil and Marilyn sing my heart breaks anew and in my spirit, I cry out for all we have thrown away.

I am not defeated, I am sitting Shiva for my planet. For the way that even while we aspire to nobility, to do good, our efforts for solution always end in disaster. No other species serves as both its best friend and its worst enemy.

“Well you have no right to ask me how I feel, you have no right to speak me so kind. Someday we might find ourselves looking into one another’s eyes, but for now, we go on living. Separate lives.” (Stephen Bishop 1985.)