Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 12:31 P.M. HAST} What Makes a Family

Gentle Tweeter,

In Athens or Aspen or Adelaide, my parents and I had always created a family. Anytime we were together, our love was intact. We weren’t like normal families who live tied to one plot of moldy compost, growing potatoes and carding wool. We had so many houses, in Dublin and Durban and Dubai, that none of them felt like our home. We weren’t like those genetically isolated finches Mr. Darwin had found in the Galápagos. No, we were more like those lost tribes wandering around in the pages of the Bible book. In Vancouver or Las Vegas or Van Nuys, all we had that was stable and consistent was each other.

For years, my faults were the glue that kept my parents united. My fat, my quiet bookwormish, misanthropic misbehavior, these were the flaws they sought to correct. And when I seemed to throw myself at Jesus Christ, well, nothing could’ve cemented their marital bond more effectively. Please forgive me my boast, but for years I was a genius at keeping my mom and dad hitched while the parents of my boarding school peers were constantly wedding and divorcing new partners. In Miami and Milan and Missoula, while our surroundings constantly changed, we had one another.

That is, until now. Which is why God has erected such a firewall between the living and the dead: because the predead always distort whatever the postalive tell them. Jesus or Mohammad or Siddhartha, whenever any dead person has come back to offer some banal bit of advice, the living recipient misinterprets every word of it. Wars ensue. Witch burnings. For example, when Bernadette Soubirous stepped into the water at Lourdes in the year 1858, the Virgin Mary materialized only to say, “Hey, don’t play here, kid. It’s a filthy-dirty medical-waste dump.” Even worse, in 1917 when she appeared to impoverished Portuguese shepherd children at Fatima, Mary was only trying to sneak them the number for a winning lottery ticket. Talk about good intentions! Here a helpful dead lady was merely trying to lend them a hand, and those predead urchins Ctrl+Alt+Overreacted.

In summation, the predead get everything wrong. But at this point in history, you can hardly blame them for being so spiritually famished that they’d gobble down anything. Yes, Gentle Tweeter, we may have polio vaccines and microwave popcorn, but secular humanism really only covers the good times. Nobody in a foxhole ever said a prayer to Ted Kennedy. Nobody on a deathbed clasps his hands in weeping despair and petitions for the aid of Hillary Clinton. My parents were in a position to proselytize. I gave them some misguided advice, and now, the headlines: “Camille Files for Divorce!”

I’ve failed in my eternal mission to keep them together.