My mom lived until she was 97. She died two weeks after President Joe Biden was sworn in, determined to hang on to make sure President Donald Trump left the White House. Mom didn’t trust him or his deceitful entourage.
She stopped eating or taking fluids after the 2021 inauguration. Mom was ready to die, knowing the world would be OK. Or so she thought.
Good thing she is not alive in 2025. It would kill her to see what Trump has done to people’s lives, the country, the world.
The last few years were particularly hard on mom, not only because of medical and physical ailments, but because she spent most of her days watching the news and was saddened — no, she was really angry — at how the country where she lived her entire life had changed under Trump’s policies.
No surprise, I was raised in a left-of-center household. We trick or treated to raise money for UNICEF. I think the first concert I attended as a kid was Pete Seeger. We were loosely non-denominational; I attended a Jewish Sunday school held at a YMCA.
My parents were the first U.S.-born children of immigrants from Europe (yes, they were legal) who moved to America for freedom of religion and political beliefs, and a chance to have a better life.
Mom had her support group, friends she had grown up with in our Chicago neighborhood which was maybe a half-mile square. It seemed all of the parents were about the same age; everyone’s kids knew each other; we celebrated holiday picnics and birthday parties and backyard barbecues; and most everyone shared the same political and social beliefs and listened to the same folk music.
Mom and three of her best friends would tape lyrics on the rim of their guitars and sing at parties. I can’t remember if they were any good. What mattered was that they had fun and shared their lives, through all the good and bad.
They kept together through childrearing, child trauma, personal crisis, medical crisis and moving out to new neighborhoods and new cities. Her friends were a constant in her life, people who knew her, people she could reach out to when no one else understood.
Then, as mom aged, her friends died. She continued to grow older and more of her friends died. By the time she was in her mid-90s, she was pretty much the only one from the group still alive. She had lost her support group. That contributed to her deteriorating health.
My siblings and I weren’t the same as mom knowing that the friends she had shared so much with for close to 70 years could commiserate with her about politics, arthritis, broken hips, folk music — and her children.
I think about mom outliving her support group as an increasing number of my friends from the 1960s and 1970s are succumbing to aging. Particularly in stressful times, like a second Trump administration, those long-time friends are more important than ever to help us cope, to remind us we are not alone and that others feel the same way. They understand.
I have more than 20 years to go before I reach mom’s age when she died, and I don’t plan to check out early. But I will make two promises: To spend more time with close friends, and to make sure I am around in 2029 to watch Trump leave office.
Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.
