Elanso

I love reading Susan Palwick’s blogs. She’s a sci-fi writer,volunteer hospital chaplain, and random do-gooder whose words often spark some wild hope and debate within my own, tumultuous soul.

Please read today’s entry over at Improbable Optimisms: Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good:

This week at the hospital, I learned that dying, or learning that you’re going to die, isn’t the saddest thing in the world. The people weeping around your bedside are devastated, but that’s because you lived a full life, because you loved and were loved. Loving and being loved is cause for joy, even or especially in darkness.

The saddest thing in the world is the person who’s never had a chance to live: the person who’s been beaten down for so many decades that there’s almost no self left, the person who’s learned to live with being punched and kicked and insulted, because “that’s all I have, and I’m too old, and where else can I go?”

The saddest thing in the world is when the ED staff says, with one voice, “We can send you to a shelter!” and you tell them, “I’m too scared, I’m too scared, I want to go home!” And when the ED staff says, “You can press charges,” you say, “No, I can’t. I’ll be killed. I’ve been promised that.” And when the chaplain asks the ED manager if there’s any way for the staff to press charges, the manager says no, there isn’t: not unless the injuries are life-threatening.

How much brutality does it take to threaten a life?

I have never been hit, not since the last time I was spanked as a child. I’ve been in some frightening situations, and have feared for my life a time or two. Any abuse I have suffered has been through mental cruelty and neglect. Sadly, you can’t show up at the ER and show them the scars on your heart, mind and soul. You can’t get a restraining order against gaslighting and the soul-sucking abuse that comes from years of neglect. But if you, or someone you know, is being put bodily into harm’s way, is being beating into submission with words, fists, or any other blunt instrument, GET OUT. GET HELP.

In the United States, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE

Please, those of you living outside the US, send me the contact info for your domestic abuse hotlines and websites and I’ll be sure to put them in the blogroll.

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