After yet again berating Emely and Jonathan, the tyrant Bastet, stopped as suddenly as she had started. Her gut had turned to the sandstone of the pyramids. Her lungs were filled with the desert sand. Her ears were filled with the rushing of the Nile River and her eyes were blinded by the mid-day sun. Bastet knew she was dying. She had failed her ancestors. She could not live with failure so she could not live. She would be met at the threshold of death with the wrath of her Fathers’ Fathers’ for her failure.

Rousing herself she gasped and turned to Emely and Jonathan and said, “Jonathan, I will tell you in the words of your Jesus God, “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.* This is what you need to know. If you know me, you know my Fathers’ Fathers’. If you know my Fathers’ Fathers’ you would know me. We are inseparable.

“But my people, those who fawn on me and think they are in my favor, those who jockey around stepping on each other in their custom made shoes, they are fools. They are who I make them to be and still they are fools. I will quote another for you Jonathan, “My people are fools. They don’t know me. They are stupid people. They don’t understand. They are experts in doing wrong, and they don’t know how to do good.’** That is your god speaking to his useless prophet Jeramiah. My people are no less stupid. I try to tell them but they only think I am a gifted intellectual. They believe I am a brilliant researcher. I am neither. I am the Truth. They cannot hear me because their ears are stopped to the truth.

"Now we are at an end. I am the last. I am old and I am useless in protecting our Fathers’ Fathers’."

Bastet’s shoulders dropped, she had expended the last bit of her energy. Her life was over. She was the last of her line and she was defeated. Emely and Jonathan had gotten the best of her. She could not shape them to her will. She had been unable to entrance or berate them into her control. There was nothing left.

Neither Emely nor Jonathan knew what to do. They had been prepared for many scenarios when the left the hotel for this private audience with Bastet. After months of living in fear that she would kill them watching Bastet crumble before them like old stone left them as paralyzed as she. They stood frozen trying to grasp what had happened. Bastet turned from her stance in front of her desk and walked quietly into her rose garden. They saw her lean over to pluck a rose and then draw the rose’s thorn down her arm over and over until her blood was dripping on the paving stones of the garden.

Excerpt from The Bones of our Fathers' Fathers, an unpublished novel

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* John 14:7 , English Standard Version GOD’S WORD® Translation

* Jerimiah 4:22, Holman Christian Standard Bible

For more than thirty years, as a free woman, I strove to help make the voices of under-served people heard. I spoke up about child abuse when people thought it was “rare”. I spoke out for victims’ rights. I spent twenty years with teams of researchers and practitioners trying to expand access to mental and physical healthcare for rural and under-served people. I used my freedom to live my life in the way I believed I should. I lived vigorously. I refused to be a bystander and not speak up. I know I made a difference in the lives of the people I encountered.

Nevertheless, the battle was so long and so dark it ate all of the freedom to act that I had. In 2012, I retired sick, old and diminished, having expended all of my power without having made “the big difference.” Victims still struggle. Children are not loved and nurtured as they should be. Rural women are still more likely to die early. Rural men are economically disadvantaged regardless of their age, race or background. Healthcare access in the U.S. is a national tragedy.

Somewhere in the debacle of the 2016 political process, We, as a nation, woke up to the fact that rural and under-served people of all color, gender, creed, age or nationality fare worse than their urban and suburban counterparts. We call “them” the “Forgotten America.” Our national forgetfulness was so powerful it transformed the word urbancentricity from a negative word meaning urban bias against non-urban things to a positive word meaning people loved the things their urban lives provided.

The transformation of urbancentricity to remembering our "forgotten people" makes me relieved that someone finally noticed and cross that and it took mean, explosive politics to illuminate the problem. If there is any hope for freedom hidden in the angry rhetoric of America these days, I am free to hope that others are as weary of it as I and that shared positive change will finally come. If it does, it will heal me, and my Country.