Car

Colby's car has been sitting on my back patio for over a year. It doesn't run. Colby had forgotten to put oil in it and the engine is bad. I also cannot find the keys to it. Not sure I ever had them. There are are still piles and piles of his stuff in his room and in the basement. It is possible the keys are there. Somewhere.

The car has become a fixture on the patio. The dog sits under it when it is cold and wet outside and the neighbor's cat sits on top of it when it is sunny. Still, it accomplishes no other purpose than that. I need to get rid of it. Colby liked Pull-A-Part, a place where you can walk through rows of junked cars and pull parts from them (for a small fee) or sometimes get things left inside the cars, such as CDs and clothes, and you can get those for free. The car, I think, should go there.

I call AAA, but towing to a junk yard is not part of their emergency road service. So I call other tow services and am shocked at the prices. I spend half a day doing this, then frustrated, throw up my hands. I try to do with Colby's things as he would have wanted me to, but this is not working out with the car and Pull-A-Part. I throw up my hands and ask Colby, out loud, what I should do with the car.

An hour later I get an email from a friend of Colby's who asks if I still have the car. He offers to buy it so he can restore it. He has the knowledge to do so, but I will not let him purchase the car. Instead, I give it to him. I see how pleased he is with the car and I am very happy about it, too. We both believe that this is what Colby wanted.

The car is now gone, awaiting repairs from Colby's friend. The dog has found a new spot under a patio chair and the neighbor's cat sits on top.

Reform

Health care reform is in the news. It's an ongoing topic, has been for months, and is polarizing. I've written about this before so I won't rehash the details, but I do have to say two things:

1. Many people are under the perception that if you are uninsured and go to a hospital that the hospital has to treat you. That is not true in practice. Twice I took my suicidal son to an emergency room and they weighed him, took his blood pressure, and his temperature. Then we waited in a waiting room for two hours so they could hand us a piece of paper that referred us to agencies we had exhausted months prior. That is how our hospitals "treated" my son. Six weeks later he was dead.

2. Others think that all Americans already have access to health care. This is also not true. As a teen, Colby was on a state insurance plan that I paid for because I was self-employed. Then that program was shut down due to lack of state funding. Because Colby had existing and extensive mental illness diagnoses, no other insurance program would cover him. By the time he was homeless and qualified for Medicaid, he was so paranoid I could not get him to a doctor.

I do not understand why all Americans cannot have access to health care. I believe that if Colby had medical care that there is a chance he would be here today. There is a chance that he could have led a productive life and fulfilled his dream of making the world a better place. There is a chance that I would someday have grandchildren. There is a chance that I would not have to grow old without any family.

All I ask our lawmakers in Washington is that whatever deal they strike, whatever language they finalize, whatever clauses they add, the end result is that no other American parent will suffer the anguish of not being able to get his or her son or daughter the medical attention they need.