I started this post yesterday with an exchange with Aussie in which, she assuming that I’d been put on Social Security’s Master Death List, as our government has done to 6,000 immigrants, didn’t hear me, didn’t see me, didn’t smell me, just assumed that I was dead. The Trump administration did that to over 6,000 immigrants who obtained temporary legal status from the Biden administration, putting their names on such a list so that they no longer have a social security card, can’t open bank accounts, get a credit card or a job.

I thought it was a humorous way to begin a post about how it feels to tell someone that, for all practical purposes, you’re dead.  But this morning, in addition to being surprised by mid-April snow, I got a notification from a very dear friend that her son, troubled by voices for many years, died of suicide at the very time she and I were talking on FaceTime, making summer plans.

Nothing transcends humor (they even made jokes at Auschwitz), but this time my stomach fell and my heart went wandering. I couldn’t channel Aussie.

What’s alive for me still? What it’s like to tell someone, or show someone, that they’re not living to us, not flesh-and-blood human beings, just labels. Suddenly, people who had obtained temporary legal status no longer exist. They’re dead to everyone.

If you’re dead, you should self-deport, right? Self-deport is one of those euphemisms that just a year ago anyone with any ethics or even intelligence would have shaken their heads at. Now, witness how it has entered mainstream political language.

What should the people in Gaza do, surrounded by mounds of rubble where once stood their homes of many years? Self-deport. What should they do when entire towns and enclaves are levelled, communities razed to the ground? Self-deport. What should immigrants given temporary legal status do when they’re dead to American society? Self-deport.

We used to have boxes to be checked off on college applications asking for your ethnicity and gender, at the least. Now we have different boxes: If you’re an immigrant, check off your occupation (preferably all five):

Terrorist

Murderer

Drug dealer

Rapist

Antisemite

Most are not. If anything, they come from some of the saddest countries in Latin America: Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, whose rulers even our present government deplores.

The crazy thing about self-deportation is that it gives the illusion that the person self-deporting made their own decision, that no one else had anything to do with it. We just took away any possibility of a job or financial legitimacy, but it was your decision, right? Or in Palestine, we are constantly burning down homes in the West Bank and annexing more land there and in Gaza, not to mention all the destruction we inflicted (and by we, I mean Israel and its big arms supplier, the US), but you decided to leave, right? Perhaps future books will earnestly tell you that they ran. That’s what I learned about Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, the same war my parents fought in: They ran. Not our fault.

I think of the local immigrants living here and pretending that they’re dead to me. Don’t we naturally wish to explore more life, like babies eagerly looking around, responding enthusiastically to new prompts and stimuli? Our senses yearn to hear more, see more, touch more, smell and taste more—till some voice of authority says: Stop, there’s nothing there. Ignore those signals, ignore those yearnings.

It reminds me of living on the streets during street retreats, asking for money or a cup of coffee, and folks just looking away. Were they bad? No. Were they oblivious? Not at all. They just wanted me out of their sight and hearing, out of their awareness. Get away, they were saying. Like we say to folks here. Like the Bibi government says to Palestinians: You’re dead to us, go away.

Who thought of something so diabolical, I wonder. Trump the Destroyer doesn’t think in those kinds of details, he doesn’t have to. He has a whole range of sycophants who not only whisper honey into his ears, but also develop new, ingenious ways to circumvent the courts and carry out his agenda.

Hitler didn’t think of the Final Solution all by himself, he had cohorts like Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann to contrive new ways of mass murder, all to get the great man to smile at them, maybe give them a thumbs-up.

But the body knows. The Mind knows, how could it not? They’re all parts of the same Mind as the Illegal Chihuahua at my feet, as the Amazon driver who left a package on the front steps. We’re all that One Mind no matter how often we shut our eyes and ears to it, no matter how often we wish to retreat to someplace safe. But life is attracted to more life, and more life, more and more. It can’t be restrained, can’t be put in its place and told: Stay! Can’t be muzzled.

The terrible Aussie, too, will not retreat from life in its various manifestations. I’ve been sick this past week and fell asleep early last night, my body exhausted from the wracking cough and irregular breathing. Around 2 in the morning I woke up to the soft pitter-patter sound of paws. “Aussie?” I said sleepily, stretching out my arm. She never comes upstairs except in thunderstorms.

She came right into my outstretched hand, her head fitting easily into my palm, and licked it. She was checking up on me. I hadn’t been able to walk her yesterday and she nudged her face against my body, as if saying: I’m here. You’re here. All’s well.

My friend’s son heard voices speaking to him throughout his life. But he knew good from evil, and he told his mother that he didn’t wish to follow bad voices, he only wanted to follow good voices, he wanted to make peace. Buddhism says that thoughts and motivations are as important as actions, so he was a peacemaker. Blessed be his memory.