For almost the first time in a year, Kim and I watched MSNBC last night. It was strange to see all the familiar faces that have been absent from our consciousness for the past year. Yesterday was a watershed day on this hilltop. At about 2:30pm, Kim’s brother, Jeff, lost his hard-fought battle and succumbed to the ages of eternity. His twelve-day hospital rollercoaster ride going from ER to ICU to Stroke Ward and back to ICU included two and almost three intubations, several emergency surgeries, countless CT and MRI scans and a seemingly endless supply of whole blood transfusions. He fought a valiant and stoic battle to the end, but finally, as his doctor said after ceasing resuscitation efforts from a code blue crash by almost thirty medical professionals, his lungs simply seized and would no longer admit air in any manner. Perhaps his proudest and greatest moment of defiance came mid-week when he was being revived from a medically induced coma allowing the respirator to breath for him. He was asked if he knew where he was and he said UCSD hospital is LaJolla. He was asked if he knew what year it was and he said 2025. Then they asked him if he knew who was President of the United States and he paused. He said he did know, but that he refused to utter his name. We in this household applaud Jeff Grogg for his bravery and his determined stand in defense of what he believed in to the bitter end.
Kim skipped her show rehearsal last night at the insistence of her fellow musical director. She had spent hours and hours driving to UCSD hospital in LaJolla and being by all of the many bedsides that Jeff inhabited for twelve days in a row. Buddy and I would patiently await her return home at 10:30pm each night, sometimes direct from the hospital and sometimes from her rehearsal studio by way of the hospital. No sister ever did more for her brother in his moment of need and no director ever did more for her show in its final push to the curtain, all in the face of great and soul-wrenching challenges than Kim did during the past fortnight. As we sat and ate our leftover chili, which I had reheated for us and that Kim had made on Sunday to both feed me for the week, but also feed our friend Faraj, whose wife Yasuko is away in Japan for a month, our news feeds started buzzing with election night results. Oh yeah….amidst all this drama surrounding our household, America was giving its one-year report card to President Donald Trump in a mix of elections that spanned several key gubanatorial races, state Supreme Court ratifications. the highest electoral turnout race for Mayor of NYC since 1969 and a lone California referendum on redistricting the state to combat Trump’s manipulation of the Texas electoral districting to preclude a 2026 landslide victory for Democrats in the U. S. House of Representatives elections that might well position him for his third impeachment. It was quite an emotional night all-around. That’s when Kim, who, God bless her, had a few other things on her mind, juggling bereavement literature from the hospital and musical scores and staging diagrams from her show, turned to me as I soothed Buddy’s loneliness with a belly rub (something that was usually Kim’s job each night), and said, “we should turn on MSNBC.”
I had to remind myself where to find MSNBC on Hulu (the portal we choose to use despite its ownership by Disney, that symbol of 2025 corporate Trump pandering). The Chiron said it all…Democrats had won Virginia and New Jersey governor races in landslides. Every single county in Virginia , the state most impacted by both the Trump/Musk DOGE rampage and the ongoing federal government shutdown, had swung decidedly from Republican to Democratic. Pennsylvania. always the linchpin swing state these days, reaffirmed three Democratic Supreme Court justices to maintain the crucial Democratic balance of power on that high judicial bench. New York City, where my daughter and granddaughters live and where Kim and I lived for many years and met in our mid-life search for love, had overwhelmingly voted for Zohran Mamdani as their next Mayor. This center of global finance, where Trump was raised and where he thrashed about pretending to be a charismatic and capable deal guy, had elected the anti-Trump of anti-Trumps to rebalance the social justice books on a city gone Sodom & Gomorrah in its wealth and affordability differential. How ironic to hear the captains of finance like Jamie Diamond and Bill Ackman bow to Mamdani like Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos had to Trump one year ago.
Those results came in timely to us on our west coast hilltop. The California redistricting proposition was just starting to trickle in results. Kim and I spoke of cremation providers and funeral urns, since we had been tasked by Jeff’s wife Lisa to handle his final affairs for her on this difficult night. There was a strange calmness that overtook our living room as Rachel Maddow and Ali Velshi analyzed the California Election results while Chris Hayes and Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed Virginia Democratic legislators beaming from ear to ear. By the time I had picked a crematorium, Kim had chosen a lovely walnut urn and I was crafting an epitaph to have engraved on the urn (“A self-made man with a rock ‘n’ roll soul”), the California proposition outcome had been called by MSNBC as a landslide approval of some 2-to-1 proportions. Gavin Newsom, who had almost single-handedly made Prop 50 happen, got up to speak. He explained how this had all come to pass. It was a simple case of the need to organize for positive democratic change rather than agonize over abusive autocracy. We have all done enough agonizing for the past year. Now it’s time to stand up, be strong and organize.
Jeff likely did what many of us did a few weeks ago when the lone Proposition 50 ballot hit our mailboxes. He ticked the approval box and sent the ballot back in. He was racked and agonized with pain from his many afflictions just like our country has been racked with similar unfair cancerous ways. Jeff did not live to see the grand electoral day outcome that Tuesday November 4th, 2025 brought to us, but he would be proud to see Americans fight back the way we did that day, just like he spent his last day pushing back on the darkness until the light of salvation could break the hold.