The heart of the matter burns

ME TO MOM: Sun, Dec 24, 2017, 12:03 PM Bernie is on CNN - Jake Tapper

MOM TO ME: Tue, Dec 26, 2017, 5:45 AM: What did Bernie have to say on CNN? i missed it.

I remember when my 78-year-old mother told me she was moving from Waco back to the San Francisco Bay Area. I was standing outside the neo-Gothic library at King's College London, where I was earning my long-anticipated M.A. in Eighteenth-Century Studies. I wasn't behaving like someone my age, so why should she?

"Mom, you should not be moving so much (she had just moved to Waco from Alice, Texas the year before). Please, Mom, at least promise me this will be your last move."

"I won't promise that."

Bernie, my mother died after a catheterization on her heart. I won't get too much into it except to say had she not been packing boxes in the heat and running to doctors to check on the pain in her chest, she might be alive today. I don't know that for a fact, but her doctor told me, "We were doing it at this time because your mother was moving." She had turned 79 on August 15, 2018, and died exactly a week later, three days after my birthday.

Senator Sanders, your life is more important than running for President. You have already changed this nation. Your upending of the status quo will live on for decades, perhaps centuries. You are already in the history books. But you do not yet want to be history.

Your doctors may not tell you; your wife may not tell you; your friends may not tell you but I will. You are too fragile to pursue this. No one at 78 should be running for President anyway. It is a far more demanding job than working in an office, and at 58 I get tired from the 9 to 5.

What are you trying to prove? I realize aging is scary and death even scarier, but you are acting like my mom. On the one hand it's noble that this resplendent Southern woman was doing yoga and cracking jokes right up until the end, but I would prefer her cooking pot roast in Waco, listening to me whine about my job search.

Today was a beautiful day with AOC's support. But you know in your heart these days are numbered if you continue. My mother adored you and if she could speak from beyond, I know she'd ask you to please bow out. Show the country just how big that heart really is, and do it for your family, your friends, and all of us.

Photo: By Jake Bucci - Bernie Sanders, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46941765