crack open a cold one with my boys trump ice

Gomez says that the combination of a leaked draft executive order suggesting that legal immigrants could be deported for turning to public assistance within their first five years of arrival, as well as local ICE sweeps-and stories about raids and arrests elsewhere-are making immigrants afraid to give their information to service providers.ĪCCFB has one of the largest SNAP outreach programs among food banks nationwide. Another 54 Spanish-speaking households that pre-qualified for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program turned down the opportunity to apply.

In other words, I hope Meals on Wheels would have been there to show a mean old lady some compassion.Īt the Alameda County Community Food Bank in the San Francisco Bay area, 40 families recently requested that their food stamps be cancelled, according to Liz Gomez, ACCFB’s associate director of client services. If they hadn’t been able to do that, I can only hope that Meals on Wheels would have been around to help her before she slipped back to the place where hunger made it impossible to finish a sentence, or stand up from the kitchen table, or put in her dentures. My grandma survived those two years between hospice stays because my aunts split up the responsibility of taking care of her. After a few healthy meals, they sent her back home, and we made sure someone went to her trailer at least once a day to check that she ate and to ration out just enough scotch to keep her withdrawal tremors at bay. What we had been convinced were signs that she was nearing death-exhaustion, weakness, confusion-turned out to be malnutrition. Two years earlier, when my grandmother was admitted to that hospice the first time, she only stayed for two weeks. I hope Meals on Wheels would have been there to show a mean old lady some compassion. My aunt didn’t mention her plan to have Cleo euthanized shortly after the service. My aunt finally broke the silence with a long story about my grandmother’s legendarily mean tortoiseshell cat, Cleo, who lashed out at anyone within striking distance. When the nurse leading the service offered us the opportunity to share a warm memory about her life, we all shifted uncomfortably in our seats as we struggled to think of one. We held her memorial service in the same room that she died in-another first for the house’s staff. Once, when a hospice worker took her outside to spend some time in the sun, she dismissed the house’s small garden as “prissy bullshit.” When a volunteer dropped a curler during an attempt to wash and set her hair, she snapped that she “didn’t have that much time left, and didn’t want to waste it fumbling around.” When a grief counselor asked her what she’d miss about her life, she answered “gimlets and a fucking cigarette.” She wasn’t an easy woman to care for during her life, and she wasn’t any different when she was dying. The second time she was admitted, she spent a month fighting off the beleaguered staff’s attempts at kindness while she settled into an uncharacteristically peaceful death. My grandmother had the dubious honor of being the only person to check into her hospice house two separate times. I’m guessing, based on Mulvaney’s argument that cutting the program’s funding is the “compassionate” thing to do, that he hasn’t watched someone nearly die from malnutrition.

Crack open a cold one with my boys trump ice