I Admitted that I was Powerless over my Obsession with Bernie Sanders, that my Life had become Unmanageable.

Sadly, it was true. When I woke up to write in the morning, I scanned Facebook for pro-Bernie articles instead, and lamented over the N.Y. Times pro-Hillary slant. I wasn’t getting anything written, nor was I billing the nursery schools and libraries where I performed daily as Robert the Guitar Guy.

One morning I dared to ask why, and I got my answer. I had made a connection in my mind between Bernie Sanders and my Bronx-born father, dead thirty years. I thought I had achieved closure with my father’s death. My relationship to that event seemed solid, but like quicksand, when pressure was applied, it liquefied. And the pressure came in the form of Sanders. My father had spent a lifetime preaching the dangers of the political power of corporations. The millionaires and billionaires. Like Sanders, he was formidable, kind, and Jewish. My father picketed the War in Vietnam all the way back in 1965. He had funny stories about his uncle, the union organizer, who had a dynamic career in labor relations until he started obsessing about balding, and spent his days on the fire escape, rubbing oil into his scalp. But one day, back in 1985, when I was a newly-minted lawyer living in California, I got a call from my mother that my funny, idealistic dad had died suddenly on the tennis court.

My obsession about the Sanders campaign signals that there is still mourning for my father, trapped, unacknowledged, in my heart. I’ve got to do more than Feel the Bern. I’ve got to go to that place, thirty years ago, when my world changed, never to be the same. Fathers die. My life is more than good. But the loss of my dad shook me to the core, and, if I allow, it still does. If I don’t go there, I’ll have to read every damned piece about Bernie Sanders until election day. By the way, November 3rd, Election Day, was my father’s birthday.

I am hoping that I can learn that turning my back on Bernie Sanders, even for a few days, is not turning my back on my father; that if Bernie doesn’t get elected, it doesn’t mean losing Dad twice.