Grief

“I love you until the end of time.”

by Mich

SLAIN COP’S WIDOW RECEIVES STANDING OVATION IN PACKED ST. PAT’S

The young widow of slain NYPD officer Jason Rivera delivered a gut-wrenching eulogy at his funeral Friday in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“You have the whole nation on gridlock and although you won’t be here anymore, I want you to live through me,” Dominique Luzuriaga said before the packed church on Fifth Avenue.

Moving eulogy by cop’s widow

Jason “is so happy” that you all came to honor him and the service “is exactly how he would have wanted to be remembered. Like a true hero,” she said.

“I love you until the end of time,” she said of the man who had been her sweetheart since grade school. They had been married for just over three months.

“We’ll take the watch from here,” she told mourners at St. Patrick’s Cathedral as they gave her a standing ovation. 

Dominique and Jason had an argument before he left for work that fatal Friday. “It’s hard being a cop’s wife sometimes,” she said.

Later that day, when she heard that Jason, 22, and his partner Wilbert Mora, 27, had been gunned down during a domestic violence call in Harlem, she was racked with guilt.

Moving eulogy by cop’s widow
Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora

“Seeing you in a hospital bed, not hearing you when I was talking to you broke me,” she told the congregation.

“I said to you, Wake up baby, I’m here. The little bit of hope I had that you would come back to life just to say goodbye or say I love you one more time had left. I was lost. I’m still lost. Today I’m still in this nightmare.”

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Tokin’ with Jesus

by Mich

Last night was brain fever night. That’s my name for it. I don’t know if it’s a medical condition or not. A sudden attack of hallucinations and brain shudders. Like a bad trip on LSD.

I don’t know what brings it on, out of the blue, or rather out of the darkness of midnight. Unless it was the four gin and tonics, three beers and two brandies. But I’ve drunk that much before without a brain fever attack.

Maybe it was the Xanax at bedtime that went on a diabolical rage with the alcohol already streaming in my blood.

You can’t sleep. You lie in bed and ride it out like a storm in hell. Around four o’clock in the morning, the waking nightmare begins to abate. Finally you sleep, mainly from the exhaustion of the battle.

The doctor told me my liver was more like a die-r, and to knock off the booze. I don’t see how. Drinking is my last pleasure. Like smoking cigarettes and grass was to my wife. And when she fell ill and was told not to smoke, she still smoked.

And now she’s tokin’ with Jesus.

My wife was a believer, especially when she was high. I try to be, but I can’t get there. Jesus was always high. So were his disciples.

As Matthew relates (14:24): But the boat by this time was a long way from the land, beaten by the waves, for the wind was against them. And he [Jesus] came to them, walking on the sea. … So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus.

If you get high, man, you can do anything.

As the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia said:

Brain fever night

Getting high on the Universe is cool and I can do that, but taking it a step further, maybe if you get high on Jesus, you end up getting high with Jesus.

I don’t know, man — just keep tokin’.

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Nights in the spirit world

by Mich

In my grief-induced, covid-enforced world of solitary inertia, the line between movies and reality is becoming thinner. And clearly, the adventure-horror-fantasy world of film is far preferable.

The basic provisions needed to sustain oneself in this world are a modicum of actual food and a multitude of salty chips and salsa dip. Spirits are essential. Not the ghostly kind — I have five of those in the lowly bungalow, each of whom make frequent appearances during my binges of spirituality. I refer, of course, to the 80 proof spirits in the liquor cabinet — gin, rum, vodka, tequila, whiskey and brandy.

Which reminds me, I am out of Bombay London Dry Gin for tonight. I do have a small bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin (from their same 1761 recipe). As if the 86 proof gin wasn’t strong enough, the Bombay Spirits Company was kind enough to make the 94 proof Sapphire. So tonight I will have that.

On second thoughts, since I’ll be watching (for the umpteenth time) the 1971 New York drug crime classic ‘The French Connection,’ I’ll make this a whiskey night.

The other spirits in the house, the ghostly ones, will have to endure a steady stream of comments from their garrulous survivor, but I don’t think they mind. So far, I haven’t heard any complaints. In fact, I haven’t heard anything from any one of them, which is a constant disappointment to me. Every night I ask them to chime in when they feel like it, but never a peep.

When the movies end, the sadness kicks in. A kick in the gut, a punch in the heart. I would give every bottle of booze in the liquor cabinet for one night with S. Of course, I wouldn’t have to. She was a drinker too. It was sort of a hobby with us. We would begin drinking at cocktail hour — five o’clock in the shorter nights of summer; four o’clock in the long dark nights of winter.

It’s dark already and it’s only three o’clock. That’s because of the thunderstorm moving in. It’s going to be a long night.

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