Christopher Handwerger

The Last of Her Kind

About 35 miles outside of Phoenix lives an old woman with a very grandmotherly aura. If she misses your call, her raspy voicemail message says “Hi, it’s Mary Durand. Please forgive me for not being able to answer your call right now, but I swear things will get better soon.” She’s a hippie, or at least a former one, one of the dwindling number of people in the United States who spent portions of the Sixties and Seventies fighting injustice and protesting the war in Vietnam, desperately trying to bring peace to this violent and vile world from the bottom up, who involved themselves in a countercultural revolution which made its way into history starting in Haight-Ashbury. Safe to say, she is no fan of Donald Trump, and got a good, cough-filled laugh out of me referring to him as ‘the Cheeto with a hairpiece on Pennsylvania Avenue.’ She’s lived one hell of a life, to say the least; she’s been engaged to be married three separate times –all of her fiances died before their wedding day–, she spent four years in a convent before deciding the Catholic Church could stick its dogma right back up its ass, and finally settled on a career by taking a job as a social worker who works with convicts on death-row, fighting for life in prison rather than the chair. Her career is now in its twilight, and her legacy of legally battling the death penalty in the US is coming to a close.