Santayana’s famous quote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” fits here because if nothing else, I expect I will be repeating myself a lot, at least in the beginning, during the middle, and at the end…
Continue reading about Why some stories get repeated and others forgotten
Today’s Science Times section (my favorite section of The New York Times) has an article titled Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain.
While older brains may seem less acute than whippersnapper brains, they apparently have a much better ability to absorb and process information better than the baby brains and can view words, ideas, [...]
Continue reading about New York Times Feature “Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain”
Grandma Sue just turned 98 on April 7th (although her birth certificate says she was born on May 2, 1910, and she says she was born during Passover that year, which only ran until May 1, 1910, so this is the subject of a whole ‘nother story), and she still plays bridge, listens to the Metropolitan Opera every Saturday morning during the season, reads The New Yorker weekly, and tries to walk 500 steps a day.
At her birthday party Saturday night (incidentally, my grandfather Aaron, her husband, would have turned 100 years old that night, along with Bette Davis), she attributed her longevity to walking and to not eating potato chips because they’re junk. The attendees went briefly silent, realizing that their lust for the fried potato would be the death of them, but anyway…
Grandma can certainly be repetitive (the usual: Have you been eating? Do you have any friends? Are you putting money into the bank?), but in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that she repeats certain anecdotes to me with regularity.
My only significant experience with Alzheimer’s Disease was my cousins’ grandmother, who developed it sometime in the early 80s.
When I saw her for the last time in 1989, she and I sat on matching bar stools while she discussed the mess of menstruation. It was this continuous loop about the blood and leaking maxipads and [...]
Continue reading about If I Had Alzheimer’s, What Would Be The Last Thing I’d Remember?