Good morning.
I
usually consider Consumer Reports to
be a useful and reliable source of information.
In the case of one recent post from them, however, I thought they were
wrong. It was a short piece on how to
load your dishwasher, and the author asserted that with modern dishwashers, it
is not necessary to rinse dishes before putting them in the dishwasher (other
than removing excess food).
Baloney.
I
remind myself a couple of times per year of the adage "the definition of
insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different
result." Perhaps every six months I
try putting unrinsed dishes in the dishwasher.
The result is always the same:
some bits and pieces of food baked on the dishes. Why do I keep trying? It may be that that approach works if one
takes the dishes directly from the dining table to the dishwasher and runs it
immediately—which we rarely do because the dishwasher isn't usually full enough
to warrant running it. Even then it
doesn't work that well, especially if something like cheese has been microwaved
onto a plate. Perhaps we have a lousy
dishwasher—but I don't think so, because at least in terms of price, it was in
the mid/upper range.
Nope,
their advice was just wrong.
* * *
Most
of you no doubt saw the news about the nasty obituary that the two children of
a deceased woman put in the Redwood Falls
Gazette. (If you missed it, here's a
summary: http://www.startribune.com/son-who-wrote-humiliating-obit-about-mom-we-wanted-to-get-the-last-word/484867381/
) I sent a news clip (before the son
came forward) to Elliott. He wrote back.
"Yeah,
just remember there's only one person who has absolute authority over the
contents of your obituary so you better be nice :P That's pretty tacky though. To say the
least. Whether warranted or not." I
agreed, and then sent him the clip where the son was interviewed. His observation coincided with mine: "Sounds like a whole collection of
bitter and vindictive people." It
appears that those two kids had plenty to be angry about, but I'm pretty sure
venting the anger in an obituary like that isn't the way to address it. Better to have seen a therapist.
That incident prompted me to
update my own obituary (yes, I've drafted it).
Elliott and Kathy better use it!
* * *
Dream
phenomenon: The details of a recent
dream are unimportant. I had a dream
(one I actually remembered) that involved Elliott. He still lived at home and we were sitting
around in the living room talking one night.
He made the most insulting, derogatory comments to me, that my life was
a waste, that I had accomplished nothing, that I was not worth knowing,
etc. I then told him he needed to move
out within the next day or so and also (with no thought about Kathy or my own
financial future) gave away all my retirement funds so that Elliott couldn't
inherit them; I donated them widely. That
was the end of the dream. Dreams are
weird, as we know. (No, Elliott has
never made any kind of remarks like that!)
I
told Kathy about this dream and she observed that it is rare that those closest
to us appear in dreams. Elliott has
rarely, if ever before this, been in my dreams, nor has Kathy or Krystin or
Pat. Kathy said that neither her son
Spencer nor her mother been in hers. I
wonder if there's any dream research on this point—or it's just idiosyncratic
to the two of us (which seems unlikely).
Perhaps more likely is that we just don't remember. . . .
* * *
As we all know, what's considered sound medical advice
can change over time. One recent study,
however, caught my attention. From
Science Daily:
A
new study authored by scientists from the American Cancer Society, the Harvard
T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and more
than 20 other medical centers and organizations finds that higher circulating
vitamin D concentrations are significantly associated with lower colorectal
cancer risk. This study strengthens the evidence, previously considered
inconclusive, for a protective relationship. Optimal vitamin D concentrations
for colorectal cancer prevention may be higher than the current National
Academy of Medicine recommendations, which are based only on bone health.
It was a huge study and appears to have included a
meta-analysis of previous studies as well.
The
article precis is here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180614101241.htm
This
one may be worth having a chat with your physician about if you have any
concern about colorectal cancer. My physician
is taking a look at the study and we'll have a chat about whether a small
vitamin D supplement might be logical.
(For people who drink a lot of milk, like I do, it may not be necessary. One cup of milk = 25% of the U.S. RDA of
vitamin D, and I probably drink 3-4-5-6 cups a day, depending on the events of
the day. But given the study, it may be
that the RDA is too low. And the RDA
itself comes under criticism.) I don't
have the sense, from the language of the report, that they're talking about the
thousands of units of vitamin D that Linus Pauling recommended some years ago,
only about adjusting the RDA for cancer prevention.
* * *
I contemplate the "path of grieving." I'm sure that's not an original phrase. Many of you may remember the work of
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who conceptualized the stages of grief in those who are
terminally ill and who know it. The five
stages originally hypothesized are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and
acceptance. I familiarized myself with
her work when my mother was dying, during the summer of 1989. I have not returned to that literature
since.
Kübler-Ross's
schema has been the subject of considerable criticism in the field. Here are the concluding two paragraphs from
the Wikipedia entry on "Kübler-Ross model" (links to citations omitted):
George
Bonanno, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, in his book The Other Side of Sadness: What the New
Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After a Loss [2009], summarizes
peer-reviewed research based on thousands of subjects over two decades and
concludes that a natural psychological resilience is a principal component of
grief and that there are no stages of grief to pass. Bonanno's work has also
demonstrated that absence of grief or trauma symptoms is a healthy outcome.
The
lack of support in the academic psychology literature has led to the popular
and special interest press applying the labels of myth and fallacy to the
notion that there are stages of grief, in publications ranging from Time magazine to Scientific American to Skeptic
Magazine, the latter publishing findings of the Grief Recovery Institute
that contested the concept of stages of grief as they relate to people who are
dealing with the deaths of people important to them.
Of course this has to do with Krystin's death, as you
might infer. There has been some
research suggesting the stages of grief do exist, but they don't manifest
themselves sequentially (a point Kübler-Ross herself made later) and not
everyone goes through all of them. Even
if they aren't "stages," surely those five emotions are part of the
grieving process in some fashion, all of them for some people and only some of
them for others. In my case, there was
never any denial or bargaining. I don't
have the psychological makeup to deny death when I've looked right at it, nor
do I have a set of beliefs that allows bargaining. The other three? Yes—anger, depression, and—I think in most
recent weeks—acceptance.
Acceptance
is critical. I've wondered whether the
path for me is different from what it might be for others because of the
diaries, blogs, and Facebook posts that Krystin left behind, in addition to the
years of email and text exchanges I had with her. It is surely the case, in the age we live in,
that everyone leaves a written trail of some sort if they ever send emails or
text messages or use Facebook. Unless
you take affirmative steps to delete these compositions, they remain somewhere
in cyberspace for a long time. So any of
us who lose a loved one can, to some extent, assemble the writing of the deceased,
if they wish and have the time and energy.
For all of human history up until the last couple of
decades, when few left behind any written record (except perhaps for letters or
diaries saved), grief consisted of the emotional trauma following death and a
gradual lessening of the pain as time passes.
(That hypothesis isn't original, either, and it's pretty elementary,
captured in "time heals all wounds.")
The loved one fades from daily life, remembered with affection (assuming
an affectionate relationship, of course!), and in many cases remembered less
and less frequently as the years go by. (I
dearly loved my mom, and she was a good friend as well as my mom, but I confess
that I haven't thought of her as much in recent years as I did in the couple of
decades following her death.) I don't
think there's anything immoral or evil about that lessening of remembering;
it's the normal course of human events, for most of us. It's also probably psychologically healthy (that's
pure conjecture).
When I decided to assemble and organize Krystin's writing,
however, it did not immediately occur to me that I would be spending time on a
daily basis with her for months. I am
reading her 2-3 hours per day as I collect pieces from the web, email, and text,
all of which have to be copied and pasted into a Word document before they can
be edited. I am also seeing her because she liked to include
photos in much of what she wrote. Because
I don't know yet where I'm going with all this material, I'm erring on the side
of including much; I'm sure much of what I'm copying and pasting I will discard. The upshot, however, is that my self-appointed
task hasn't permitted Krystin to fade even slightly from my life. I can't decide if this is good or bad. For the most part it seems to me good; I can now
work with her Facebook posts and her emails to me without emotional strain (well,
98% of the time, anyway). Without acceptance
I am certain that I'd quickly run away from this work.
I do want to bring this project to a conclusion. I originally thought to complete it within a
year after Krystin died, but I won't make that deadline; there's just too much
material to organize and work with. So
perhaps sometime in early 2019.
* * *
Apropos of my musings about life in 130 years: In the course of collecting my email
exchanges with Krystin, I came across an excerpt from an Aeon piece that I sent to her (and to Kathy and Elliott) in March
of 2015. A very different speculation on
aspects of life in 100 years, several elements of which I find frightening. (It's a few paragraphs, out of a longer
article, but worth a read:)
In
100 years it will not be acceptable to use genderised words such as ‘he’ or
‘she’, which are loaded with centuries of prejudice and reduce a spectrum of
greys to black and white. We will use the pronoun ‘heesh’ to refer to all
persons equally, regardless of their chosen gender. This will of course apply
not only to humans, but to all animals.
It
will be an offence to eat any life-form. Once the sophistication, not only of
other animals, but also of plants has been recognised, we will be obliged to
accept the validity of their striving for life. Most of our food will be
synthetic, although the consumption of fruit – ie, those parts of plants that
they willingly offer up to be eaten – will be permitted on special occasions: a
birthday banana, a Christmas pear.
We
will not be permitted to turn off our smartphones – let alone destroy them –
without their express permission. From the moment Siri started pleading with
heesh’s owners not to upgrade to a newer model, it became clear that these
machines contained a consciousness with interests of heesh’s own. Old phones
will instead be retired to a DoSSBIS (Docking Station for Silicon-Based
Intelligent Systems).
Privacy
will have been abolished, and regarded as a cover for criminality and
hypocrisy. It will be an offence to use a pseudonym online – why would anyone
do this except to abuse or deceive others? – and all financial transactions of
any kind, including earnings and tax payments – will automatically appear on
the internet for all to see. With privacy, prudishness too will disappear; for
example, wearing a bikini or trunks to go swimming will be seen as no less
absurd than bathing in a bow-tie and top hat.
In
100 years, the idea that ordinary humans – prone to tiredness and drunkenness,
watery eyes and sneezing fits – could be in sole charge of weapons, cars or
other dangerous objects will cause the average citizen to shudder. All driving,
fighting and arresting will be done by silicon-based intelligent systems that
are prone neither to a tipple nor to hay fever.
Wasting
water will be regarded with the same horror that we now regard the spilling of
blood: as a squandering of the stuff of life. Those who flushed toilets with
water of drinking quality (everyone in the industrialised world) will be put on
a par with those who shot the last tigers.
Well,
maybe. Perhaps some of these predictions will come true, perhaps not. In some
cases, the opposite might happen: a resurgence of the right to privacy that
will armour-plate our personal space, making it unthinkable, even indecent,
that anyone would ever reveal their real name online; or a movement for human
accountability that derides reliance on automated systems – whether in our
cars, phones and elsewhere – as an abdication of responsibility. But one thing
is certain: in 100 years, ordinary people will look back at us and shake their
heads, wondering how we could have been so irresponsible, so venal, so morally
short-sighted.
Norms
and values change. Think for a moment of the world in 1915. It is the world of
just a few generations ago – depending on your age, somewhere between your
parents and your great-great-grandparents. It was a time of world wars in which
swathes of people were regularly dehumanised as preparation for conquest or
killing; a time in which sexism, racism, imperialism, anti-Semitism and
homophobia were not just accepted, but expected, even required.
These
prejudices all still exist, of course. But in large parts of the world
momentous shifts in our values have made them increasingly unacceptable. We
authors, a Briton and a German, are writing this essay together in a peaceful
and unified Berlin. This city is now in the heart of a continent-wide union of
nations that, according to its treaties, is founded on ‘pluralism,
non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women
and men’. And we write in between looking after our respective children while
our respective wives are at work, doing jobs that would have been closed to
their grandmothers.
(Unfortunately, given the character and beliefs of the current
occupant of the White House, their concluding two paragraphs don't ring quite
as true as they did even a few years ago.)
Krystin's response was similar to mine.
What
a good article, thanks for sharing. I
don't like the idea of this "heesh" thing, though. Also, this sounds like it could be written as
a more modern version of 1984! . . . [She
didn't like several of the projections, but] I guess in 100 years, the children
born during that time won't know anything difference, so even though it's
disgusting to think about for us, it'll be the norm for them. Thus are the advantages and disadvantages of
change! Like they wrote in the article,
some changes are for the better, some for the worse.
This vision (or imagined possibilities) is at the other
end of the spectrum from mine. I think most
changes will be at the margins. I cannot,
however, dismiss these as absurd.
Enough
for today. With warm wishes—
Gary
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