Neuro Changes

When They Happen To Your Friends

Nuance and individual variation is slowly entering the conversation about death and dying.

How we look at the changing mental states that accompany aging is still pretty one-dimensional. We see it as awful.

Maybe we can grudgingly accept a little bit of purely cognitive decline, forgetfulness. But anything beyond that and into the different forms of Dementia that mean personality change along with major memory loss — no nuance to our reactions at all — just sadness, and fear.

We see some of the things gramma or grampa say as funny, but I know for myself that it’s a shield. Grandparents and then parents acting strange is where the fear starts because they’re where you could easily be headed. The humorous reaction deflects the in-coming fear-bomb.

I was diagnosed with cancer over ten years ago and I have pretty much stopped deflecting Death Thoughts. I created my own curriculum for learning to accept and appreciate my personal extinction and I’ve been following it ever since.

I’m in my 70s, no parents left, lots of good friends have died.

No good friends had shown signs of dementia that I knew of, until we learned what was going on with one of our best friends.