Unsettling Coherency

My grandfather is now in a nursing home.

It was a matter of time, really. He has been in steady decline for the past year and a half and the dementia dominates his reason and ability.

Visiting him on Saturday was wrenching. It was our first visit to him in the facility and we had to come to terms with the fact that Grandpa is never coming home again. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen my grandfather outside of Aquebogue, and now this is going to be the new normal until he eventually passes. Grandpa's frailty was expected, but it was jarring to see him in this situation.

Most of what he said was incoherent, but whether that incoherency was due to the dementia or his hoarseness was hard to determine. There were only two moments in which he spoke loudly and clearly. One of his clearer and relevant sentences was about the way the roof in the facility covered the air conditioning unit. The other topic that he spoke clearly about was more unsettling.

"Did you hear?"
"Hear what, Grandpa?"
"Death."
"What? What death?"
"No one died?"
"No. Why do you say that?"
"Oh, I thought that you had heard that someone died."
"No, I haven't heard that. I've heard a lot of happy things lately: news of people getting pregnant, giving birth, weddings, and engagements."
"Oh, ok."

That last part, my attempt to lighten up the conversation, was true. And I actually did have a wedding to go to immediately after visiting him. It was a fun wedding with good booze and spectacularly free dancing. We had a great time, and I had a little too good of a time, because I was rewarded with a moderate hangover the next morning.

In the name of recovery, we canceled our plans to attend a young cousin's birthday party and instead lounged about at my dad's house while we were getting our laundry done. When he found out that we were visiting, he took a break from work to stop in and chat for a bit.

It was our usual catching up. As is his custom, he asked what we had been up to and let us talk about the wedding and grandpa visit for a while before talking about himself. He said that it had been a sad night at the track. When I asked why, he began telling me things I already knew about one of the drivers that had just left the team. After a while, I asked again, why was it a sad night? And he begins talking about another driver who drove before that, and then more about the driver before that. This third person that he spoke about was a good friend of his that had wanted to stay driving on the team, but the team didn't have enough money to maintain a car that was worthy of his talent. Still, they remained friends and the man kept flying over from Connecticut to be a fill-in driver for other cars on the track. He was supposed to be at the track this past weekend, but he missed the first drivers' meeting. As consequence, they arranged for his car to start the race in last place. Hours later, he still hadn't shown up. When the news that a small plane had crashed in Connecticut and taken the lives of its two passengers, people began to realize why he wasn't at the track.

I don't think my dad has ever lost a good friend in his age group to a tragic accident before. He was shaken, and, as expected, not dealing with it well. At several points in his meandering debriefing, I was concerned that his mind was deteriorating like his father's. Of course, after the truth came out, it was crystal-clear that his mind wasn't going, it was just that he didn't want to admit the truth because he was still having a hard time believing it.

I didn't have the same difficulty processing the news. Not only because I barely knew this man, but also because my grandfather had warned me the day before.

"Oh. I thought that you had heard that someone had died."

Grandpa said that at one in the afternoon -- right at the time the news reports say that Teddy's plane went down.

Customs and Capitalism

How can a family not hold funeral or wake services for a sixteen year-old?

Until this point, I've had a really open and unfazed attitude toward the cultural differences between my students and myself. I am aware that the attitudes, behaviors, and styles so many people in my cultural cohort see as negative are markers that demonstrate the divide between the culture of poverty and the culture of wealth. I realize that poverty is systemic and people should not be judged unfairly because of how and where they were raised. But, I never would have thought that a family and its community wouldn't be able to provide remembrance services for a kind and respectful sixteen year-old boy. It shocks and saddens me. Not to cheapen the genuine sentiments of those who paid their respects more unofficially, but is a candle and note-strewn wall in the middle of a housing project the best we can do for the memory of this child? And why hasn't the school stepped up yet to even acknowledge Adam's passing? Is the statute of limitations for officially recognizing the death of a sixteen year-old merely a week to the date of death?

I can't shake the feeling that the death of this sweet boy is being swept under the rug. At first, the school claimed that they were being restrained by Chancellor's Regulations about the protocol for student deaths, but that excuse surely can no longer stand.

I had always assumed that tragically unhonored deaths belonged to individuals who were invariably older and also likely friendless or very poor. I had always thought that society would step up and give appropriate recognition and respect to the deaths of children and teenagers.

This past week has made me feel so nihilistic about a human's place in this world. Our impact only officially matters if our families have means to provide recognition and remembrances.

Physical Soul

Just saw a special on out-of-body experiences that posited that the goings-on of the mind are actually a quantum structure of consciousness that exists outside the mind. Obviously, this lends itself to the theory that the soul is eternal and that we are all connected within an order beyond ourselves. These ideas really appeal to me and, without the scientific jargon to shape them, had comprised my spiritual beliefs for a few years now. Ever since my grandparents died, in spite of my rejection of organized religion, I knew that our souls (or energies or whatever you want to call it) would continue to interact, maybe sporadically, and that I would be with them again. Sometimes, when I dream about them, I wonder if it's happening already.

What has struck me, however, is how this theory might interact with how we conceptualize mental health. What if Dissociative Identity Disorder was the competition of more than one quantum consciousness? Which personality would be the dominant or true consciousness? What if depression or general malaise was caused by poor interactions of the quantum consciousnesses that are beyond the person's corporeal control? What if schizophrenia indicated that a person's quantum consciousness was under attack? What if...?

All the more reason to spread love and good energy around.

Schism

Politics fuels itself off of divisions and platitudes that distort and/or magnify those divisions. A contest in which the two sides throw platitudes and one another will go nowhere, as the arguments are not framed in stasis with one another. Only through reasoned logic can stasis be achieved, and in arguments which even have the slightest speck of a theological tinge, logic can never be enough.

To have is to not have

Possession is an illusion that our conceited psyches project upon things and other people. The only thing that one can possess is oneself, and even that could be up for debate in less individualistic cultures.

The problem with psychology

Having a large vocabulary for labels of people does not mean that one actually understands people. Quite the opposite, by focusing on the definitions and dynamics of the labels, one is distracted from true understanding of the very people these labels supposedly represent. In this case, understanding is instead circumvented by thought that turns inward in the pursuit of classifications which understand labels and categories, not nuanced and changing people.

The basis for "abnormal" psychology is this: Person X shares characteristics with Group Y of people therefore they all share Z Problem. Even if we do accept the judgement that Person X actually does share Group Y characteristics (which are classified with Q label) and that this judgement is not erroneous, does that really mean Person X has Z Problem which is given Q Label? Or, even if Person X has Z Problem, does that mean that the nature of Z Problem is because of the qualities that are shared with Group Y? As one can see, in labeling people this way, there's a conflation of correlation and causality that impedes actually understanding people. Instead, labels are projected.

Ironic -- how the development of vocabulary to discuss people and their problems detracts from understanding people and their problems.

Have to go tutor. Will revisit this topic soon.