Category Archives: Aging & dementia

A haunting bit of writing

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A reader shared an article with me that deserves to be more widely read!

The article, by Nora Lindström, appears online at spacedaily.com.

The lede grabs me, as this is something I think about regularly when mulling over the future of my digital archives, including family photos and recollections, along with the memories, the sights, sounds, smells the photos draw from the depths of memory. My parents and my sister are long dead, but they are still embedded in my memories, and when those are gone they will die a second death. Every generation must face this, but it’s different now that it is our time.

Margaret is seventy-three and keeps a photograph on her dresser of her father in a wool suit, standing on the steps of a Glasgow tenement in 1952, holding a cigarette he hasn’t lit yet. She can tell you what his hands looked like before the arthritis bent them. She can describe the particular way he laughed when something genuinely surprised him, a sound she says she hasn’t heard come out of any other human in fifty years. When she dies, that sound dies. Not the photograph. The sound. The texture of him at twenty-six, standing in a doorway he no longer stands in, alive in a country that no longer exists, held only in the soft tissue of one woman’s brain.

This is the bereavement no one schedules. The 1950s generation — those born roughly between 1946 and 1964, depending on which demographer you ask, which is itself a contested act of naming — is the last cohort whose lived memories of their parents include those parents as young adults. They watched their mothers in housedresses on linoleum kitchens. They watched their fathers come home from factories and offices that have since been demolished or converted into lofts. When they go, those parents go a second time.

Most discussions of grief end at the funeral. The cultural script tells us that mourning has stages, that there is a beginning and a middle and something resembling an end, that you eventually integrate the loss and carry it forward. What the script doesn’t account for is the slow second death of the dead — the moment when the last person who remembers them not as a name on a stone but as a young man slicing an apple, a young woman braiding her hair before a mirror, finally stops breathing.

Read the whole story here.

I didn’t see this coming

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My parents both lived well into their 90s. Both died closer to 100 than to 90.

My dad didn’t retire and transfer his small restaurat supply business to a longtime employee until the end of 1998, weeks after his 85th birthday. He took overnight fishing trips on his 28′ fiberglass fishing boat that had once belonged to Duke Kahanamoku for most of another decade, enabled by a younger crew that handled the boat while my dad went along for the ride.

I used assume that the combination of their excellent genes provided a layer of protection that mere mortals didn’t have, which meant that I would be likely to follow them into a similarly long life.

Silly me.

I should have known this was a far too simplistic view of how our bodies work!

I’m still 16-months short of my 80th birthday, and six years short of my dad’s retirement age.

And now I find myself skating on the thin edge of mortality with a potentially (but not necessarily) life-threatening malady that I’m trying to beat by seeking out top-notch cutting-edge medical treatment in San Francisco. I’ve become a medical commuter.

I’m rolling with it, and right now feel better than any time in the past 6-weeks.

Back on March 16, I announced that I would be taking a “leave of absence” for medical reasons. That has proven more difficult than I thought. Although I’ve tried to press concerns about current events into my mental background, I’ve still found plenty of things to share that might otherwise appear prosaic, but now feel very special–sunrise on a rainy day, the sparkle of sunlight in a cats eye, bits of Hawaii memorabilia found in my files, ginger blossoms along our driveway, stories worth sharing from times past. Small pieces of life as it moves along.

I do appreciate all your positive vibes, and am maintaining an optomistic attitude as we move forward a step at a time.

Pulitzer Prizes Board hits Trump with broad demand for documents

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The headline from Law&Crime.com highlights the dangers of filing a defamation lawsuit, such as the one Trump filed against the Pulitzer Prizes Board after it declined to rescind its 2018 awards to the Washington Post and New York Times for their coverage of the investigation of Russian election interference.

Pulitzer Prize Board members dump broad discovery demands on Trump for tax returns, psych records, and ‘any’ prescription meds history

It sounds like just another boring legal filing in a Florida court case: “DEFENDANTS’ FIRST SET OF REQUESTS FOR THE PRODUCTION OF DOCUMENTS DIRECTED TO PLAINTIFF DONALD J. TRUMP”

But it’s a quiet legal bombshell tossed into the oval office.

The Pulitzer Board’s court filing sets out a long list of requested information related to Trump’s claims that he suffered immense harm from the board’s refusal to rescind the prizes to the two newspapers.

After all, since Trump alleges he has been damaged to the tune of billions of dollars, defendants in the lawsuit have every right to evaluate the claim by examining all the evidence.

And so it begins.

“All Documents and Communications Concerning…,” repeated 42 times, each one requesting information relevant to Trump’s claims that he was damaged by the Pulitzer Board’s actions. The list begins on page 5 of the court filing, in a section headed “Requests for Production.”

The full document is attached below.

But then it gets personal, as defamation cases are wont to do, seeking details of Trump’s finances and financial holdings, assets and liabilities, tax returns “from all jurisdictions,” and last but not least, all documents regarding Trump’s physical and mental health.

33. All of Your tax returns, from all jurisdictions, including all attachments, schedules, and worksheets, for tax years 2015 to the present.

34. Documents sufficient to show all sources of Your income, including but not limited to the dollar figure attributable to each source, from January 1, 2015, to present. For the avoidance of doubt, income includes earned and unearned income.

35. Documents sufficient to show all of Your financial holdings, including but not limited to the financial value of each holding, from January 1, 2015, to present.

36. Documents sufficient to show all compensation, gifts, or items of $100,000 or more in value given to you from January 1, 2015, to present.

37. Documents sufficient to show all assets, including but not limited to the financial value of each asset, held by You, from January 1, 2015, to present.

38. Documents sufficient to show all of Your financial liabilities, including but not limited to the financial value of each financial liability, from January 1, 2010, to present.

39. All Documents and Communications Concerning any financial losses You or any of Your businesses have allegedly incurred as a result of the Board Statement.

40. The “voluminous and comprehensive financial information made available” to the defendants in Donald J. Trump v. Timothy L. O’Brien, et al., Case No. L 545 06 (N.J. Super.Ct.), as referenced in Paragraph 2 of the complaint in that action. See also id. 9 19 (“Trump directed that O’Brien be given complete access to comprehensive information … detailing his holdings, assets and ownership thereof.”)

41. To the extent You seek damages for any physical ailment or mental or emotional injury arising from Counts I-IV of Your Complaint, all Documents (whether held by You or by third parties under Your control or who could produce them at your direction) concerning Your medical and/or psychological health from January 1, 2015, to present, including any prescription medications you have been prescribed or have taken. For the avoidance of doubt, this includes all Documents Concerning Your annual physical examination. To the extent you do not seek such damages in this action, please confirm so in writing.

It’s put up or shut up time for Mr. Trump.

Family history told in a new children’s book

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I received an email three years ago from writer working on a nonfiction picture children’s book “featuring amazing feats by female lighthouse keepers, as well as interesting anecdotes from women in lighthouse families.”

[text]She contacted me after seeing a post here (“Makapuu Lighthouse c.1929 (photo“). In that post, I described an old photo my mother shared with me showing several children, including my mother and her older sister, at the Makapuu Lighthouse.

From that post:

My mother believes this was taken at the Makapuu Lighthouse sometime around 1929. Her uncle (her mother’s half-brother), Alexander Toomey, had been an assistant lighthouse keeper at Makapuu. He was badly burned in an explosion and fire at the lighthouse on April 9, 1925, and died of his injuries.

The author, Kris Coronado, had also found a 1985 interview with Alexander Toomey’s daughter, Julia. The interview by Rick Carroll appeared on the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser in 1985. Coronado wondered if I could put her in touch with anyone in the family who could provide additional info.

Well, one thing led to another, and she was able to reach Julia?s daughter. Using the information gained, Julia Toomey became one of the women whose stories are told in the book.

And the book–Lighthouse Ladies–was published earlier this year and is available from Amazon.com and other booksellers.

And here’s the blurb from the book jacket cover, used as the book description on Amazon.

Ahoy! To man a lighthouse over a century ago in America required guts, courage, and bravery. It was a job tackled by hundreds every day, many of whom . . . were not men! This true tale chronicles the amazing feats of four fascinating women. Each real lighthouse lady featured in this book—whether she’s on a wind-walloped Hawaiian clifftop or an icy channel off the Virginia coast—shows that girl power was around long before it became a popular phrase.