Comments on: mary’zine #40: September 2009 http://editorite.com/2009/09/24/mary%e2%80%99zine-40-september-2009/ It all started when I deluded myself into thinking my opinions mattered--Dilbert Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:28:25 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Susan Lockary http://editorite.com/2009/09/24/mary%e2%80%99zine-40-september-2009/#comment-144 Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:25:08 +0000 http://editorite.com/?p=484#comment-144 About 5 minutes after reading your new entry I came across this in a book written by a brain surgeon: “My husband & I can waste inordinate amounts of time in arguing over which one of us came up with a certain brilliant idea, exchanging accusations of faulty memory…Neither of us gives in. This makes me think that the memory network must also be tied strongly to whatever cortical regions control ego, but I haven’t seen any studies on this.” Now I’m not sure exactly how this relates to what you were saying about memory…but it seemed important when I marked the page….I guess your image of a clean part of one’s mind standing outside the rest of it to monitor and assist one’s own memory could then include standing outside one’s own ego, monitoring and assisting defensive responses. Looking myself in the eye, “Hey, you don’t have to be right all day, and that probably wasn’t even an attack. Chill out.” I like that. Record it, hit repeat as needed.

But fear of dementia is real. I’m dealing with parent (or in-law) #2 fading into oblivion, scrambling past with present (she’s my sister, she’s my daughter), stuck in the ancient same thought loop for seven re-tellings within one breath. My own “strategy to avoid all this” is to acquire a nice bottle of pills and hope I can discern when the moment of permanently diminished returns has arrived, thereby sparing everyone around me a lot of heartache and diaper changes. It’s probably as doomed a strategy as yours, but what the heck. Keeps me going.

]]>