Remembering what one reads

Nice thing about dementia is that you are always making new friends. You can hide your own Easter eggs. Buy your own presents and be surprised on Christmas morning.

I’m not sure where the sentiments above came from but they are accurate. I guess. While my memory is probably not what it once was (which was never great), I still remember things like doctor appointments, shopping lists, car keys, etc. I will admit that I have long used strategies of keeping lists on my phone, my calendar updated, and items, like keys, always in one place. Our technology has delayed, if not the loss, at least the impact of the loss, of human memory.

In conversation with a friend one evening, I bemoaned the fact that I often forget almost everything about a book soon after reading it. I could read the same mystery every year and still be surprised at the twisted conclusion. I find myself often going to Goodreads to help me remember the plot and setting of a book - and especially my reaction to it in the review.

But what Laura, a high school English teacher, said after my complaint was “Sometimes you should just enjoy the experience of the book while reading it.”

And on reflection, that is what I usually do, especially my “junk food” reading of mysteries and science fiction and the latest silly bestseller. Most of my movie watching is not to learn or be emotionally or intellectually deepened, but to simply pass the time in an interesting way. Some authors write such good “junk reading” that I re-read them over and over - Connelly, Child, and McDonald, especially.

I will remember Laura’s comment the next time I berate myself for not concentrating more on my books. I will just enjoy them. 

Or at least I will try to remember.

To-do tasks before I kick the bucket

I do not like to dwell on my own mortality. I am not particularly concerned about my ultimate demise nor am I particularly fearful of it. I totally agree with Woody Allen’s sentiment above. 

But ya just never know. Traffic accidents, home repair projects, heart attacks, jealous husbands, and my own cooking are all existential threats (see my last post). Should I leave this life unexpectedly, I would like to leave it so that it is not a big bother for kids. 

Among the tasks I am working on:

Downsizing personal property. I’ve done a pretty good job of this already, living in an uncluttered 850 sq ft townhouse. My single car garage has room for my car and a few things like garden tools and camping equipment. All my clothes should fit in one or two car loads to the Goodwill store. I’m not much of a book collector, but I suppose I could sort through the ones I still own in paper format. I suspect before the end I will be living is some sort of senior housing with even much less space than I have now, so maybe this will take care of itself.

Digitizing records/photos/family movies. I don’t have a lot of paper stuff, but I would like to eliminate all of it. I’ve converted all my old VHS tapes to mp4s, but I have a lot of scanning of old photos and documents which I can’t seem to work up much enthusiasm to do. I am not sure what to do with the old paper stuff. (I have given my kids access to my passwords already.)

Creating will and health directive. This one is actually done. I used an online program to make a simple will, had it notarized and have sent copies to each of my children. This includes a health care directive and property release statement. My kids only have to decide if they want their inheritance in ten or twenty dollar bills.

Arranging for funeral stuff. I have made arrangements to donate my body to the University of Minnesota’s Anatomy Bequest Program on my death (the act that spurred this post.) After organ donations, students will slice and dice and then I will cremated with my ashes going to a common burial site in a local cemetery. No muss, no fuss, no expense to my kids, maybe some benefit to science. They say, after all, that cremation is the last chance most of us will have to have a flaming hot body. 

Creating the happy 100. I don’t want a funeral, but a nice family dinner after my passing would be nice. For the occasion, I plan to create a “Happy 100” slideshow made up of photographs taken throughout my life when I have been the happiest. While I have not been immune to sadness, my joyful days have greatly outnumbered the painful ones. I’d like people to remember that.

Identifying memorabilia. While I don’t think of myself as a hoarder, I have managed to collect a lot of art on my travels around the world. My long term project is to create a spreadsheet of each item with a photo, date and location of purpose, and any information about it. None of the stuff has much monetary value as far as I know, but I get a kick out of seeing my painting from Arusha, Tanzania each time I enter my house, reminding me of my Kilimanjaro climb. 

Completing another book. My professional blogging days are done. What gets posted in the Blue Skunk now is personal. I would like to collate some of the posts collected from the blog over the past years into a book that may communicate a few of the lessons I have learned. Title? Words out of the Blue (Skunk)? A Whiff of the Blue Skunk? Suggestions?

I would like my relatives’ memory of me to be of fondness, not of frustration. And this means taking action now, not later. As Micheal Gearson reminds us:

The cosmologists, even with all their depressing talk about the eventual heat death of the cosmos, offer some comfort. They point out that we live in the briefest window — a fraction of a fraction of the unimaginable vastness of deep time —in which it is physically possible for life to exist. So we inhabit (or are chosen to inhabit) an astounding, privileged instant in the life span of the universe.

Suggestions for other, let’s call them, “transitional tasks”?

Existential questions

I challenge you to pick up a newspaper or magazine and not encounter the word “existential,” especially compounded with “threat.”

• Climate change is an existential threat to the human race. 
• Trump is an existential threat to democracy.
• Inflation is an existential threat to the economy.
• Tik Tok is an existential threat to Instagram

The root of existential is the same as existence. So an existential threat is one that has the potential/likelihood/promise of completely zapping whatever is being threatened. As Dictionary.com puts it when explaining why they chose it as their 2019 Word of the Year, “It captures a sense of grappling with the survival—literally and figuratively—of our planet, our loved ones, our ways of life.”

I’ve grown so accustomed to encountering this word, that I sort of sniff when reading it, and dismiss the entire argument being made as being unlikely. The opposite impact of what the writer intended. An over use of such a dramatic term soon casts a shadow of hyperbole. 

Sadly. When one reads that both the entire planet due to a meteor strike and the supply of toilet paper at the local Walmart both face existential threats, well, one just has to reflect just how serious something that is described as existential really is…

Oh, existential has a second, less used meaning. It can also refer to one’s reason for existence. “Why am I put on this earth? is an existential question. Does “Why am I writing this blog entry?” fall into the same category?