a continual extinction
I've been thinking lately about personality. We've all got this accumulated collection of behaviors, reactions, quirks, and suchlike oddities that combine to form what we think of as our personalities. As we grow older, our personalities also grow, and, hopefully, mature. I like to think that I'm not the same great thumping silly that I was even ten years ago, but I may be wrong. I'm not really the best judge of my own character.
When we get old enough, we begin to go senile (a word that actually means "of, or relating to old age" -- it doesn't intrinsically carry within it its current pejorative sense) and our personalities slip. To others, we become someone else, someone who isn't connected with reality. Of course, what we mean is that the senile person isn't sharing our consensual reality. Who knows? The demented personality might be experiencing a true alternate world, complete with its own rules and physics. This in itself isn't a terribly bad thing, but that their bodies don't go with them. Their bodies remain rooted to this plane, and must be taken care of.
I fear growing older, with its likely attendant change of personality and loss of mental faculties. It doesn't always happen, mind you, but it usually does. I've heard of different ways to keep one's mind in order, but there's no way of telling what will work.
Where am I going with this? I found out today that my grandmother, who suffered first a stroke last year, then a fall a few weeks ago, is in the hospital in a demented state. She doesn't recognize her family members anymore, and she goes in and out of both consciousness and lucidity. I don't know what to do.
I read somewhere that our personality is a percentage game; at any point in time, there is a greater or lesser chance of our being "ourselves". Sickness can make us rave and hallucinate -- at these times we are at a lower percentage of "selfhood", returning to 100% only once we've gotten better. There is a standing waveform that represents ourselves, and it fluctuates over time. On any given day, we are more or less who we are.
Dementia is definitely in the low percentile. The question is: If that person in there isn't completely me, then who is it? Who's driving the body? Who has taken over, and why?
So I turned myself to face me/But I've never caught a glimpse/Of how the others must see the faker/I'm much too fast to take that test
Akela
2 comments:
This is a hard one...and very close to home. My paternal grandmother died of 'premature senility' when I was barely a teen - and she was only in her 60's. Both my father, her eldest son, and his half-brother by a different mother suffered from Alzheimer's. My maternal grandmother started losing it in her 70's, and spent the last 10 years of her life utterly helpless, and apparently mindless - a condition I have sworn I will not endure myself. It was obvious to me that the person who was my father had a very tenuous grasp on the piece of meat that was his deteriorating physical self for a very long time before he quit this sphere. But for the selfishness of people who 'love' them, those so afflicted would long since have fled their bodies. Whilst I may cherish life, I am not so fearful of death that I will cling to ANY sort of existence rather than face possible annihilation. Even though, being the good BritoCeltic Druid/Taoist/cryptoBuddhist that I am, I subscribe to other alternatives, being Nothing and Nowhere strikes me as infinitely preferable to the awfulness I have seen...
Agreed. After being intimately familiar with Unexistence, I'll vote for Nullity any day of the week and teice on Sundays. Thank you for sharing this bit of your history.
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