9/1/24

September 1, 2024

1939 Adolf Hitler ordered the extermination of the mentally ill, arguing that wartime "was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill"

1939 Germany started World War II starts by invading Poland 

1941 Jews living in Germany were required to wear a yellow Star of David

2015 Pope Francis told priests to pardon women who have had an abortion, in a letter released by the Vatican

2016 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest during the national anthem objecting to racial injustice and police brutality in the US

2018 Memorial service for Senator John McCain at Washington National Cathedral with his daughter Meghan McCain, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush speaking

2021 Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks came into effect, now the most restrictive in the country

In bed around 9 p.m., and up at 5:30 to let Lilly out, after a long period of half-sleep, half-awake, with a dream and thoughts of Janine G. in her various remarkable leadership roles in the state and local community.   Where do these dreams come from? 

Prednisone, day  112, 10 mg., day 17/28.  I took the 10 mg. at 5:55 a.m.   Diclofenac at 8:25, along with morning meds.  I put one Lidocaine patch on the lower knee and another on my hip, the first time on the hip, later in the morning.  The diclofenac and Lidocaine seem to help the knee pain and perhaps the lidocaine is also helping my hip pain.  In any event, I'm doing better with mobility since using them.

Funkytown for sale.  Geri tells me that Caela is putting the cottage on Bean's Lake on the market and that she, Geri, feels like a part of her life is going away.  I sort of feel the same way, though it has been several years since I was there, and even then I had a hard time walking from the parking area up the gentle hillside to the cottage.  Bill Roush and I accompanied Tom to inspect the place when Tom was considering buying it many decades ago.  I used to repair there with a box full of blue books that I needed to grade.  When he and Caela bought it, Tom asked if I wanted to buy it with them, half ownership, and I wisely declined.  The cottage was Tom's, his place of flourishing, of husbandry.  He put a ton of sweat equity into it, building a shed, and personally building another bedroom and bathroom onto the basic structure.  He had a workshop full of tools that he kept there and was a regular customer at the hardware store in Wautoma.  It was his getaway, his hideaway, his LaVerna.  I say 'hideaway' but he was more than generous in sharing it, especially with me.  He gave me my own key to the house.  As our group of friends grew older, we used to gather at the cottage at least once a year for a weekend of golf during the day (Two Oaks and the Waushara Country Club), and games of Hearts at night, with David Lowe always trying to 'shoot the moon.'  Tom, David, Don Shane, Jane Delzer's husband whose name I can't pull up right now, Jim Liebsohn, Mark Darneider, Jack Levine, who else?   Tom kept his boat, the Great White Whale, up there, and at least once I drove my Lund Mr. Pike there and Tom and I put her in on Silver Lake, did some fishing, and stopped at a lakeside restaurant for lunch.  The news of the sale of Funkytown, Caela's name for estate, is triggering many, many memories and they tie into what I've been reading online of Erik Erikson and Gene Cohen's theories about development in old age, below.

Integrity vs. Despair in Psychosocial Development by Kendra Cherry, MSEd Updated on February 28, 2023:

Integrity vs. despair is the eighth and final stage of Erik Erikson’s stage theory of psychosocial development. This stage begins at approximately age 65 and ends at death. Psychologists, counselors, and nurses today use the concepts of Erikson's stages when providing care for aging patients. . . At the integrity versus despair stage, the key conflict centers on questioning whether or not the individual has led a meaningful, satisfying life.

Integrity vs. despair involves a retrospective look back and life and either feeling satisfied that life was well-lived (integrity) or regretting choices and missed opportunities (despair). In order to understand this stage, it is important to first understand what Erikson meant by integrity and despair.

Integrity, also known as ego integrity, refers to a person's ability to look back on their life with a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. Characteristics of integrity include:

Acceptance

A sense of wholeness

Lack of regret

Feeling at peace

A sense of success

Feelings of wisdom and acceptance

Despair, according to Erikson, refers to looking back on life with feelings of regret, shame, or disappointment. Characteristics of despair include:

Bitterness

Regret

Ruminating over mistakes

Feeling that life was wasted

Feeling unproductive

Depression

Hopelessness

The integrity versus despair stage begins as the aging adult begins to tackle the problem of his or her mortality. The onset of this stage is often triggered by life events such as retirement, the loss of a spouse, the loss of friends and acquaintances, facing a terminal illness, and other changes to major roles in life.2

During the integrity versus despair stage, people reflect back on the life they have lived and come away with either a sense of fulfillment from a life well lived or a sense of regret and despair over a life misspent 

Gene Cohen picked up Erikson's challenge to his students to continue the work on aging. His book, The Mature Mind, is the outcome.  He posits four stages or phases of Maturity.  Phase I—Midlife Reevaluation (ages mid-30s to mid-60s)  Phase I is a period of quest more than crisis. It involves searching for truth and meaning.  Where have I been?  Where am I now?  Where am I going?

Phase II—Liberation (ages the late 50s into the 70s)  a time of experimentation and innovation.

Phase III—Summing Up (ages the late 60s through 80s)

Phase III is a time of review and resolution and heralds a desire to give back. The review is of one's life with recognition of its meaning. It is a time of putting photos in albums, of writing memoirs. It may be that the richness of the autobiographical activities is aided by the ability to use the left and the right sides of the brain simultaneously. 

Phase IV—Final Phase, Encore (ages the late 70s until the end of life)    This phase continues aspects of the three previous phases: reexamination, liberation, and summing up. Hence the name encore is used in the French sense of "continuing."  Although some qualities of intellectual functioning decline, new dendrites, synapses, and neurons are continually being created, especially if there is adequate physical and mental stimulation. Not only is learning always possible, but the depth of experience gives an added dimension of wisdom to the quality of one's thinking. 

All this makes me wonder: when did I start growing old?  I suppose it started from the moment of conception, sometime around Thanksgiving Day in 1940, probably with the aid of some alcohol and a celebratory spirit.  My parents had been married less than 4 months.  He had just turned 20 years old and she was still 18.  From the moment we begin life as a growing entity, we are on the road to death.  Each minute we are older than the minute before, and a minute closer to our death as a living, growing creature.  In our childhood, youth, and midlife, we don't usually think of our temporality, but as we pass through midlife, we think about it, consciously or unconsciously, whether we want to or not.  For me, the 'midlife crisis' was a real experience and it started around age 40, around the time I first needed eyeglasses to read and when I realized that I was lonely and troubled. haunted? by memories, regrets, doubts.  In Cohen's taxonomy, it was my Phase I, midlife reevaluation, the time of my separation and divorce, and much depression and suffering,  Phase II took me to remarriage, return to the Church, retirement from the law faculty, and my 'liberation' to the House of Peace, and my second retirement, pretending to be practicing law at our Ironwood office.  Phase III was our move to Saukville, my Dad's moving in with us, much volunteer activity at Riveredge (indoor and outdoor classroom help, collecting seeds, clearing invasive species, raising sturgeons), and hippotherapy with disabled children at stables in Darien and on Jay Road).  I wrote my memoir, 281 printed pages,  over a period of at least a couple of years, maybe three, overlapping Cohen's Phase II and Phase III.   Phase III also saw our move from Saukville and down to Bayside, and now I'm in Phase IV, and struggling to find a raison d'être, other than providing a little help and some companionship to Geri.   Do I want to pursue this Eriksonian/Cohen analysis?  It seems pretty clear that I have ended up on the "Despair" side of Life's Ledger rather than the "Integrity" side.  Pessimism, cynicism, fear, and dejection not simply over current events (Trump, MAGAism, Ukraine, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, climate change, etc) but over the characteristics of our destructive species, the built-in constitutional fecklessness of our government, etc.

Anniversaries thoughts.  Hitler, the Nazis, and the German people of the era were the "Gold Standard", but their sins were shared throughout Europe and much of the world.

Pope Francis' letter caused a lot of confusion, mainly because of the peculiar dogmas concerning the sacrament of confession and the peculiar and ridiculous role of priests in granting or withholding forgiveness of sins.  

Poor Colin Kaepernick paid a heavy price for his sin of calling attention to racism and police brutality. It interfered with the fans' enjoyment of watching large men brutalize each other for entertainment and fun.

McCain's funeral, Obama and "W: eulogized, Trump wasn't invited or present.  What an asshole.

What is it about Texas that makes it the most extreme at so many bad things?