bootsykowan's Blog

Just how reliable is the memory of a dying human being?  By then they've been so drugged can you really rely on them being true to themselves.  I've lost my memory 5 times.  That means people were talking to me as if they were talking to the real me.  From 3 of these events (the other two were involved with sexual relationships so you can scratch those witnesses, including my own physicianl here in the D.C. area;)  I found out that two times I was very nice, very submissive and the other one I was a tyrant.  When I visited my mom who was dying she was a tyrant.  She stopped talking to me two years before she died because she said "You are too smart."  I saw her Saturday evening with her 17 month younger sister with whom she didn't talk also.  She died in my arms the next day asking my forgiveness.  (BTW, that was a great gift.)  My aunt and I in our trip to the hospital discussed what would be her first words when she saw me.  I said  "My, Bootsy, you got fat."  Exactly her first words.  She wouldn't talk to her sister.  She made fun of my aunt's gift of a lovely pink scarf which I still have.  I asked the nurse how can she be so mean.  That was 20 years before I got my facelift and the "mean" experience myself.  When I found out how mean I was, I understood that my mom really wasn't my mom because her memory was all mixed up.  Our psyche may be very dependent on our own memory banks.  I don't know how you can measure memory.  That, it seems to me, is a project for NIMH.  Back in the 1980's when I was concerned with my first two memory lapses, the ONE expert in the USA at NIMH refused to talk to me about it.  He said he was only expert of loss of memory due to physical trauma that he can identify.  
Perhaps, Mrs. Ethel (Shulman) Weiss, my 2nd grade teacher at Van Ness Elementary chose a scientific path.  In our reading groups, she would ask us to read a randomly chosen sentence.  Then close our books. Then she'd point to someone and ask them to recite what we all had just read.  Eventually, she added the next sentence.  So then we had to repeat back to her two sentences.  I believe that's called "rapid reading" in today's lingo.  Remember this was before they knew what was inside an atom and during the great depression and a lot of us were on welfare and long before Dr. Spock.  IOW, "Ethel" or "Eth-El" used plain old Common Sense about healthy memory maintenance.