1 post tagged “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
-- "Changes", David Bowie
