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Dealing with memory issues is such a strange part of growing older. The smallest thing can trigger a memory of an event that happened 20 years ago. Other things just seem to fade away. Lately there has been a TV commercial about early signs of Alzheimer’s. It shows a woman who can’t find her keys and her husband tries to help her find them. The commercial ends with warnings that this could be an early sign of the disorder. So imagine how I felt this week when I lost a set of keys. I had just walked into the house with them and they “disappeared ”. I looked everywhere for them. I do mean everywhere—including the freezer, the bathrooms, under the furniture and the garbage. I was beginning to have paranoid fantasies of someone breaking into the home and stealing them. After two days I gave up and had another set of keys made.

This morning I found the keys. They were bunched up in the workout shorts I had been wearing. I had taken the shorts off and forgotten the keys were in them. They were not evident at first because of the material of the shorts. The more I think about this, the less concerned I get. I have always had things “disappear”. I once lost another set of keys for over a year and a half. I think this happened in my mid 40s. I have no idea what will disappear next. I just have to accept that this has always been an issue. My wife is trying to come up with some increased structure so it doesn’t happen as much, but I’m sure I will find a way to overcome any effort she makes.

Names, titles, events just seem to slip in and out. I can be talking and all of a sudden not remember the title of a book or an author’s name. It will come back to me later almost like the keys that magically reappeared. Last week I was with a friend and we both began to laugh about how frustrated he became one time with how slow a driver I am. He was sitting next to me and put his foot on the accelerator. I just had to steer and swear loudly. The more we talked the more it seemed that this had just happened. I think that’s the thing about getting older. I have this gigantic hard drive inside my head that is packed with material and images of the past. Lately I have been going thru old pictures for a project for my son’s wedding. I look at pictures of him as a child and have trouble accepting that he is a man in his 30s. I also look at pictures of my wife and I back then. We were so young. Our children were so young. It just doesn’t seem that long ago.

Every age has its challenges and it’s benefits. One of the benefits of getting older is all of the memories—especially the happy ones. I suppose I could focus on the sad ones too, because they are also a part of who I am. I once heard Carl Whitaker, one of the icons of family therapy, talk about this. He was then in his mid 70s. He told us that if he tried hard enough he could bring back all the memories, the sounds, the smells, the places, the words and the people that were present when his father had died more than sixty years ago. He used this to tell us that this meant relationships never die. People in our lives live on in one way or another. One of my colleagues used to ask how often you hear your parent’s words coming out of your mouth. This surprised me because of how true it was.

What are the important memories – the ones you really don’t want to lose? That is a really difficult question. I suppose we could all say weddings, births, graduations, vacations, etc. However the mind stores everything. Sometimes the memories we don’t want can come flooding back. I had a number of patients with PTSD from Vietnam. They were symptom free for years, until random sights, smells, people would start something. One man was walking in the city and he suddenly found himself next to a family group from someplace in Asia. He heard them talking in their language and immediately had a severe panic attack. Another man was locked in his basement for two days because of fireworks on the 4rth of July. They wanted to never think of their time in VietNam again.

I think the challenge to accept everything and work thru it is what makes us who we are. I keep thinking of how diamonds are made. Before they become diamonds they are lumps of coal and have to be subjected to immense pressures for thousands of years.

Sometimes I still feel like a lump of coal, but sometimes I do feel like I’m beginning to shine. I think it depends on just continuing to accept every part of where I’ve been, whom I’ve known, and what I’ve done. I know that there are people, places, and things that will continue to disappear. I just have to not get upset and be ready when they come back.

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Lately I have been thinking about death, The recent deaths of a relative and the son of a co-worker who was only in his early thirties have probably brought this on. The death of any young person is very hard to understand. There is so much left unsaid and undone .My cousin’s husband died last fall. He was eighty and had lived a very full life. His funeral was full of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. The difference in wakes was more than age. There was a different mood. The only thing they had in common was death.

My grandfather died in October 1950 when I was five years old. There was a three-day Irish wake at a funeral home. My cousin and I were brought in for two of the nights. My cousin has memories of us wandering thru the funeral home. I just remember it being very warm. After the funeral my grandmother went into a perpetual state of mourning. She always wanted my mother or one of her other children to take her to the cemetery. She lived with us off and on until her death eleven years later. She often wore black or dark clothes when she went out and would pray at least two rosaries a day for my grandfather until she herself died.

Another clear memory I have is when I was in grade school and the father of a classmate died. We all went to the funeral mass. The wife of the man who had died began screaming and threw herself on the casket. I remember that this frightened me because I had never seen this type of emotional response. When I think of it now I realize that the man who died was probably a young man who left this poor woman alone with a very young family. No wonder she was so upset.

Death is going to happen. Nobody knows when and most of us dont want to think about it.. Whenever I had a suicidal patient I would work hard to have them think of the others in their life. I would try and get some type of contract with them so they wouldn’t do it. . This is standard practice, but if someone is really serious, it is very hard to stop. There was a young man in the hospital that hung himself with his own pajamas. My wife told me a story about a patient at Rush who killed himself with his hospital bed, , Then there are the sudden unexpected deaths from accidents/heart attacks/aneurisms, and whatever. These are usually very hard on the family because there is no real closure. It is most hard when there are many ambivalent feelings about the person who died.

There was a woman who was in a terrible marriage with long history of verbal and physical abuse towards her and possible sexual abuse towards her daughter. She had finally decided after almost fifty years of marriage to divorce. On the day she was going to tell her husband, he died while driving in a car with her and two of their friends. The friends and the woman suffered minor injuries, but the husband had a major heart attack and died on the scene. This woman who had bemoaned her fate for years was now not sure how to behave. The marriage was over, just not the way she wanted.

Another man told his wife in my office- “One of us is going to die and then the survivor will finally have a chance to be happy”. He ended up drinking himself to death, but she had developed Parkinson’s and is now in a nursing home. I doubt if she is happy.

Later this summer I will be 70 years old. I can’t even begin to accept that. My denial system is extremely strong and every time I am confronted with the reality of my age , I turn the music up louder. I like it when people say, “I can’t believe it—you don’t look that old!” However the reality is I am. I wonder what my wake will be like. I told my wife jokingly many years ago that I wanted a Rolling Stones song played as they were carrying me out. Now I am not so sure. Perhaps some bagpipers? I can picture people coming up to my casket and saying “Doesn’t he look good?? They did a great job on him!!” The thing about any wake or funeral is that it is a reminder of mortality—and that is still something I am working on.

We recently spent a week in Door County Wisconsin. I am an early riser and would usually go for a morning swim. One morning after the swim, I went for a walk with a cup of coffee and came upon two deer. They were only a few feet from me. They looked at me and then continued to graze until they slowly walked away. It was a moment of wonder. These moments are few and far between, but they still exist and continue to make me glad to be alive. Maybe I need to focus more on the wonder of now and not so much on the end. There is still a lot to see.

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I was raised a Roman Catholic and that really has influenced much of my life. Thoughts of right and wrong don’t just appear in a humanistic form in my head. I think the good nuns and priests that have taught me over the years are still there whispering in my ears. I do have my own doubts about the Church and right now I am probably still a cafeteria Catholic in that I can take most of their teachings, but let some of the others go.

I think I am writing this because of some thoughts about our new pastor. He is somewhat more conservative and formal than the previous pastor. He reminds me of some negative contacts with religious that I have had over the years. Due to this I am thinking of joining a new parish. He probably is a very good man, but my own stuff is getting in the way.

To understand this you really would have had to grow up in the 1940s and 1950s. My wife doesn’t understand some of this. I remember being taught by nuns all thru grade school and priests all thru high school. We looked down on the kids that went to public schools. We used to classify kids as Catholic or Public. I remember the “Marian Year” in Chicago and tens of thousands of people marching to Soldiers Field. I remember in grade school how the statue of Mary would be passed from house to house so families of the school children could say the rosary. I remember how priests were treated as royalty and their words as almost commands. Divorce was unheard of and birth control was never talked about. My mother was once criticized for only having three children when families with ten or more were praised.

This whole thing begins to make me think about the nature of power. In my childhood and adolescence the clergy and religious were the ultimate rulers of right and wrong. There was even a Legion of Decency that listed what movies a good Catholic could watch. The Church infiltrated every area of life.

Things are obviously somewhat different now. Divorce is part of the norm in the 21^st century and families are more complex than ever. Birth control is never talked about because it is assumed that every couple practices it. I am writing this about two weeks after Ireland passed a law making same sex marriage legal. This was totally against what the Church wanted. People who were interviewed about this basically said that the Irish had grown disillusioned with the Church and were not listening to them as they had in the past. The scandal of clergy abuse has turned many away.

Pedestals are difficult to stand on. It’s very easy to fall off and very difficult to get back on. Right now there is also an ongoing scandal with a former Speaker of the House of Representatives. I think it was Warren Buffet who said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”. The Church has lost much of it’s splendor because of the scandals and also because the world has changed. The clergy used to be the most highly educated members of the community. This is no certainly no longer true. It was easy to do what “Father, Sister says” because of what they represented, but now that has been tainted. Perhaps that is not all bad.

As a therapist I often had to deal with the tendency of my patients to put me on a pedestal. I would continually try and climb down because I really didn’t want to be put in that position. I never wanted to make decisions about other people’s lives. That is up to them. I think that one of the goals of all therapy is to help people take responsibility for their own lives. It may seem easier to have someone else take over, but that is usually the way to disaster.

One therapist used to tell a story that he felt like someone on a hill watching two trains rushing toward each other. He would jump and shout and wave his arms, but it was up to the trains to stop. He couldn’t make them. This again brings up the difficulty in letting go and trusting people to make their own choices. Sometime this is easier said than done. I am still struggling with this and when I have someone telling me what to do, I have a very difficult time. I can respect what the Church is saying, but I still have to make up my own mind. I have to work on doing this without being a rebellious teenager or a stubborn child. I still feel the need for what the Church offers. I am still working on how to accept it.

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“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”(T.S.Elliot). It is also the month of birthdays. My wife, two sons and two friends all have April birthdays. There is something about celebrating the day you are born. I still want to celebrate with all my loved ones, but there is something about my own that has lost much appeal. I remember as a child not being able to sleep because I was so excited about the gifts I was going to get. As I have gotten older my own birthday doesn’t mean as much. In fact I would like to forget this annual reminder of how old I am. There was recently a news story that 60 was the new 40. No it’s not, or at least there is a lot of deterioration between 60 and 70. Aging is highly over rated. Strange things begin to happen. Bodies and reflexes are not the same. It takes longer to recover. Memories come and go. All of a sudden a word, a picture, a fragment of a song brings back events of long ago.

I was talking to someone last week and all of a sudden I remembered a patient who came into our office building and lay down in front of the stairs to the second floor. She began weeping and calling my name. I had to be called out of my office to come and deal with her. I don’t remember much else about her except she was a difficult patient. In the same building we had just finished a group with some problematic adolescents. My colleague and I were called out into the hallway because they had started wheelchair races down the stairs. Another time a different group pushed a wheel chair with a smaller kid into the middle of an ice covered pond outside our building. Another time someone started a fire. I do not ever want to work with teen-agers again. I no longer have the patience.

This thing about memory is so strange. I can’t remember what I had for dinner, but events from years ago come flashing back. When my wife went into labor with our first son I was doing a staffing at the hospital. She called and said it was starting. I came home. We went to the hospital and they sent us home. We did this two more times before they admitted her. She had an emergency C-section. I remember hugging this rather distant female OB when she came out and told me that our son was born. It is so strange to think that he is now 38. Our second son was also a C-section. He was a scheduled delivery. When my wife was admitted to her room, the first phone call she received was from some guy trying to find out what birth control we used. He apparently was some type of deviate who had gotten the number for all the OB rooms. Thank God she hung up quickly. At that time there was a big effort to get fathers more involved in the birthing process. Since I was not allowed in surgery at that time for C-sections, the child was brought out and was to be given his first bath by me. The hospital hadn’t quite gotten this down so they brought out a trashcan filled it with water and gave me my second son. I put him in the water and he began screaming. I think he hated baths until he was 11 all because of that. He is now 34. How did both of them get so old so quick?

Memories of my own childhood come and go. I’m still surprised at some things my own cousins say and then it comes back to me. My father had his first heart attack in his 30s. Now we are not sure if it even was a heart attack and not something else connected with his poor health habits. He was a great guy but he was a chain smoker and drank too much. He really could never stop either one. I think a lot of guys from his generation grew up going to taverns and saloons. They were the social centers of the neighborhood. The smoking was what everyone did. His generation got really hooked while in service. My generation smoked because it was “cool” and almost expected. Everybody smoked. I stopped when my oldest son was in first grade. He asked me to stop because he learned in first grade it wasn’t healthy. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

As I said memories keep flashing back. I know that even a smell can bring back memory of an event positive or negative. I have heard a lot of people have positive memories of cookies or bread baking. They talk about childhood and family events associated with those smells. I remember a patient who always had trouble in the summer during road construction season. The smell of asphalt reminded him of Vietnam and fuel for Helicopters. He would be fine all year until that season and then would begin showing up again with troubling dreams and increased anxiety attacks.

Music can do it too. Every generation has their own music. My Dad loved the big bands, especially Glen Miller. I think he always wanted to be a singer. “Stardust” was his favorite song. I have had patients tell me of breaking into tears hearing an old song and the memories it invoked. We had the Beatles, Stones, etc. In high school it was the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys. There really were two groups-the “Greasers” and the “Dupers”. I still think of “Help Me Rhonda” as one of my favorite songs. When we were dating there was a Rod Stewart song that played a lot -“Maggie May” -and we always thought of that as one of “our” songs. Whenever I hear it on one of the oldie stations it brings back memories of when we met—on a camping trip with a large group of our friends.

I think of all the stories I’ve heard over the last 40-60 years. I’m sure my family and friends get tired of hearing them, but as I have said , sometimes they just emerge. I don’t know when this is going to happen or what is going to come out. It’s like I have this huge hard drive inside my head just waiting to remind me of the past. I always heard about how for many seniors the past was more present than the actual present. Thankfully that’s not quite true for me yet, but I know all those stories are just lying in wait. This is still an unknown journey for me. I just hope my family can put up with me while I am going thru it. I think of the line from a Steely Dan song “She thinks I’m crazy, I’m just growing old”.

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It is now in the high 40s outside and we all are beginning to think we live in Florida. The sun is out. The birds are singing. Hell yeah!! I think the winter was really starting to wear me down. Now I have no real excuse for any lack of motivation due to snow and cold. I still have these mood shifts. I still flip from idea to idea. Maybe that is what not working means. I think the external structure that work provided was good for me. I would look forward to my time off and to occasional vacations., but I always would go back to the job. Now I have this big long vacation. Today one of the guys in our breakfast club was late and he told us time just got away from him because he really doesn’t have any time now. We all started to talk about that. The every day is Saturday is OK most of the time, except when it isn’t.

I just finished the David Carr book “The Night of the Gun”. Good book! At times it was like a lot of drunk-a-logs and TIW (There I Was) stories, but it confirmed again the importance of accepting addiction as a disease that you don’t get better from. He was a very passionate guy and I’m glad he got back in recovery before he died.

His website is interesting too. What he did was buy a video camera and an external hard drive and go around and interview people who knew him when he was using, and when he was in recovery. I started to think about the possibility of doing something like that about recovery. We’ll see how that goes.

I still go back to how important it is to find meaning in life. I still don’t think you can tie up all your meaning to a relationship with another person. What happens when that person dies? Or the relationship ends? I have seen what happens in my own family. My mother was lost despite having two young children still at home. My cousins, who have lost their spouses, still have a difficult time. They begin to feel as if they have lost half of themselves. The grieving is important, but you still have to hold on to your own center while you go thru it.

The thing about recovery is that it doesn’t mean just stopping alcohol/drugs/etc. It means that you have to find some meaning apart from the addiction. Sometimes the meaning is there and it is clear as glass, but then it begins to cloud up. Victor Frankl’s opening statement to his patients about what stop you from suicide is still important. Where do you find meaning? ? It’s easy to get lost in materialism. Get more things!! Get new things! No matter how much you have or get, sooner or later, it is just not enough.

The whole concept of accepting a higher power is essential. This doesn’t have as much a religious meaning as a spiritual one. I remember one guy who told us a bus was his higher power. Just before we were going to commit him, he explained it. He couldn’t drive and this bus would pick him up and take him to his meetings and to his treatment. He began to talk to the drivers and they were always supportive. In a way it made sense because he was a very lonely guy. The support groups he was in meant everything to him. They helped in his process of finding himself. I think all good relationships do that.

Maybe what I am trying to clarify for myself is still about growth and self-discovery. I keep thinking that I understand myself and my own process and then it just slips away again. We would always make jokes about people who spent all their time contemplating their own navels. I am not talking about that so much as being comfortable in my own skin. I can’t expect perfection or the constant insight into myself. I just want to understand the process better.

One Christmas Eve many years ago, I was putting together a very complicated toy for our children. My wife was wrapping presents and kept asking me how it was going. I kept telling her how hard it was. She finally asked, “What do the instructions say?” I never looked at them because I thought I could just do it by myself. It was a lot easier with the instructions. I know that there is no real set of instructions for this apart from keeping at it. I just have to keep working on this. Domeena Renshaw, the sex therapist from Loyola, would often tell our patients a story. She said that if all you focused on during sex was the orgasm it was like taking a trip to the Grand Canyon with your eyes closed. If you finally opened them up at the Grand Canyon (orgasm), great! —but you missed all the scenery along the way. I would like to enjoy more of the scenery on this journey.