After my son and nephew go home, there will be a great deal more to do. I know someone who helps with this sort of thing for a living, and I plan to try to hire her. She’s an exceptionally kind and capable person.

The post The sequel appeared first on The New Neo.

Right now my son is here and helping with the dismantling of his father’s place and all the many papers, decorative items, furniture, and memorabilia there. It’s a huge task and won’t be completed for a while. He’s here for a few days to give it a jump start, though. Wish me luck.

The post I’m not finished … appeared first on The New Neo.

Consider the case of 83-year-old Brigitte Stegemann, whose assisted suicide under Canada’s MAiD program sounds more like it may have been a murder. It’s necessary to read the whole thing to understand the story, but the gist of it is that the elderly grandmother seemed to have lacked the ability to understand what MAiD was intending to do, and she was nowhere near the point of agreeing anyway:

… [A]ccording to [her granddaughter and primary caregiver] Kranendonk, her grandmother still had a good appetite even following a stomach cancer diagnosis, and rejected the idea of using MAiD when it was presented as an option.

Everything changed, however, in June when Kranendonk left to go on a 10-day road trip with her husband.

… [O]n July 3, near the end of her trip, Kranendonk said she received a call informing her that the home planned to arrange a MAiD assessment for Stegemann, despite her grandmother previously telling her that she did not want an assisted death.

Kranendonk said, according to The Daily Mail, that when she returned, she asked a nurse at The Pearl about who had initiated the MAiD conversation. …

When Kranendonk interjected and said, “She doesn’t understand what you’re saying,” the doctor allegedly looked at Stegemann and said, “We’re going to make sure you won’t have any more pain.”

According to a doctor, Stegemann was “deemed fit for MAID, and we’re going to proceed,” The Daily Mail reported.

It’s a chilling story, one of many under such programs. It has a special resonance for me at the moment because, although the details were very very different from that of Brigette Stegemann, I have recently experienced what it is like to feel that a hospital gave up on an older patient prematurely and to have nearly all my input and all my requests fall on deaf ears.

The distinct impression I got was that, once my ex-husband became very ill (at least in part because of what I consider to have been doctor negligence), many of the doctors seemed to ignore the fact that I kept telling them that his quality of life prior to this surgery had been pretty decent despite his Parkinson’s, and that he had been living completely independently.

I never got the impression they believed me. They didn’t seem to be able to adapt by changing interventions. Their concern seemed fake and unctuous, and it was combined with a condescension and early pessimism that were infuriating.

The hospital has a good reputation. Would another have been better? I’m not at all sure, and at any rate I didn’t know how to find that hospital or how to accomplish a transfer. The hospitalist system, in which doctors (some of whom don’t have particularly good English skills) rotate constantly, is extremely frustrating as well. The doctors didn’t take much time with my ex, and I’m virtually sure they didn’t read the bulk of the notes on his case. With a long hospital stay (three and a half weeks from relatively good health to death), the number of notes became enormous and would have taken hours to plow through.

No hospitalist was going to do that, and therefore in my opinion they missed what was really going on. Nor did they particularly care about a patient whom they barely saw – and would not be likely to see again after their days or week on that floor ended and they rotated out again. My distinct impression was that they wrote him off very early on and spent a great deal of time sending palliative care doctors to speak to me and try to convince me to write him off, too.

If I sound angry, it’s because I am.

The post MAiD in Canada (plus a few personal notes) appeared first on The New Neo.

Thinking about the question of when to resume writing the blog, I think it’s a good idea for me to just plunge in – maybe not at quite the usual rate right away, though. I find that thinking about other things than myself and my own personal woes is a good distraction for me for a while each day.

Also, if you think about what makes a person want to write – and I certainly have thought about it – for most there’s an impulse to tell the tale. Although I’m not the most self-disclosing writer around – as you can tell from the green apple – I still feel compelled to tell what I’ve been going through or at least the part of it. So I plan to be adding some personal reflections on, for instance, how hospitals are run these days. I’ve had far more experience with that topic lately than I’d ever have liked.

The post Writers write appeared first on The New Neo.

He had some health problems, to be sure. But not fatal ones, or ones that were supposed to be fatal. But he got aspiration pneumonia after a relatively routine surgery and just couldn’t shake it. Yesterday he died.

The chain of events lasted about a month from start to finish. It felt like something unstoppable, although I continue to think something could have been done to stop it. Perhaps that’s unrealistic of me, but that’s how I feel. It was only a few days ago that I realized this train to death would not stop, and by then there wasn’t time to talk and plan.

He was the person who knew what we had gone through, the only person except me. He was the most intense relationship of my life. We had a child together – now a grown man with a family of his own, giving us grandchildren. My ex-husband was a wonderful father and grandfather, able to entertain any child for hours. He entertained me, too. One of his favorite ploys was, in the middle of an argument between us, to make a joke that stopped me in my tracks and cracked me up.

He was the person who could look at me now and remember me when I was a young woman. And I could look at him and remember him when he was a young man.

Now there are many sad tasks to perform – in particular the dismantling of all the carefully-assembled memorabilia and bric-a-brac and voluminous paperwork that are amassed in a long life by someone who very much liked to save things.

It is a tremendous loss for me.

The post Grieving appeared first on The New Neo.

This post of mine about love at first sight sparked a lot of discussion, including some personal stories about the phenomenon, some doubters, and some believers.

Until it happened to me I’m not sure I believed in the existence of love at first sight, either. And I certainly didn’t expect that it would ever happen to me. Indeed, the evening I met my husband-to-be, such a thing was furthest from my mind.

It was the evening of one of my very first days in law school. I had just arrived for a temporary stay in a spare room in the apartment of two other women while I looked for more permanent lodging. I was exhausted, and all I was really thinking about was that at least I had a place to sleep for a few nights. I entered a room where the two young women were talking to a young man, and I sat myself down in an available chair (a wooden rocker) to relax for the very first time that day.

And then I glanced at the man. His look intrigued and attracted me, but it wasn’t just that. He was talking to the two women, and what he said was very entertaining, witty, and humorous. They were laughing and laughing. I’ve always been attracted to humor in men, and the combination of that plus his good looks – and something else, some indefinable and indescribable perception that to this day I don’t understand, but let’s call it “connection” – was apparently all it took.

About 24 hours later I had a thought I’d never had before: “I might marry this guy.”

I was twenty-one years old. We married five years later, and although we’re divorced now we stayed married for over thirty years. Was the love real? Absolutely. And I still can’t explain the phenomenon of love at first sight.

And I’m still extremely surprised that it happened to me.

The post Love at first sight: a personal story appeared first on The New Neo.

You might recall that recently I purchased a new computer. Transitions like that are not my forte. It takes some time for me to get familiar with a new system, and I often find it very frustrating for a while.

This go-round was no different. I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say that during the process I got to know a few members of the local Geek Squad.

And no, please don’t tell me to get a Mac. Been there, done that, kept it for four years and never got used to it. My new computer is a Lenovo PC and it required me to register with Microsoft, something my old Lenovo PC (circa 2012) never made me do. Progress.

It seemed that the registration would be a fairly easy task. But no, it wasn’t. For some unknown reason, when I was signing up, Microsoft was eager to know about the minor child in my home. I don’t have a minor child in my home. But it would not let me take that option. It insisted on knowing said child’s name and age. And so finally I made one up. That couldn’t hurt, right?

Big mistake. Microsoft would not let me register after that as an adult. It assumed there was an adult in the home, and I was the child, and that I needed that adult’s permission to do anything with that computer.

So off I went back to the Geek Squad, although the nice young man who helped me was somewhat stumped by the whole thing. But he kept trying different approaches and finally, somehow, he came up with a solution and made another account for an adult, which he very creatively named “test.” However, for some reason I no longer remember, I would be forced to use the child account and not the adult one whenever I worked on the computer. It seemed to me that would be okay. And at first, after I took it home and turned it on, it was.

But then, after an hour or so of work, it cut me off and informed me that as a minor child I had to get my parent’s permission to use it any longer than that. Okay, I could fix that, right? But when I signed in as the adult, this is the little note I got from Microsoft.

Hi test,
Jean wants more screen time on PC today.
How much extra time would you like to give them?
15 minutes
30 minutes
1 hour
2 hours
8 hours
Custom time
I don’t want to give more time today

Jean asked on June 3 at 9:28 AM. The screen time you allow can be used on any PC they use. We sent this request to all adults in the family. If nobody responds, the current screen time schedule stays in effect.

To learn more, visit https://account.microsoft.com/family

Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more, read our privacy and cookies statement.

Nice to know.

Note that it does not give the option of letting child “Jean” have unlimited time on the computer, although the choice “custom time” seemed promising. And that’s how I finally solved the problem, allowing little Jean to be on the computer as much as she likes.

So everything I’ve been doing on this new computer since June 3 has been with my pretend parent’s permission.

The post In Microsoft’s eyes, I’m my own parent appeared first on The New Neo.

It doesn’t seem possible. And yet I know it’s true. For me, 9/11 marked the beginning of a several-years-long process that led to the creation of this blog and a life I never had envisioned at the time. On 9/11 itself, the events were profoundly shocking and horrific, and I couldn’t even begin to understand them.

To go back to that day is to go back to a world that seems far more than twenty-five years distant – to another mindset, one with trouble imagining that the things we saw and heard that day were possible in anything but an action/horror movie. Now it all seems highly possible, perhaps even inevitable. But that’s only in retrospect.

I’ve watched many documentary videos recently about 9/11. I’ve watched many in the past, too. The stories are of heartbreaking tragedy and loss, of errors, of tremendous bravery, of inspiring survival, of selfless people helping people, of last loving words, of horror and evil. What does it all mean now to those too young to remember, too young to know a world where 9/11 hadn’t yet happened on a beautiful September day with a surpassingly clear blue sky? As with all history, the time will come when more and more people alive will not remember, and their views will be shaped by later events we cannot quite imagine.

I can’t speak for them. I can only speak for myself, and to a certain extent for my generation. For many of us, it was a watershed experience. Today is a solemn day and a solemn remembrance. RIP.

NOTE: Douglas Murray captures an interesting perspective here:

And here are links to some previous posts of mine about 9/11. I particularly call your attention to this post, which was part of my “change” series, as well as this one.

The post 9/11: 25 years later appeared first on The New Neo.

I never liked roller coaster rides very much.

This morning the hospital called saying my ex had a big respiratory crisis and the doctor started asking me a bunch of end-of-life questions. I raced over to the hospital but by the time I arrived the crisis had abated, and he was back to merely being extremely sick.

So here I am, pecking this out on my cellphone. He is sleeping now, which is good, so I may try to crank out some posts and/or polish a draft. Forgive typos and errors- it’s much harder to proofread on a phone.

The post Another update on my ex appeared first on The New Neo.

However, the insult to his lungs that occurred during the surgery was profound, and he’s not a young man and has several co-morbidities. The doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists make no long-term predictions.

A great many relatives have come to visit, which has been pleasant for him but exhausting. Now there’s a lull.

In order to protect his privacy, I’m not going to go into much medical detail. But I plan to post periodic updates. I deeply thank all of you for your good wishes and prayers.

The post An update on my ex appeared first on The New Neo.