Last Orders
In her last couple of weeks, when my mother’s mind seemed to be floating off somewhere else most of the time, she would sometimes lift her arms into the air, plucking at invisible objects with her fingers. Once, I captured her hands in mine and asked what she’d been doing. “Putting things away,” she answered, smiling dreamily.
This half-dreaming, half-waking state is common in dying people. In fact, researchers led by Christopher Kerr at a hospice centre outside Buffalo, New York, conducted a study of dying people’s dreams. Most of the patients interviewed, 88 percent, had at least one dream or vision. And those dreams usually felt different to them from normal dreams. For one thing, the dreams seemed clearer, more real. The “patients’ pre-death dreams were frequently so intense that the dream carried into wakefulness and the dying often experienced them as waking reality,” the researchers write in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. Seventy-two percent of the patients dreamed about reuniting with people who had already died. Fifty-nine percent said they dreamed about getting ready to travel somewhere.
Jennie Dear on what it feels like to die.
I think the phrase “off the rails” describes where we are now.
I think the phrase “off the rails” describes where we are now.
Oh, it’s a warm, sunny afternoon here. Almost tea time. The fact that the thread has veered into a ditch and is currently on fire bothers me not one whit.
Ooh, there’s ice cream in the freezer.
I think our host is in a good mood. 🙂
And makes a hell of a lot more sense than the woo espoused by the pseudo-scientists.
None of which its detractors have typically looked into or if they had, only to see if it aligned with approved cultural barriers. That’s the thing about scientism, isn’t it? Its popularized myth is rarely strictly scientific but it makes splendid goggles out in the public as it meanders through its various pop eras, where it does so until a substantial period of contrary evidence rewrites and finally overwhelms the conventional view, where it’s eventually revealed that various academies were already well into the replacement view decades before the man on the street.
Incidentally, forget the new theory, just reconcile the string of failures of the old one.
I suspect that our Visiting Troll (I hope it doesn’t plan to take up residence) thinks it has submitted a winning entry in David’s world-renowned, ongoing gobbledygook competition. But its submission can’t keep up with the professionals. Sabrina McCormick has this:
This describes precisely my impression of my father in his last few months of life; difficulty differentiating between reality and his own dreams.
It is beautiful here too! The tea olives outside my office window are blooming and smell fantastic. My secretary (and general minder – she has that “Mom” look) is leaving town tomorrow to go to Italy for a whole week. Life is great!
But yours still somehow reminds one of familiar pseudo-rightist graffiti, Geheezer. And yet, here you are in polite society. Like a boss.
Never let ghetto signalling between broheims be corrupted by a clean white surface, eh? We don’t need no facts. Appearances like yours aren’t going to keep themselves up, after all.
I never refer to the Troll by name, but someone seems to want to claim the mantle. Because of my suggestion that it might be a finalist in David’s world-renowned, ongoing gobbledygook competition?
I am a volunteer at a hospice keeping vigil or company with patients who have no family, or whose family is geographically distant. This morning I sat with a man who has an inoperable brain tumor who was reaching for imaginary objects in an agitated fashion. I helped him calm himself by playing along, asking him to give them to me to put away. At one point he chuckled and made a comment that made me think he understood he was hallucinating.