Sktrbrain: The areas of taboo have yet to be delineated and so the candid little cherubs are free to run amok. Not so for us -- us aged individuals.
....Perhaps the reluctance in speaking on such things as you've described above is a result of people not wanting to feel attached to someone's death, better said, to not feel implicated -- as funny as that might sound.
HHC: Thanks for interest and joining in. The taboo to talk about death, in my experience, sets in by middle elementary school ... by age 8 or less ... but this may relate to my own idiosyncratic experiences. One of my grandchildren ... 13 yo girl ... writes macabre tales that include death and murder and what have you ... in the style of HP Lovecraft or Poe but still is somewhat reticent when it comes to her Grandpas' aging processes. I find older folk, too, sometimes symbolizing rather than talking straight out ... images of manifestations before or after sleep that run the gamut from wondrously heavenly beings to flaming ones. And I don't know if that sense that if I think it, it is (a variant on Pres. Carter's heart lusting taken from Matthew 6) plays much of a role ... I suspect it's there for some. Do remember once talking to my Father-in-Law about the sadness and terror he must be feeling over his Stage IV cancer 20+ years ago and a couple of years before he died. Everyone was telling him that he had to "think positive" which I thought a great disservice to this nice guy. My Mother-in-Law, on the other hand, showed her superhero listening power and thereafter expressed her disdain for my comments in brutally direct tones. My youngest child remembers it, too; it was her 16th birthday. Obviously, if there's a prohibition against talking about our feelings for end-of-life issues, it DOES get the juices going.
Thanks, again for getting in my boat, here, and rowing with me.
On another note ... the Last Quarter does seem to give me/us the right to indulge some mischief. Something came in the mail that I had written about not understanding at all some new forms of thinking/writing. My review of this had been -- no holds barred -- mischief and a source for great amusement to me, even now, a year or more after writing it. Sat there with Marsha -- as her now-long-gone Father would say -- reading it and laughing my ass off.
I suppose it may be as simple as: "what do I got to lose?" Now, I DO know that I cannot rightly tell if the reason I find that I need a dictionary of what-the-Hell usages and semantics of the English Language to understand these new writers has to do with my incredible shrinking brain, but I do find the contemporary mannerisms of speech, especially among some folk who call themselves post-Modern or Lacanian, laughable and intentionally un-understandable. I read a sentence and wanna go out and buy an arsenal of super-soaker water guns and go after these folk ... or tie them up and have a heard of second graders tickle them silly. I recall a picture in GK Chesterton's autobiography of something called, as I recall, the Great Barrie Hoax. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw and a couple of other of Chesterton's friends dressed up as cowboys and crashed a very proper British party of "those in the know."
The urge becomes strong for me to enter the world of the absurd ... to ... (I better not admit to these urges in public) ... to be mischievious. Just one example: I have difficulty following commercials ... hardly ever know what they're selling and turn to Marsha and quizzically wonder. Marsha is one and a half years younger and is, therefore, supposed to be 'with it' but does, betimes, look at me as if I missed the Sunday night bus to the nursing home. Any case, I have the urge to interpose myself into the TV commercials telling dog jokes ... Did y'hear the one about ... just popping my head up ... Woof!
Enough ... I'm in enough trouble, perhaps, already for writing my little review (which they put in the way-back of this publication, hoping, perchance, that it would get lost) ....
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