Death and Crazy

I deal with death a whole lot better than most people I meet. Since I am an intutitive if it is a friend or relative I can follow them to the other side because speaking with the dead is something I do as well as speaking with the living. What I do to help beings every day might make most people just faint.

However, what I don't do well with is "Crazy". I guess I met and had contact with one to many PTSD (post traumatice STress disorder) people both male and female from the Great Depression and World War II during the 1950s. So my quotient for "Crazy people" is pretty much used up. Recently, I watched again "Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull". During this movie during a chase you see signs of "Better Dead than red" on a college campus in the 1950s which meant then, "It is better we all get nuked to death than to wind up Communist". This sort of thinking is still right below the surface in America and possibly in Europe as well. But you must admit on one level it is sort of like telling the women and children, "You all have to jump off this cliff now so we don't get taken over by the other side." It sounds good but it is also sort of crazy if you think about it very much.

So, this is the kind of thinking I grew up with in the 1950s.

So, then my mother when I took her to Europe to visit the places her mother and father grew up near Glasgow, Scotland was okay in Scotland and England. But when I took her for the first time in her life to Germany she sort of snapped mentally and never recovered. There was an 18 year old young man named Bruce from her church during World War II that died in the Battle of the Bulge from German machine guns and was cut in two by the machine gun fire then and died. So she had a lot of trouble landing in Munich at over age 80. I guess I sort of began to lose her mentally then as it was "A Bridge too Far" for her. But I had no idea about "Transfer Trauma" or how senile dementia or how Alzheimers set in then. She died 9 years later in 2008 after spending from December 2001 until September 2008 in a dementia and alzheimer's facility. I would have liked to have her here with me but I found the liability after she almost burned down her own home because of senile dementia was just too great.

As bad as my father dying when I was 37 from prostate cancer which eventually went to bladder, then kidney, then bone cancer was not as difficult as watching my mother turn into 50 different strangers over time that I didn't know and eventually go to about 3 years old, then a baby and then a coma and then a death rattle and then die which is what happens to the both fatal diseases of senile dementia and alzheimers.

So, my plan is to find a way to freeze to death in the snow on Mt. Shasta before something like that ever happened to me(if it ever did). However, we all do in the end whatever keeps our family alive and healthy so one never knows what sacrifice one may need to make for one's family.

But for now, watching my friend die who is now in a coma is very difficult for me. I tried to save him from a lot of the suffering he is presently going through but to no avail by helping him separate from his wife who was mentally ill and emotionally disturbed since her parents institutionalized her from age 10 until about 18 or 20. Whether she was sane or not when they put her in an institution, she is emotionally not functional now though she was intelligent enough to get a master's degree. So the combination of emotional dysfunctionality and extreme intelligence is very dangerous. So when my friend was left naked to die on the floor of their home for a week or two before a neighbor found him, I had told him if he went back to her I had told him that I could not watch her kill him, so this was the last time I would ever see him. This was about 6 years ago. She almost did kill him last summer. But in a way now it doesn't matter because he is now in a coma and dying in a dementia facility. He is only 63 years old now, one year older than I.  We couldn't find each other after the Viet Nam War because his mother moved from Glendale to Santa Barbara and I moved to San Diego County where I married and had a son during this time. So I finally found my friend on Yahoo.com when I was in my 40s and we took a trip to Yosemite and climbed up to Vernal falls once again like we had when we were about 15 in the summer of 1963. Even then I think some kind of dementia was setting in because he was incredibly afraid of the slippery rock trail and the heights up to the top of the falls. I was worried about him even then a little.
I got a call from his sister who had gotten custody of him about a month ago now on my cell phone as I was heading out from San Bernadino on a road trip to Death Valley National Park with my son. It was a lot to take to hear what had happened to my old friend. Though I knew something like this was coming, like I said I refused to watch him die like this. So when he chose to go back to his wife that I knew likely would kill him(not because she wanted to) but because their relationship was not functional after he got Alzheimers.

Like I said, I already had to deal with way too much crazy in my life already. Death I can easily deal with much better than most people. But crazy I have just seen way to much of in the 1950s with PTSD from the Great Depression and World War II and the Korean War, and then the 1960s with the birth control pill and all the crazy changes that created in society and LSD and Marijuana and Viet Nam and all the craziness and death and outright insanity that all brought, and then all the recessions and more wars and craziness ever since. A person can only deal with so much in their life. Death I can deal with. Crazy, I've had just about all I can deal with at this point in life.