grief – Retreading for Retirement

‘You can fake anything on the internet’: Professors host day to teach WA students to combat misinformation

Seattle-area students participated in learning to examine information found on the internet. Some of the lessons they learned could benefit us older folks as well.

Excessive napping could be a sign of dementia, study finds

CNN reports on research results recently published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association: “Elderly adults who napped at least once a day or more than an hour a day were 40% more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who did not nap daily or napped less than an hour a day.”

Love, Loss, and Sensory Memories

This article on the several different types of sensory memory helps explain how “sensory memories of a lost loved one may become activated during everyday activities.”

Our Brains Want the Story of the Pandemic to Be Something It Isn’t

Two years of living with the coronavirus has been spirit-depleting for obvious reasons, but this weariness has been compounded by the fact that the pandemic has defied our attempts to snap it into a satisfying story framework. . . . The coronavirus’s volatile arc has thwarted a basic human impulse to storify reality—instinctively, people tend to try to make sense of events in the world and in their lives by mapping them onto a narrative. If we struggle to do that, researchers who study the psychology of narratives told me, a number of unpleasant consequences might result: stress, anxiety, depression, a sense of fatalism, and, as one expert put it, “feeling kind of crummy.”

These Ripped-From-the-Headlines Dramas Are Taking Over TV This Spring

“a surprising number of this season’s dramas are based on real events and real people,” and some of them even feature getting-older actors.

After a Hard Youth, Mom Found Beauty in Making Art

“Here’s proof that it’s never too late for dreams to be realized.”

Candy Schulman recalls how her mother, a self-educated traditional 1950s housewife, “discovered her true talent in her 60s, leaving behind a permanent vision for the next two generations.”

At an extraordinary Olympics, acts of kindness abound

The only Olympic sport I truly enjoy watching is swimming. Other than that, more than the medal counts I care about the kindness counts:

A surfer jumping in to translate for the rival who’d just beaten him. High-jumping friends agreeing to share a gold medal rather than move to a tiebreaker. Two runners falling in a tangle of legs, then helping each other to the finish line.

The Surprising Benefits of Talking to Strangers

In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of that research have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, me

My Phone Doesn’t Realize My Mother Is Dead

Karolina Waclawiak expresses an understandable ambivalence over the painful memories and emotions that her phone’s algorithms churn up when they bring up her past photos. Waclawiak’s thoughts move beyond the case of her mother’s death to incorporate all the jumbled emotions we all felt over the past 18 months or so.

Tag: grief

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