Passing On...Valuables or Junk?

     Perhaps it took the passing of my brother to see what so many have already seen, that much of what we consider valuable is pretty much worthless overall.  Not the financial stuff, those pensions or savings or condo or whatever, tangible items that can be transferred or sold for actual green paper, which was how the recent movie, To Catch A Killer put it, the killer being a loner who confronts a detective and "explains" how mixed up the world is, how we have others clean our homes and our toilets so that they can collect a small bit of green paper in the end; and how we blind ourselves with fireworks and noise while missing out on all the stars and the silence that is always above us.  In the movie, he tells the detective that he's messed up partly from working in a slaughterhouse, but that he followed those cows backwards in their lives, back from the McDonald's and the saws and the bolt guns and the trucks that rounded them up, back over the wire fence to the field where they rested.  "They were magnificent, just sitting there, peaceful and quiet.  They just wanted to live and enjoy life."  Despite it being a movie, and he being a killer, I had to ponder his thought, that isn't that all of us?  None of us want to careen off the road or fall off of a ledge or have a doctor tell us that we have only a few months to live.*  It's not as if we don't feel that we'll die eventually; but just not right at this moment, or the next, or the next.  We all just want to live and enjoy life...but then death begins knocking.

    It is then, and perhaps only then, that we look at what really matters.  When I posted a few "collectibles" on EBay, saying that 100% of the purchase would go to the families trying to rebuild in Maui after its devastating fires, I had hoped that it would prove a win-win in that I'd get rid of a few things, a collector would add to his or her collection, and charities would get all the proceeds. But I soon discovered that all of those "originals" were worth, well, nothing, or at least not to those on EBay.  I should have anticipated this because when I had donated an entire rack of 250 greeting cards to a local church auction, the organizer said that he could easily sell them.  "Put a tag of $35 for the entire rack," he told his helper.  Wait?  That was all that he felt it was worth, including the display rack?  On the higher end side, our contractor has told us of clients getting rid of their Wolf stoves and Viking refrigerators (which run thousands of $$), all because the newer model was out and well, they were remodeling.  So what to do about all the other "valuable" items I had?  My wife has joked (as I mentioned before) that when I died that she would simply hire a dumpster and have everything --everything, from those limited Disney prints to the hundreds of other art prints-- thrown in the dumpster.  I laughed since I wasn't planning on passing away tomorrow; but soon realized that she was quite serious.  And why not?  Whether it's your spouse or your parent or your sibling, what will you do with more "stuff," no matter how much your loved ones may have treasured it?  So you save only that photo or that ring or that pipe, whatever had some sentimental meaning to you, and walk away.  Those dishes?  Nah.  Those clothes?  Nah.  Those books and photos?  Nah.  Indeed my nephew (my brother's son) rejected everything of his dad's when he died, from his shorts to his books to his mementos (my nephew is the same size as my brother and many of the clothes were new with store labels).  At first I was baffled that he didn't even want a pair of his dad's eyeglasses, or a ring, or something I felt that he would gaze at or wear to remember his dad.  But then I thought of myself at that age.  In my mid-20s such sentimentality was so far off in the distance.  People around me, including myself, still had tons of years left to live, or so we felt, and besides, I was starting my own life.  Which is not to say that I didn't see the opposite with families who were fighting over every last item as if that was all that mattered.  What do I get?  What's in it for me? (on a side note, one of the things that will get passed down is debt; reported CNBC, credit card balances in the U.S. have now passed $1 trillion, with total consumer debt nearly 17 times that, said the same source). 

     So I had to ask myself, what does get passed down, and how do the people of Ireland or Sweden or Japan or Peru feel about the passing down of their family "possessions"?  Is the way we in the U.S. view "valuables" the same as that of other countries, or do other countries place different values on such family heirlooms?  I bring up Peru because we're soon heading there, and also because Charles Mann's book wrote that gold meant little monetarily to the Inca of Peru, despite all the craftsmanship that they put into it; gold to the Inca was primarily shaped and molded to decorate their altars and to adorn their royalty.  When Pizarro came in and demanded a ransom after capturing one of their kings, the Inca filled several rooms with their gold and silver adornments which the Spanish simply melted down into ingots and shipped back to Spain (Pizarro killed the king anyway).  Then the Spanish burned all of the Inca's recorded history, (a system of corded knots) once they found out that it was a way the Inca kept their records.  So in the end, what was passed down there?  Elaine Pagels (as mentioned in the last post) proved even more controversial when she wrote that the Biblical version of events differed from surviving Roman and Jewish accounts.  Written in some of the texts during the time of Jesus' death, they described the disciples of Jesus as being continually hunted by Roman soldiers, with Peter being caught and crucified, and Paul being beheaded.  So author Pagels questioned if the remaining disciples (primary among them, Mark), who were still being pursued and writing their version of events decades later, wrote a pro-Roman version (Pontius Pilate declaring Jesus innocent) to save themselves?  And she also asked, why did both Matthew and Luke make even more additions to the Gospel of Mark a decade later (they added that Jesus was resurrected)?  In the long run, and I am certainly not taking a position one way or another since I am no religious scholar of any sort, did any of it matter?  In the grand scheme of things, we humans may have been just a fluke of evolution, or so said a new study, summed up in The Conversation.

     Okay, let's forget all those histories and whatever versions we learned thereof, for even the same historian and Princeton professor Pagels asked, who or what do you trust, if any of it?  So with that in mind should we even try to interpret people's memories and such once they're gone, because no matter how much we may stare at a figurine or a locket or even a worn out vinyl record album, we will never know what such a thing meant to them.  And again, would it even matter?  What seemingly would matter are the living things such as pets, and children.  Will they ever mean as much to the new "owners" as they once did to their former ones?  Certainly what we pass down are some of our genetics such as eye and hair color, dimples and gaits; and even the genetics we may not be aware of such as those of gender** or ethnicity.  Sickle cell, BRCA, Huntington's, perhaps even sarcoidosis, which the NHS in the UK described as "...a rare condition that causes small patches of swollen tissue, called granulomas, to develop in the organs of the body."  But as Discover elaborated: Black women in the U.S. have the highest mortality rate from sarcoidosis, and they're more than 12 times more likely to die from the condition than white men and women.  Then we have to add to that question, do we pass down our prejudices and behaviors as well, those we consciously or unconsciously "learned" from parents or friends?  Or talk show hosts?  Or learned scholars and scientists?  Or old papers and texts?  How to sort through it all?  And lastly, what if you have little, even of yourself, to pass down?

      Orion featured a piece on a part of Philadelphia known as Needle Park in Kensington, a place "infected" by addicts swept into the new world of "tranq dope," a dangerous combination of fentanyl and the veterinary drug xylazine (the combination is not only far deadlier and more addicting than heroin, but has a shorter "high" of only a few hours which results in addicts wanting multiple injections throughout the day).  But perhaps worse than the state of the addicts are the many people now filming them overdosing or being a zombie (the term used by addicts for what traq dope does to you), and posting their videos on YouTube and TikTok.  The hundreds of thousands, and likely millions of viewers (YouTube has 69 channels devoted strictly to videos of these addicts) watch, all while the iPhone and other video-posters get paid.  One of the people who sp films is a former addict himself who started this because "it was a way of keeping it fresh to remind me what I didn't want to go back to" (he now has 1.6 million subscribers).  As he told the author: At the time when I started my channel, there was no other channels doing it.  There's so many channels out there now and it's like, a lot of them are doing it for the wrong reasons...They're almost showing people like it's a safari or something; they could see someone slumped over and they'd rather record them than get out and be like, "Yo, are you all right?"  What IS changing is that now, perhaps because there are so many videos of these addicts, he's noticed more people not gawking but wanting to help.  More and more commenters ask how they can get involved, or how to contribute supplies.  

     The author of the article then shifts to her father, now in a memory-care facility and aware only that he wants to get out: There is something profoundly destabilizing.  I am thinking now about a person who has lost track of their animal instincts toward safety and shelter and food, whether because of supernatural reanimation, old age, mental illness or some ravaging disease, whether real or fictional.  It's perhaps for this reason that we fear them, even when we also love them for who they are or once were.  They unmoor our sense of what makes sense...In a world where people cannot always choose how much to feel or when it is time for their bodies to die, these videos seem to offer a glitch in the system, a portal to a place where you can be alive but not alive, sentient but not feeling, unhoused but not afraid...What we see when we look at our fellow people in Kensington are humans fighting with the very things that make us human --longing and desire and will and pleasure-- animals fighting with surroundings that are not equipped to support life, trying to make the best of their environment to survive.  They are only making the struggle obvious.

      An article in Discover put it this way: "The brain is a symphony orchestra."  Each region is its own musician, playing a unique instrument and simultaneously adapting to synchronize with nearby melodies.  This synchronization leads to our thoughts and actions.  But new research is looking at all of this not while we're awake but while we're asleep, tracking not the usual REM and non-REM sleep, but the one & two second bursts of neural activity called sleep spindles, and collecting those results over an entire night.  One researcher and co-author of such a study, Dara S. Manoach, noted: that deficits in sleep spindle activity have been linked to a host of mental health conditions that include schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder...These additional insights are especially meaningful for young brains.  Most mental disorders emerge in adolescence, with half materializing by age 14 and three-quarters by age 25.  This new (and almost derogatory) term of "woke" may be focusing on what we think when we're awake, but perhaps is missing all that our brains are processing when we're asleep.

     Last night, my dream was basically about writing this post, the words coming so quickly it was as if ChatGPT was spitting it out like subtitles on a screen, a dream which ended with two large blocks closing together and a background voice saying a variant of The Talking Heads lyrics: Same as it ever was; same as it never was.  And then...it was gone.  All of it, as if someone had flicked a switch and erased it...the words, the concept, the idea, everything.  And even in the dream I remember struggling to get back the thought and the basis of the idea it was conveying; but all that remained were those blocks, a loop of them always closing and always with those words: same as it ever was, same as it never was.  These were large rocks, easily 8 feet square, monstrously heavy, and sometimes appearing in black and white as if plastic squares, but most times simply being the gray boulders that they were.  They were always slightly askew as if having been knocked out of place, but then closing easily and without effort...no cranes, no object pushing them, no noise, just always closing as if by doing so they were filling in part of a long wall, but closing over and over.  Askew, then closed, askew, then closed.  And always those words as they closed --same as it ever was, same as it never was-- words that repeated with each closure as if that was all I was supposed to remember from the dream.  Was this something I would see in Peru (indeed many of the later Inca ruins feature large stone structures, their rocks smooth and placed so tightly together that in most areas, not even a slip of paper can be inserted between them).  Or was it me reading about the brain and what happens while we sleep?  Or was it simply how I subconsciously viewed life now that I was older, life closing shut and sealing tight, all without effort?

     My wife and I had just finished the recent broadcast of the 5th season of Unforgotten on PBS, a closeup of broken relationships and lives as it dealt with the death of its main character from the previous 4 seasons.  Well written and perhaps even better in its acting, it was a rare treat since other such series, even those of other Masterpiece presentations, often have difficulty following up on the success of earlier seasons.  But, just like those blocks closing and those words, I wondered if its continuing tale represented life in that relationships and murders cases were routines that went askew then closed, over and over: same as it ever was, same as it never was.  Perhaps it is as simple as watching sunsets, or reading an uplifting story about an abused dog who knows where he has to be (and escapes from shelters multiple times to get there)...a nursing home.  As David Crosby once wrote: Thoughts like scattered leaves, slowed in midfall into the streams of fast running rivers of choice and chance.

     The more I read about the history and geology of the different parts of the world, the more I realized that oceans and continents came and went, civilizations and conquerors came and went, friends and families came and went, objects and so-called valuables came and went.  Did it matter in the end, or at least matter in the way I thought?  Kids today are a different generation, just as I was at that age.  Society has changed, just as it did for my parents, and for their parents.  Perhaps all we can pass on, for better or worse, is our values and not our valuables.  Did we treat others well?  Did we show caring, and grace, and love?  Did we show respect for our parents, for our loved ones, for the planet we call home?  Perhaps the old adage of "lead by example" deserves more credit than we give it because perhaps that is the basis of how all generations decide what to learn.  At some point, each of us will face those years closing in on us, perhaps after a long life and perhaps after only a short amount of time.  And whether we've accumulated a lot of valuables or a lot of junk will be for us, as well as others, to decide.  In the end, perhaps just as with the Inca gold, everything will simply melt down and what will remain will be not our talents or our looks or our possibilities, but our behaviors.  And just as with those stones in my dream, our hearts and minds and lives and histories can be viewed as something closed and shut, or as something which is simply complete, a finished part of the puzzle we've come to call life: same as it ever was, same as it never was.  

Early fall sunset...just as it ever was, just as it never was.

*Here I'm leaving out suicide, although it would appear that no matter the mental state or condition, most suicide victims have second or third thoughts about ending their lives.  This was a recent report from the medical newsletter, STAT: Both the number and rate of deaths by suicide rose 4% in 2021, reversing two years of decreases recorded by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, a report out today says.  The number rose from 45,979 in 2020 to 47,646 in 2021 and the rate of suicides per 100,000 went up from 13.5 in 2020 to 14.0 in 2021.  Those are still lower than what’s called the modern peak in 2018, when suicides climbed 35% from 1999 before dropping by 5% through 2020. Other notable numbers: The increase in suicides was higher among males (4%) than females (2%); the suicide rate went up more for males (3%) than females (2%).  But here was a disturbing part of the report: The rate of suspected suicide attempts by self-poisoning among children and adults aged 10 to 19 in the U.S. rose by 30% in 2021 compared with pre-pandemic rates, according to a new study published Thursday.  The largest surge was among the youngest in that age group -- the rate rose 73% for 10- to 12-year-olds and about 49% for 13- to 15-year-olds, compared to 11% for 16- to 19-year-olds.  (bold emphasis is mine)   Noted the same newsletter:  Only 2% of people who die by suicide choose to do so by jumping from heights...Golden Gate jumpers account for less than one-tenth of one percent of total suicide deaths.  Firearms, on the other hand, are used in more than half of all suicides.

**From 1491: All human beings have two genomes.  The first is the genome of the famous human genome project, which proclaimed its success with great fanfare in 2000.  The second and much smaller genome is of the DNA in mitochondria; it was mapped, to little public notice, in 1981.  Mitochondria are minute, bean-shaped objects, hundreds of which bob about like so much flotsam in the warm, salty envelope of the cell.  The body's chemical plants, they gulp in oxygen and release the energy-rich molecules that power life.  Mitochondria are widely believed to descend from bacteria that long ago somehow became incorporated into one of our evolutionary ancestors.  They replicate themselves independently of the rest of the cell, without using its DNA.  To accomplish this, they have their own genome, a tiny thing with fewer than fifty genes, left over from their former existence as free-flowing bacteria.  Because sperm cells are basically devoid of mitochondria, almost all of an embryos mitochondria come from the egg.  Children's mitochondria are thus in essence identical to their mother's.  More than that, every woman's mitochondrial DNA is identical not only to her mother's mitochondrial DNA, but to that of her mother's mother's mitochondrial DNA, and her mother's mother's mother's mitochondrial DNA, and so on down the line for many generations.  The same is not true for men.  Because fathers don't contribute mitochondrial DNA to the embryo, the succession occurs only through the female.  The author does note that this is somewhat a broad statement since: ...sperm actually have 50 to 100 mitochondria, just enough to power them through their short lives.  By contrast, the egg has as many as 100,000 mitochondria.  When the sperm joins the egg, the egg eliminates sperm mitochondria.  Every now and then, though, a few escape destruction and end up in the embryo's cell.