Tag: family

  • Carolyn Just Died and Now We’re Short 86 Billion Neurons

    Carolyn Poplett died on May 18, 2022. This is the eulogy I gave for her at First United Church in Oak Park on July 23rd, 2022.
    Carolyn giving her attention to grandniece, Robin

    Years ago, driving my parents out to O’Hare, suffering the critical presence of my father, who for some obnoxious reason had decided to sit in the back, positioned to keep an eye on the speedometer as I drove, a driver shot into traffic from an on-ramp and cut me off. I found the brake pedal just in time to avoid plowing into the back of his car.

    Preempting the unhelpful words that my father was bound to issue, Carolyn blurted out, “Why…why, he’s just contributing to world rage.” To my teenage ear, that sounded like crazy talk. It would take decades before it occurred to me that this incident, as much as any other, typified a person with a profound conviction in the interconnectedness of things.

    As far as people were concerned, my mother, your aunt, your friend, and your co-conspirator, was a connection machine. She made connections out of her abundant grace, reflexively, as it was utterly and thoroughly integral to her being. Going to the farmer’s market with mom felt like we were campaigning for an office she had already won. It very often went like this. “Oh, John, you remember so-and-so”. And I cringed. Of course, I didn’t. If Demosthenes knew all the names of all the citizens in the ancient city-state of Athens, Carolyn Poplett knew all the names of all the people living in Oak Park. It was just one of those things a connection machine does.

    Carolyn, as her beautician friend, Carol, can tell you, was “magnetic”, the perfect word for mom if ever there was. It was easy to imagine, how when they went together to Parker’s restaurant, a shared favorite, men would abandon their spouses to see Carolyn safely to her car.

    On her last visit to Ravinia, no doubt perfectly coiffed, lipstick carefully drawn, elegantly attired, nails painted a dark and alluring shade of red, Tony Bennett fell into a conversation with her that carried on so long his manager had to pry him loose. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how those two persons found each other even at a crowded, sprawling venue. Two magnetic people, their polarities lined up, a gentle, summer night, Sir Isaac Newton could have predicted it.

    The most spectacular results to come out of AI, feats such as malignant tumor detection and self-piloting helicopters, come from so-called artificial neural networks.

    How does a machine with a pittance of crude, imitation neurons so often outperform and outsmart human beings? Artificial neural networks don’t sleep, don’t get bored, don’t get distracted. They don’t take time off for meals or sex or watching Law and Order SVU. They don’t have attention deficit disorder. Above all they, never suffer trauma or its pernicious, crippling after-effects; they don’t have rage.

    Carolyn Poplett was engaged in the most interesting piece of that conundrum. If the average human brain has 86 billion neurons1Cherry, “How Many Neurons Are in the Brain?”, an almost infinite capacity for connectedness, why aren’t human beings more deeply connected to their humanity?

    I think she understood how trauma damages the soul and when persons damage each other emotionally or rob a person of their innocence, neurons are damaged. Our capacity for self-love, a healthy autonomy, self-actualization, our capacity to love others, is cut back, diminished, compromised. The human connections we need to thrive become more tenuous and fragile, unstable, more difficult to maintain.

    In Dante’s Paradiso, the poet postulates that it is God’s love which makes the world spin round and that love is the prime mover2Paradiso, Canto 27 106-111.:

    The nature of the universe, which holds
the center still and moves all else around it,
begins here as if from its turning-post.
This heaven has no other where than this: 
the mind of God, in which are kindled both
the love that turns it and the force it rains.

    Sometimes towards the end, I whimsically began to think of Carolyn as the prime mover. I mean, there she was, sitting in front of the television in her jammies, content to watch reruns of Gunsmoke or the cable series, Mountain Men, yet there was always a fantastic swirl of energy around her. And when Georga Parchem called, and Jim, Allison, Mary Ann, and Erin got involved with this year’s spring benefit at the 19th Century Club, where Carolyn would be the guest of honor, she barely moved but seemed to be the force of a great national convergence that brought friends, nieces and nephews, fellow club members, colleagues from Thrive, in brief, an adequate sample of all the people she had loved, together in a single ballroom.

    Fully three years after her husband died, Carolyn confided to me that she had decided to live. That revelation came as a total shock. I knew that she was grieving, I could not have guessed she had gone fully to a “to be or not to be” level of despair per the soliloquy. Well, now, finally it is obvious. The high cost of being a connection machine is that when you lose connections you cherish, the suffering is magnified by this cultivated knowledge of their value. And Carolyn I wager had plenty of her neurons, a healthy swath of her 86 billion neuron allotment, devoted to her husband, Ray, probably more than any other person.

    Human neurons do not observe the boundaries of the human skull or body. They are promiscuous. They interconnect with neurons in the minds and bodies of other people. That is a trick that artificial networks haven’t quite learned yet. The two flames merging into one metaphor, that charming trope of youthful weddings, actually happens at the level of synapses and neurons. So, the loss of a loved one, a significant other, is exactly the same as the sturdy chop of a cleaver slicing through a bundle of nerves. That is why it took Carolyn three years to decide she wanted to carry on. Half of her, it must have seemed, was gone.

    Yet we know that the human brain is plastic and that neurons can eagerly repurpose to new tasks. So, the only adequate answer to grief is to do as Carolyn would have us do. Maintain as many connections as diligence allows and whenever possible, form new ones.

    • 1
      Cherry, “How Many Neurons Are in the Brain?”
    • 2
      Paradiso, Canto 27 106-111.

  • Inveigling and The Kung Fu Mind of Carolyn Poplett

    Early Photo of Outsmarted Son Sulking Next to Carolyn

    Time and time again, Carolyn has proven—thirty years beyond the death of her spouse, through a stroke, day in and day out after the onset of dementia, right up to last evening—that now no matter how many times the disease shaves off another thin slice of her mind, all it succeeds in doing is to expose another vein of precious ore that it might shimmer in the light.

    I have followed the Chicago Bulls since Jerry Sloan, Chet Walker, Bob Love, Tom Boerwinkle, and Norm “Stormin’ Norman” Van Lier were starters in the early seventies. I have seen the Bulls put together many entertaining teams, yet the team has never been more charming than in this 2021-2022 NBA season. We’ve had characters and “greats” but never a team so inspired by love.

    With this team, the shop-worn metaphor of chemistry catalyzes into magic. The players do not always succeed in hiding the joy and delight that wells up inside them from the chance to exercise and display their God-given talents, believing in the brotherhood of their team, and seizing on the potential for love in what—as former Bull player and current Bull announcer, Stacey King, routinely asserts on air—is “a simple game”. It seems like when they’re out on the floor they’re always smiling.

    Carolyn played ball in high school and college. She coached ball in her first years of teaching in Scales Mound, Illinois, after graduating across the Big River in Dubuque.

    At ninety-two, Carolyn enjoys watching the sport not a little but a lot, almost too much. Her eyesight is preternaturally acute. To this day, I believe, she could count the veins on a dragonfly’s wing.  I imagine it makes it extra tiresome to see things that keenly. And people who know my mother, knows she does not get half-way involved in anything.

    Earlier this year, DeMar DeRozan, the Bulls’ leading scorer, treated Carolyn, me, and other fans to two back-to-back buzzer beaters where he won both games in dramatic fashion in the closing seconds. Two of them! Each behind the three-point arc! Fully engaging in the drama from tipoff to dramatic or disappointing finale, as Carolyn does, no matter how old you are, is going to wear you down. That she has the stamina and is even eager to watch—after four high scoring quarters, half-time, and 1,400 Geico commercials—the post-game show amazes me. Sure, the analysts, Kendall Gill and Will Perdue, have stepped up their game but, they could walk on balls while juggling bowling pins, it’s still a post-game show. I don’t get it. Maybe Carolyn needs it as a diver needs a hyperbaric chamber to decompress and stave off the bends.

    And this happens regularly even after her sons and her caregivers cruelly, surreptitiously like cowardly thieves switched the grounds used to brew her late-night cup from regular to decaffeinated.

    Last night I dialed to ask her permission to visit and watch the game. Usually, I don’t dial. I just drop in, often bringing soup from Panera or rice and fish from home. I take my laundry with me and then I attempt to inveigle Carolyn into watching a game.

    (should have looked this up years ago)

    “Inveigle” is mom’s word, not mine.  The word amuses or charms her in some way that I don’t completely understand though I have observed its effect on her many times. It is perfectly apt for my purpose. To say, “Mom, can I inveigle you into watching a Bulls game with me?” is the quickest way to “yes” or “sure that would be fine”.

    Most doting mothers, I imagine, don’t need inducement or any inveigling. Whatever the reason when I called, I didn’t resort to using the mantra word, inveigle. Maybe I thought unleashing it between mother and son was dirty pool, in violation of the Geneva Convention, or merely a sad example of unsportsmanlike conduct.

    I asked her meekly instead “if it would be alright to come over and watch the game”.

     “Oh, son, it cheers my heart to hear your voice and receive your call. Nothing in the world makes me happier to be with you and my other son, Jim. And I’ll look forward to hearing from you again tomorrow when you call,” she said.

    “Yes, mom. I love you too,” I said.

    “Oh, how I love you!” she said.

    “Good night, mom,” I said.

    “Bye,” she said cheerfully on a rising Southern note.

    That’s how Carolyn Poplett blows off her son. She’s been doing it for decades.

  • Long Day’s Journey into a Mind Going Dark

    Carolyn Poplett

    Returning from a road-trip that kept me away for two weeks, I knew to expect that my mother, Carolyn, who is fast approaching her 92nd birthday, would impress me with how dementia had robbed another tiny piece of her mind. It’s hard to go away without some dread of the return, knowing how she depends on the society of her two sons.

    If nothing else, our company and a steady stream of visits retard somewhat her decline. My brother, Jim, and I will swap turns watching Gunsmoke with her, the longest running show in television history, co-created by John Meston, a screenwriter who authored 379 Gunsmoke episodes himself some time after riding broncos in Colorado and attending Dartmouth, Harvard, and the Sorbonne in Paris. If you want to know why that show is deep, John Meston and an envious liberal arts education had something to do with it. It’s a good thing since Carolyn has undoubtedly looped through 379 episodes more than once, while the rest of us, her caregivers, Mariya and Lyn, and two sons could only claim the half.

    I’ve watched all six interviews of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers, a TV series called The Power of Myth (which you can buy on Amazon Prime for the princely sum of twelve bucks). Campbell was caught up with mythology early as a boy when he saw a live performance of Buffalo Bill at Madison Square Garden. It sealed his fate. He dove into Native American mythology, rites, and religious customs and didn’t stop until he had canvased the globe.

    Carolyn and I have viewed each episode in that series together at least once, some two or three times. Even when she can’t remember my name, a narrative as profound and abstruse as Campbell’s survey of world cultures, religions, and archetypes and myth which, he argues, ground all of human experience, inching us closer to the edge of what is humanly knowable and therefore to God, and Moyer’s dogged persistence in fully animating Campbell’s explanations and replies, grips her mind and reaches deep down inside her to find a place where her intellect remains vibrant and intact. I’ve seen this reawakening many times. To experience it feels akin to a miracle like a flower unfolding before your eyes with the trick of time lapse photography.

    Emerging from the bathroom one evening at the one of these episodes, after a change into her pajamas, adorable in her stockinged feet planted on the foot rests of a wheelchair, Mariya paused briefly to give Carolyn a chance to bid me good night.

    “You know that man on the show we were watching?”

    “I sure do, mom.”

    “What he’s been saying is important. You need to tell other people about him.”

    “Yes, mom. I agree. Believe me. I’m trying.”

    I needed to make that trip though. I had friends to visit and the honor of an all-expenses-paid artist residency at Wildacres in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. My fears of how I might find my mother were soon realized.

    I gave her the briefest of rundowns on where I had been and a few of the places I had visited. It was difficult for her to understand what her Yankee son was doing galumphing about her beloved childhood state. It must have been confusing. Why was I there and not her?

    Carolyn no matter how much difficulty she’s having in the moment with her memory, refuses to come up short in conversation. I am utterly charmed by her strength of will. This time she decided to co-opt my story and turn it into her own.

    I explained how, on the way down, I passed through the area around Boone, NC and saw some friends in Deep Gap.

    “Guess where I went on the return trip?”

    “Burnsville?” [Burnsville is one of the many towns in Western North Carolina where Carolyn and her siblings shared a home as children.]

    “Not this time, mom. But I do go there a lot. I grabbed a bite of dinner next to The Boone Tavern Inn and Berea College where your sister Ginny went to school. I always like to go there. It feels like I am saluting your sisters. Didn’t Aunt Mary Lib and Sally go there too? You always liked to talk about how Ginny had one of her paintings on display for years in one of the campus buildings.”

    [And here’s where the conversation went slightly off the rails.]

    “Well, I think your mother would be proud of you,” she said.

    “You do? Mom, I thought you were my mother. Who do you think I am?”

    “Well, I think you live in a lot of people’s minds.”

    “I see. I love that thought, mom. I love that idea. I believe it is true and I have similar thoughts all the time. [And here again was yet another time where I got a hard glimpse into how much she had informed my being. It was like opening a closet and seeing a ghost.].

    “How about if we talk about going out for a little supper?”

    “Well, I just got back from… uhm, Boone and then I went to Berea after that,” she said.

    “Mom, we don’t have to talk about our travels. What I’m trying to talk about is super banal. We’re just discussing where we should go to get some supper.”

    [Hell will freeze over two or three times before she will concede her part in a conversation or come up short without a repartee.]

    “Oh, well, I think that’s very important. I like that idea. Let’s think about that instead. I don’t know any of the places around here like you do, George,” she said. [George was one of Carolyn’s beloved brothers].”

    Then, with hilarious cunning, “Where would you like to go?”

    [Leaving me to wonder, how many times she had pulled a like ruse on me before, a Southern gal trumping her dim-witted Yankee son, feigning to graciously relinquish the prerogative to me, in this case, the choice of restaurant, though at this stage I could see clear through her deception: that she couldn’t think of a dining spot, not even her long-running favorites, Citrine or Hemmingways, in our hometown of Oak Park, to save her soul.]

    “Well, we we could go to Citrines. You might not remember. We went there the week they first opened. You liked it so much you wanted to go back the next night.”

    “Did I really?”

    “Yes, I reminded you, at the time, that we had just gone there but we decided to go back anyway. That’s how much you like it there. And we always share the beet salad.”

    “Mom, I want to watch a baseball game when we get back from dinner but I don’t want to watch it if you don’t want to watch it. All I can tell you is that playoff baseball is like nothing else. It’s operatic. A slow-paced drama only there are charges of dynamite hidden all over the field. You never know when one of those charges is going to go off. A game can lull you while the pitchers engage in a subtle duel for innings and then, out of nowhere, kaboom! One of them goes off. It could be a play at the plate, a double play, a home run, a stupendous catch to keep the ball from going over the fence, stolen bases. Playoff baseball is unpredictable in every way except that it is predictably amazing. And the camerawork nowadays is better than ever.”

    “How do you know so much?”

    “Mom, I don’t. My knowledge is about half a centimeter deep. It’s your other son, Jim, who knows baseball. How could he not? He’s a Cubs fan.”

    “Is he really?”

    “Yes, trust me, mom. When we watch a game with Jim, you’ll see. It’s a lot of fun. Wait till he mimics Harry Caray and Steven Stone. You know what a good mimic he is.”

    “Is he?”

    “Yes, mom.”

    “Can I pay the check now?”

    “It’s already paid. You can hold your head up high. You don’t have to worry about your son going home malnourished or fainting on his way to the car.”

    “Oh, that’s good. We wouldn’t want that.”

    “Right, mom.”

    At home, that evening, Carolyn had a conniption, a series of rapid fire angry, almost rageful outbursts of an intensity that hasn’t visited her in years, maybe even since she faced the humiliation of having to use a walker for the first time (it’s a wonder she didn’t hurl that thing through one or many walls). She refused to join my brother and me in the den (highly unusual) and instead inexplicably insisted on returning to the bathroom. Popping out of the bathroom a little later, there was nothing left for her to do in there, she avoided the den, more strangely than the first dodge, going to the kitchen to avoid us. She was—to use her own expression—”so mad she could spit bullets”; those that she did spit were aimed at Mariya.

    I went in to back her up. “Mom, this is not like you. What’s the matter? This isn’t you. What’s bothering you, mom? Do you know?”

    She didn’t. I couldn’t figure it out either1Jim later figured out that a reduction in strength of a medication triggered the upset. She’s back on a full-dose now.. I didn’t expect her to. I just wanted to jog her out of her upset. She calmed down. People who know her know her know that she cannot stray to far from grace. The instant she started to recover. She apologized to Mariya, the ease and naturalness of it utterly familiar and yet at the same time a display of character to excite wonder. It happens quite often—albeit with less drama—and I’m always quite amazed. A moment or two later, after Mariya moved away, she looked at me and said, “I love you and Jim more than anything in the world. You mean so much to me.”. It was sweet and sincere but also was here apology and way of saying “I know I kind of lost it; please don’t runaway.”

    As if, my brother or I could ever entertain such a thought.

    • 1
      Jim later figured out that a reduction in strength of a medication triggered the upset. She’s back on a full-dose now.